Participatory processes and Knowledge management

What is public participation?
Public participation means that citizens are involved in the environmental or natural resource decision-making that has an effect on them. Public participation is also seen as part of sustainable development, and it may enhance social learning. It can be assumed that the final decisions are made with more competence, when local knowledge is included and expert knowledge is scrutinized by the public (Webler et al. 1995). Furthermore, the legitimacy of the final decision may be better, when the different stakeholders are involved in the decision making.

Which levels of participation exist?
The participation can be organized in many ways. In case of active participation, the stakeholders may work in working groups or citizen juries, for instance. This sort of organization is suitable for the last three levels of participation. When the participation is less active, the opinions of the stakeholders may be elicited through interviews, surveys, questionnaires and public meetings. These methods are suitable especially for the consultation level. Germain et al. (2001) divide the process to six levels: 1. Informing, 2. Manipulation, 3. Consultation, 4. Collaborative decision making, 5. Delegated power, 6. Total control of participants.

What are the phases of public participation?
Each public participation case may include slightly different phases, and each phase may include one or more tasks. In each phase, and for each of the tasks, many different tools may be available (e.g. Lynam et al. 2007). Some of the tools are generic, so that they can be used in many fields, not just forestry. Some of the tools may be forestry specific, for example the growth and yield models of different tree species. Many forest DSS include tools for many different tasks, and they may also be combined with the more generic tools. However, for achieving success the way the tools are used may be as important as the tools themselves (DeMeo et al. 2013)

What is Knowledge Management?
Knowledge management can be defined as the systematic strategy of creating, conserving, and sharing knowledge to increase the performance of individuals, companies, or nations (Heinrichs et al. 2003). Knowledge management attempts to provide methods for managing both explicit and tacit knowledge. Sometimes this means primarily socially-based methods that help person-to-person knowledge exchanges. Other methods can take advantage of existing explicit knowledge that has already been codified for other purposes to make it more readily accessible (Hansen et al. 1999). But knowledge management also concentrates on methods that help the process of moving from tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge and thus expand the amount of codified knowledge available for use (Heinrichs et al. 2003).

Which Knowlegde Management Tools exist?
Knowledge management tools do not manage knowledge by themselves but rather facilitate the implementation of knowledge processes. They promote and enable the knowledge process by identifying, creating, structuring and sharing of knowledge through the use of information technology in order to improve decision-making (Tyndale 2002). Various KM approaches can be used to develop components of DSS and they will be partly integrated in order to capture information, data and conceptual knowledge. In this context several Knowledge Management Tools exists in order to facilitate the development of DSS. As illustrated By Vacik et al. (2013), such KM tools may be useful also in natural resource management as they can facilitate the development and use of related DSS.

Workplan for the group participatory processes and knowledge management

Members of the ForestDSS Working Committee are leading this working group through discussions and special project activities. The group takes on leadership role in guiding the community activities and works out the work plans.

Based on the interests of the members a workplan has been formulated to continue with the activities. The details can be found here. A report on the activities of the last years can be found here.

Currently the following members are part of the Participatory processes and Knowledge management Working group:
Harald Vacik, Eva-Maria Nordström, Chiara Torresan, Isabella De Meo, Teppo Hujala, Laszlo Bacsardi, Luc Boerboom, Keith Reynolds,.

In case that you have interest to join the activities of the group, please contact Harald Vacik.

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