Geoscience Reference
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Given this range of approaches to engaging public, stakeholder, and specialist
participants, a major research challenge is to build connections between all these
actors in interactive learning processes (Webler et al., 1995) and move engagement
'upstream' to the earliest stages of policy processes and decisions that shape envi-
ronmental, science and technology futures (Wilsdon and Willis, 2004). A number
of citizen panel processes exist, including consensus conferences (Joss and Durrant,
1995) and citizens' juries (Crosby, 1999), where small groups of publics develop
recommendations after questioning specialist expert witnesses. A key methodologi-
cal challenge is the development of participatory processes that are both interactive
and analytic-deliberative. A classic example remains Renn et al's (1993) cooperative
discourse model, a three-step decision procedure where stakeholders fi rst take a
lead in articulating value-based criteria by which to assess decision options; special-
ists assess the impacts of options; and then publics take the lead in making fi nal
recommendations for policy decision making. Higher degrees of interaction have
been afforded in participatory integrated assessments of climate change where
publics directly engage with scientists and scientifi c models (e.g., Kasemir et al.,
2003). A particularly innovative analytic-deliberative method is Deliberative
Mapping (DM), as trialled in the context of medical biotechnologies and radioac-
tive waste management, which builds highly symmetrical and interactive relations
between citizens, specialists and stakeholders, who are given the same opportunities
to defi ne options, develop criteria, and make decision judgements (Burgess et al.,
2007).
As with environmental research more broadly, geographers could do more to
exploit the intra/interdisciplinary opportunity of analytic-deliberative learning pro-
cesses: human geographers often act as facilitators but physical geographers are
rarely involved as specialists in such exercises. Beyond this, a crucial area of future
development relates to the eternal problem of 'scaling up' participation in 'function-
ally complex, socially differentiated, and spatially and numerically extensive societ-
ies' (Barnett and Lowe, 2004: 8). Claims about the representativeness and epistemic
relevance of participatory approaches are harder to sustain in the face of trans-
boundary or global environmental problems that involve multi-scalar governance
(Davies, 2002; Swyngedouw, 2005). Meeting the challenge of representativeness
over larger scales could be addressed by linking multiple deliberative processes
across geographic regions or attempting to integrate intensive deliberation with
extensive quantitative surveys (see Fishkin, 1991). Many see the Internet as an
obvious means of overcoming problems of scale, which is emerging as a key research
opportunity in PPGIS (Balram and Dragicevic, 2006).
Another crucial question about deliberative processes is whether environmental
understandings and actions developed through them are context dependent (i.e.,
always different in different fora) or contain elements that are stable and generalis-
able across contexts (Owens, 2000). For example, focus group based research on
environmental and scientifi c citizenship has reached similar conclusions in different
contexts, such as about the importance of public trust in institutions (e.g., Harrison
et al., 1996; Macnaghten and Jacobs, 1997; Marris et al., 2001). This raises ques-
tions about whether such convergence is a function of method, facilitation, context
or a 'real' consistency in public understanding. Teasing out relative infl uences in this
regard requires retrospective and ongoing analysis across deliberative research proj-
ects. Any stable elements might then be built on in future processes (with obvious
checks to refl exivity) rather than being repeatedly rediscovered.
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