Summary
Most analyses of participatory methodologies focus upon what they have to offer at the policy making level. This project was rather more specialised in that it was designed to see what contribution one novel engagement methodology, Geographic Information Systems for Participation (GIS-P), could offer as a tool for public engagement with science. Unlike other methods, GIS-P is spatially explicit, and thus useful for (science) communication of environmental issues such as local air quality management, the environmental risk of breast cancer, and issues of urban and rural regeneration within the framework of sustainable development.
With respect to public involvement in local air quality issues this project extends work developed in two previous ESRC-funded projects (R000221902 and R000238534) which established the utility of such engagement in science-based policy. Concerning breast cancer, we wanted in this project to build on ‘lay’ inspired research into environmental causes of the disease prompted by established hypotheses about endocrinal disruption from various commonly occurring hazards. Presentationally, could this ‘lay knowledge’ be communicated in a way of more utility to epidemiologists (or at least a way in which they couldn’t ignore). We also looked at urban regeneration in Sheffield, and environmental visions for the future of Yorkshire and the North East. The research focused upon uncertainties over future land use issues using the potential of GIS-P to help to make decisions.
In the air quality ‘case’ SEI employed a combination of citizen consultation groups and GIS-P to engage with different Sheffield city-centre stakeholders which local council officers had found hard to engage. We held two major meetings with city centre residents and individual meetings were organised to encourage the participation of city centre businesses. We also tested GIS-P around the M1 corridor in Tinsley (Sheffield) and Brinsworth (Rotherham). In the breast cancer study we set up two GIS-P groups in Barnsley (S. Yorks.), a locality which has one of the most stable demographic profiles in the UK; one group was a breast cancer support group, and the second a comparison group - roughly matched for age - of women without breast cancer. A further dimension of this study was to compare the Barnsley experience of mapping with similar work in Marin County in the Bay Area of California. Furthermore, as we were concerned with evaluating GIS-P as a method to augment epidemiological practice in relation to understanding the aetiology of breast cancer, we also arranged interviews with key people working in this field: in public health, a cancer registry, epidemiological research, and a cancer services user network. We worked closely with one local authority in urban-based work involved practical group work with developers and local communities in the Darnal & Attercliffe area of Sheffield. We produced maps and identified techniques which could be employed to carry out 3D visualisation of the possible redevelopment of options.
The results of the project relate both to the specific case studies and to a number of generic issues – these concern public engagement with scientific policymaking, the appropriateness of GIS-P as a methodology for that engagement, and indeed the process of researching public engagement. Our breast cancer case study highlights the experiences of social movement activists in the UK and the USA who have engaged in both lay and professional research into environmental causes of illness using various methods of spatial analysis. Some of these have reported a lack of responsiveness to hypotheses from epidemiologists and health policy planners. We found considerable interest in the possibility of greater dialogue, even among those who were initially sceptical about the usefulness of this way of working; some were particularly interested in the possibility of generating action plans or hypotheses for future research. Lay participants in the research also identified a value in mapping their local area, describing the process as “giving you a good picture of all that’s around you”. It is important, as one health professional put it, to “harness the power of a number of brains, to put together the ideas of women with breast cancer, who deserve to be heard”, and who may have a useful contribution to make to understanding the disease aetiology. Both ‘lay’ and ‘professional’ participants in this study regarded the GIS-P mapping process as a useful way of making sense of the lived environment, and this reiterates our findings in previous work. The use of GIS-P showed the methodology's scope at representing heterogeneous interests in ways that can help identify where conflict (and by implication agreement) lies.
Activists also saw the process as a way of legitimising their experiential knowledge. This leads on both to benefits that GIS-P offers over other participatory methods and also a caveat. Any data displayed on a GIS can be made to look similar. Because of the levelling impact of GIS technology, the ‘lay’ knowledges, when digitised, can assume a visual legitimacy that puts them alongside other knowledges with different epistemological pedigrees. In having their knowledge(s) thus legitimised and ‘expertly’ reframed citizens can at once have greater understanding of their own evidence-based knowledge while at the same time better start to understand the uncertainty that is present in all knowledge around contentious science issues, even that generated by other experts. Professionals with whom we have spoken in our case studies have been supportive of the use of GIS-P, and relatively comfortable with the implicit legitimisation of lay knowledge claims.
These points relate to a more general issue that became apparent through the process of this research, concerning how to conceptualise the different parties with a stake in an issue, and the policies and ideological positions held by these parties. This issue is present – though played out differently – in all our case studies. We have found that the range of stakeholders taking part in the four-stage air quality management process can vary between different stages and also between different locations. This is determined largely by local circumstances such as the level of activity of local interest groups, the consultation and/or participation methods deployed by the local authority and the ways in which the issue becomes framed locally. Our breast cancer case study has added a further dimension to this, that stakeholders who appear to be similarly placed can in fact have quite diverse positions and interests: commonalities are no more certain to lie within the bounds of citizen knowledge or within those of scientific expertise than they are to traverse the two.
Our GIS-P methodology has allowed us to selectively digitise and analyse these perceptions in order to pick out the detail from the more general concerns which the GIS-P/citizen group produces. This has helped to overcome a logistical problem for scientific policy actors and while it can prove time consuming and expensive to mediate between the obligations of scientists working in 'the real world' and the meaningful engagement of lay publics it does offer benefits as a mediating tool.
We have held or are soon to hold three seminars to disseminate results to users; we have given six conference papers to date to academic and user group (health) audiences. We have a number of articles planned for academic and user targeted journals. Our current research priorities include addressing key issues identified above: situating lay and professional expertise more precisely; bringing different stakeholders together; and remodel science communication around contentions science issues and focus upon linkages between different citizen expertises, scientific ideologies, and policy. We have two small grant applications and one large outline grant in to the second round of SinS and are exploring other avenues for funding continued research.