Public Involvement, Environment and Health: Evaluating GIS for Participation

Most recent analyses of what are now referred to as PTAs (Participatory Technology Assessments, Joss & Bellucci, 2002:5) have focussed upon these procedures in their institutional settings (op.cit.:7-8). Thus, they consider what participatory methodologies such as citizen juries and so on have to offer at the policy making level. This project – funded by the ESRC under grant number L144250045 – was rather more specialised in that it was designed to see what contribution one novel PTA engagement methodology could offer as a tool for what until recently has been called ‘the public understanding of science’. This methodology is Geographic Information Systems for Participation (GIS-P), a spatially explicit participation tool designed for extracting and presenting ‘lay’ knowledge. The fields it has been applied to in the project are those involved in local air quality management, the environmental risk of breast cancer, and issues of urban and rural regeneration within the framework of sustainable development. The research team set out to investigate whether using GIS-P would prove a useful tool for communicating perceptions of environmental problems and hazards in relation to environmental science and to issues of public health concern. In this respect, GIS-P is a process that is new to both policy makers and to ‘lay’ groups, and so was seen to have potential for better communication between these groups by virtue of being relatively free of history in these contexts: it comes with little baggage to most participants. This was seen to be particularly valuable when considering contentious and emotive scientific issues such as public perceptions of environmental causes of illnesses.