‘Committing to Place’ at the Local Scale: the potential of youth education programs for promoting community participation in regional natural resource management

Emerging approaches to environmental governance require a greater level of community participation than did previous approaches in which these responsibilities largely rested with government agencies. There is consequently a need for increased engagement with NRM among a broad community sector. This paper examines initiatives by two prominent government agencies, the Murray–Darling Basin Commission (MDBC) and the National Museum of Australia (NMA), to engage school children from regional communities using education programs that focus on place and environmental health. We focus on the MDBC's International Riverhealth Conference held in Mildura in 2003 and the associated Murray–Darling Basin TalkBack Classroom sponsored by the NMA and the Parliamentary Education Office (PEO). We explore how key themes of local scale, place-based identities, youth voice and critical engagement are developed in these programs and consider how they relate to the environmental agency of children. We then reflect on the potential for the kinds of environmental agency promoted through these programs to help build the capacity of local communities to progress larger goals of environmental restoration and sustainability in the Murray–Darling Basin. The evaluation research reported here forms part of the Committing to Place research project, an Australian Research Council Linkage grant involving the University of Tasmania, the National Museum of Australia and the Murray–Darling Basin Commission.     

The Natural Resource Management Planning Portal: Perspectives for NRM Planning and Reporting

Natural Resource Management (NRM) is often conducted as a partnership between government and citizens. In Australia, government agencies formulate policy and fund implementation that may be delivered on-ground by community groups (such as Landcare). Since the late 1980s, over AUS$8b of Commonwealth investment has been made in NRM. However, quantitative evidence of environmental improvements is lacking. The NRM Planning Portal has been developed to (1) provide an online spatial information system for sharing Landcare and agency data; and (2) to facilitate NRM priority setting at local and regional planning scales. While the project successfully federates Landcare NRM activity data, challenges included (1) unstructured, non-standardized data, meaning that quantitative reporting against strategic objectives is not currently possible, and (2) a lack of common understanding about the value proposition for adopting the portal approach. Demonstrating the benefit of technology adoption is a key lesson for digital NRM planning.     

地方依恋对城市居民社区参与的影响研究 ——以广州为例

基于2015年广州市1 273份居民问卷调查和半结构性访谈数据,结合逐步LPM回归和中介效应模型,探讨地方依恋和社区参与两者关系中存在的中介效应及其传导机制,并系统对比本地居民与外来移民之间的差异。研究发现：① 社区居民的地方依恋能够直接提升其社区参与期望;② 社区参与行为作为一个中介变量,在地方依恋对社区参与期望的影响中发挥中介效应;③ 对比本地居民,外来移民的社区参与行为和期望程度相对较低;④ 外来移民的社区参与行为对其社区参与期望影响的中介效应相对较弱。揭示了中国城市居民社区参与中存在户籍制度壁垒,需要进一步通过社区公共服务均等化措施,提升居民尤其是外来移民的获得感、幸福感和安全感。     

Learning about learning: lessons from public engagement and deliberation on urban river restoration

This paper provides a new discussion of how people learn through deliberative processes, drawing upon empirical analysis of a novel public engagement process for urban river restoration. Such critical evaluation is rare and yet will be crucial to both theoretical development and learning about engagement practice, not least in a policy area subject to strong regulatory drivers for public participation. The analysis supports two important learning mechanisms – the use of 'gatekeepers' of knowledge, interests and values, and the privileging of narrative. It provides new evidence of instrumental and communicative learning about shared priorities and criteria for effective river restoration that evolved through the deliberative process and directly informed the restoration scheme. It is important to question whether and how such site or context-specific learning might inform other restoration schemes. Finally, the paper questions the often ignored issue of expert learning, not least the issue of the link between individual and organizational learning.     

Making Space for the Citizen in Geographic Education

Abstract

This article argues that we need to reconsider the connection between citizenship and geography. Although geographic education purports to prepare citizens, the possibilities for this relationship have been addressed by few scholars. The study shows that citizenship is situated in places and students’ actions as citizens reinscribe the meaning of these places. Because of this intersection, educators must be attentive to how they teach about places, particularly the ongoing interconnection between place and identity. One of the identities common in the teaching of places is citizenship. Geography instructors need to be thoughtful about their role as citizenship educators.     

Quality and timing of crowd-based water level class observations

Crowd-based hydrological observations can supplement existing monitoring networks and allow data collection in regions where otherwise no data would be available. In the citizen science project CrowdWater, repeated water level observations using a virtual staff gauge approach result in time series of water level classes (WL-classes). To investigate the quality of these observations, we compared the WL-class data with “real” (i.e., measured) water levels from the same stream at a nearby gauging station. We did this for nine locations where citizen scientists reported multiple observations using a smartphone app and at 12 locations where signposts were set up to ask citizens to record observations on a paper form that could be left in a letterbox. The results indicate that the quality of the data collected with the app was better than for the forms. A possible explanation is that for each app location, a single person submitted the vast majority of the observations, whereas at the locations of the forms almost every observation was made by a different person. On average, there were more contributions between May and September than during the other months. Observations were submitted for a range of flow conditions, with a higher fraction of high flow observations for the locations were data were collected with the app. Overall, the results are encouraging for citizen science approaches in hydrology and demonstrate that the smartphone application and the virtual staff gauge are a promising approach for crowd-based water level class observations.     

2022冬奥会背景下北京区域居民参与冰雪运动消费调查

运用文献资料、问卷调查和数理统计、应用因子分析方法,结合北京区域滑雪场空间分布情况,对比居民冰雪运动参与倾向和频率,发现北京区域居民参与冰雪运动及消费的主要影响因素为性别、年龄、距离、收入水平和政策红利;分析得出雪场密度和区域经济水平、性别等对参与冰雪运动消费特征的影响。归纳4个主要影响北京区域居民参与冰雪运动的公共因子,分别是冰雪运动基础因子、冰雪运动信息因子、冰雪运动距离因子以及冰雪运动友谊因子。提出不断提升冰雪运动产品服务质量,出台鼓励性冰雪运动消费政策,完善冰雪运动消费环境,创新冰雪运动消费内容,逐步扩大冰雪消费规模等建议。     

Measuring Community and University Impacts of Critical Civic Geography: Insights from Chicago

Geographers have increasingly adopted community-based learning and research into their teaching and scholarly activities since Bunge and Harvey called for an applied public geography that is both useful and challenges societal inequalities. With few exceptions, however, there has been little discussion of methods for measuring this work. Many published assessments focus on the impacts of projects on students but overlook the impacts on community partners. Impacts on faculty and the larger university community are also often ignored. This article discusses literature on the evaluation of community–university research and service learning from a critical perspective. A discussion of service learning and community-based research (CBR) projects at two Chicago universities, DePaul and Chicago State, is presented. In both cases challenges were encountered to achieve full evaluation of projects, yet both included an evaluation of university and community partners that allowed for assessment of the projects’ value to all partners.     

Carbon pricing in practice: a review of existing emissions trading systems

This article analyses the implementation of emissions trading systems (ETSs) in eight jurisdictions: the EU, Switzerland, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) and California in the US, Québec in Canada, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea and pilot schemes in China. The article clarifies what is working, what isn’t and why, when it comes to the practice of implementing an ETS. The eight ETSs are evaluated against five main criteria: environmental effectiveness, economic efficiency, market management, revenue management and stakeholder engagement. Within each of these categories, ETS attributes ? including abatement cost, stringency of the cap, improved allocation practices over time and the trajectory of price stability ? are assessed for each system. Institutional learning, administrative prudence, appropriate carbon revenue management and stakeholder engagement are identified as key ingredients for successful ETS regimes. Recent implementation of ETSs in regions including California, Québec and South Korea indicates significant institutional learning from prior systems, especially the EU ETS, with these regions implementing more robust administrative and regulatory structures suitable for handling unique national and sub-national opportunities and constraints. The analysis also shows that there is potential for a ‘double dividend’ in emissions reductions even with a modest carbon price, provided the cap tightens over time and a portion of the auctioned revenues are reinvested in other emissions-reduction activities. Knowledge gaps exist in understanding the interaction of pricing instruments with other climate policy instruments and how governments manage these policies to achieve optimum emissions reductions with lower administrative costs.

Key policy insights

• Countries are learning from each other on ETS implementation.

• Administrative and regulatory structures of ETS jurisdictions appear to evolve and become more robust in every ETS analysed.

• A ‘double dividend’ for emissions reductions may also exist in cases where mitigation occurs as a result of the ETS policy and when auction revenues are reinvested in other emissions-reduction activities.

     

Multi-stakeholder collaboration yields valuable data for cetacean conservation in Gamba,Gabon

Private industry, the Government of Gabon and two international NGOs collaborated to conduct marine surveys off the coast of Gabon, Central Africa. Surveys addressed multiple objectives of surveillance and monitoring, the documentation of the distribution of and threats to the marine megafauna, and capacity-building among government agents and local early-career scientists. During 22 days of survey effort over a two-year period, observers documented humpback whales Megaptera novaeangliae, bottlenose dolphins Tursiops truncatus, Atlantic humpback dolphins Sousa teuszii and common dolphins Delphinus delphis. Humpback whale presence was limited to the months of July to November. Bottlenose dolphins were present year-round and photo-identification of individuals indicated a closed, resident population, with an abundance estimate of 118 (CV = 21.6%, 95% CI 78–180). Small open-decked fishing vessels with gillnets were observed concentrated around river mouths within 2 km of shore, while commercial trawlers were at least 10 km offshore; all were confirmed to be registered and legal. Observations of marine turtles, flocks of marine birds, and floating logs and other debris were sparse. This multi-stakeholder collaboration to conduct a marine survey can serve as an effective model by which funding and logistic support from private industry paired with technical expertise from NGOs and academic institutions can benefit marine and coastal conservation.