What do decision makers learn from public forums on climate-related hazards and resilience?
Abstract
Public engagement around climate resilience efforts can foster learning for both public audiences and decision makers. On the one hand, public audiences learn about environmental hazards and strategies to increase community resilience through effective public engagement. On the other, decision makers and scientists learn about community members' values and priorities and their relation to environmental hazards and resilience strategies. Evidence from other public engagement efforts involving decision makers suggests that decision maker involvement results in reflection by officials on their own values, capacities, and roles. However, few public engagement exercises evaluate impacts on decision makers. As part of the Science Center Public Forums project, which aims to conduct public forums in eight cities across the country on resiliency to drought, heat, extreme precipitation, and sea level rise, we sought to 1) build partnerships with local decision makers and scientists around public forums and 2) explore how decision makers and scientists interacted with the planning and undertaking of those public forums. We held workshops with decision makers and scientists to inform forum content and identify local resilience issues. We will conduct interviews with local decision makers regarding their involvement in forum planning, their reflections and takeaways from the forum itself, and their perspectives on the value of public engagement for policy making. We will present our model of engagement with decision makers, initial findings from interviews, and lessons learned from connecting decision makers and scientists to public engagement efforts.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2017
- Bibcode:
- 2017AGUFMED53C0182W
- Keywords:
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- 0805 Elementary and secondary education;
- EDUCATION;
- 0815 Informal education;
- EDUCATION;
- 4327 Resilience;
- NATURAL HAZARDS;
- 6334 Regional planning;
- POLICY SCIENCES