Community-Driven Relocation Recommendations for the U.S. Gulf Coast Region and Beyond (2024) / Chapter Skim
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7 Communication, Participation, and Knowledge
7 Communication, Participation, and Knowledge
Pages 203-236
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as guiding principles for engaging communities about relocation • Local and Indigenous knowledge in participatory planning, in cluding traditional ecological knowledge (TEK)
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. There are instrumental methods and tools for organizing and facilitating community-driven relocation processes that can build on existing community capacities and processes of engagement, including the co-production of knowledge and decisions relating to climate action, as well as participatory action approaches to research.
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The second section turns to the broader issue of communication, including risk communication, which is the subject of the chapter's third section. In the fourth section, we look broadly at participation and knowledge, perhaps the most critical parts of any relocation process.
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Gulf Coast, there has been an overall lack of discussion about climate-induced relocation strategies, especially between U.S. Gulf Coast residents who likely will have to relocate and the government entities and nongovernment stakeholders that would need to facilitate relocation, compounded by the fact that existing government frameworks do not include relocation as a viable option.
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In general, if something is not required, then it is often left out of these plans, as local governments have limited time and resources. For example, most local HMPs do not include a commitment to climate adaptation or include mechanisms on how to incorporate new climate data into plan revisions (Stults, 2017)
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,3 the committee heard from community members that trust issues can be reduced by • engaging communities through a trusted third party (e.g., commu nity leaders) who has no financial interest in the outcome; • improving transparency in who is funding the relocation process; and • communicating to relocating communities on the use of land post buyout or post-relocation.
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. Managed retreat in the United States.
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and Casi Callaway, Chief Resilience Officer, Mobile, Alabama. Virtual Focused Discussion: Mississippi and Alabama Gulf Coast Community Stakeholder Perspectives on Managed Retreat, March 2023.
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We need to get direct information from the organizations or the agencies so that we know that the information is authentic and accurate." SOURCE: Gordon Jackson, Board President, Steps Coalition. Virtual Focused Discussion: Mississippi and Alabama Gulf Coast Community Stakeholder Perspectives on Managed Retreat, March 2023.
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. Additionally, longer planning timeframes can help build relationships among the various actors, allowing for more meaningful community participation (see Box 7-3; Boege & Shibata, 2020; Campbell, 2022; National Academies, 2023a)
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Workshop 2: Opportunities & Challenges of Climate Adaptation on Florida's Gulf Coast, July 2022, St. Petersburg, Florida.
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Effective communication may require building trust among community members and leaders. Key to this process is understanding how relationships form in a given community, including knowing "the ways people connect culturally and create spaces for conversation," which can then be incorporated into meetings with community members (Climigration Network, 2021, p.
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Petersburg, Florida. Workshop 2: Opportunities & Challenges of Climate Adaptation on Florida's Gulf Coast, July 2022, St.
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So, there's a real disconnect sometimes with what is being said with what is happening." SOURCE: Chelsea Nelson, Resident of Madeira Beach, Florida. Workshop 2: Opportunities & Challenges of Climate Adaptation on Florida's Gulf Coast, July 2022, St.
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that advise on the process and logic of the relocation process; • providing time for people to become prepared psychologically and to prepare their families for possible relocation; and • allowing for people to make their own decisions about where they wish to go. Participation and transparency mean full community engagement in all discussions.
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Workshop 2: Opportunities & Challenges of Climate Adaptation on Florida's Gulf Coast, July 2022, St. Petersburg, Florida.
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. It is well known that traditional news media -- newspapers, radio, and television -- are no longer consumed universally and that local print news sources in many communities have dried up (Pew Research Center, 2019)
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Among these generalized strategies, strategy two makes clear that effective risk communication also necessitates an understanding of risk perceptions in the specific communities one is engaging. Recognizing how people perceive risk can thus help improve the two-way communication needed for major adaptations like relocation to be discussed, planned, and implemented effectively and equitably.
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, making risk and potential mitigation measures difficult to communicate to locals who are often the ones impacted by this gap. An expected outcome of effective risk communication to the community is an increased knowledge of the risk and the associated mitigation measures.
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. Such an approach of active public engagement has been seen to be a critical component of successful managed retreat exercises, and it provides a valuable lesson about the intersection of risk communication and community knowledge creation (Spidalieri & Bennett, 2020d)
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Critical to the engagement process is the inclusion of local knowledge, such as place-based knowledge systems or TEK, as described below. A public lack of trust in entities managing relocation (e.g., government)
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259) and engenders political representation, focusing on bridging social capital among communities and then linking that social capital across sociopolitical hierarchies can provide access to decision-making spaces and promote participatory decision-making processes that can, in turn, draw on local knowledge and enhance community resilience and well-being (Aldrich, 2012; Woodson et al., 2016)
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FIGURE 7-2 Bonding, bridging, and linking social capital. SOURCE: Aldrich, D
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. Other approaches that show the range of thinking about linking social capital to civic leadership and policy participation include empirical work about voluntary collaboration and cooperation in managing shared environmental resources and harms, such as Ostrom's key design principles for managing commons resources (Dietz et al., 2003; Ostrom, 1990; see also applications of Multilevel Evolutionary Framework; Waring et al., 2015)
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For example, in the Carteret community relocation in Papua New Guinea, the community-based nonprofit organization Tulele Peisa reached 9 More lessons learned from LA SAFE and other community-centered Gulf region and na tional resilience-building efforts from a National Academies study are available at https://nap. nationalacademies.org/read/26880/chapter/5#37 10 More information on the Citizens Initiative Review Commission is available at https://olis.
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. Co-Production of Community-Driven Relocation There is a growing recognition of the importance of involving multiple stakeholders, including community residents, in the co-production of climate adaptation strategies (Conde & Lonsdale, 2005)
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They also may reveal how residents have in the past responded to similar environmental change or events, as well as how they are responding now or may respond in the future. Thus, the engagement of local and Indigenous knowledge along with scientific knowledge is increasingly being promoted and accepted as best practice in addressing diverse and intersecting climate challenges, especially when communities need to adapt or otherwise respond urgently to environmental changes (see Boxes 7-8 and 7-9; Lazrus et al., 2022; Thornton & Bhagwat, 2021; Wildcat, 2013)
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Indigenous peoples' traditional knowledge systems can play a role in advancing understanding of climate change and in develop ing more comprehensive climate adaptation strategies. (Reidmiller et al., 2018, p.
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Yet, many communities in threatened coastal areas today, such as the U.S. Gulf Coast, are not able to maintain local knowledge to previous degrees, nor to share it effectively with other governments.
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We can't really do that because you need to be federal, even if it's a state-level issue.' So, even though it's not a specific project, on a broader, more systemic level, when tribes try to engage with state agencies or engage with the state overall, the problem is that people aren't exactly recognizing tribal people as sovereign people or people in general." SOURCE: Chief Devon Parfait, Grand Caillou Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw. Work shop 3: Community Viability and Environmental Change in Coastal Louisiana, July 2022, Thibodaux, Louisiana.
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. Community Knowledge and Protocols There may be cultural protocols that should be followed for collecting knowledge, such as approaching community elders to get their permission (Boege & Shibata, 2020; Mercer et al., 2010)
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For example, a special government task force in Fiji has been trying to relocate communities since 2018. A document that is guiding the relocation process, Standard Operating Procedures for planned relocations, is considered a "living document" that is updated regularly in response to lessons learned with successive relocations and ongoing dialogue (Lyons, 2022; Office of the Prime Minister, Republic of Fiji, 2023)
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Overall, governance processes around relocation need to be fundamentally reexamined and, in some cases, overhauled, to shift the balance of expertise and information sharing to a two-way process and to re-balance decision-making power in the direction of communities most affected by relocation projects, including the communities that will be receiving relocated people. CONCLUSIONS Conclusion 7-1: Effective risk communication is a dynamic, strategic, and locally attuned way of meaningfully conveying the dangers posed by climate change in specific communities, while working alongside residents.
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Longer planning timeframes can help build relationships and trust among the various actors, allowing for more meaningful community participation.
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