GIS for Environmental Decision Making - Chapter 5

Part II ___________________________________________________________________ Tools to Support Decision-Making © 2008 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC CHAPTER 5 GIS and Environmental Decision-Making: From Sites to Strategies and Back Again R. MacFarlane and H. Dunsford 5.1 INTRODUCTION Spatial policy and planning are fundamentally about locating facilities, services, industry, housing, utilities and other land uses that are required by society and the state in such a way that benefits are justified against the foreseen costs. Many policies have a spatial dimension in that economic activities tend to cluster, and similar social groups exist in proximity to each other, so benefits and costs, for instance through the collapse of heavy industry, are unevenly distributed in space. However, spatial policies and land-use plans are much more explicitly about where things should be. There are ‘winners’ and ‘losers’, with NIMBYism representing one response when the ‘losers’ are proposed to be ‘here’ rather than ‘there’. If policy is premised on achieving the greatest good (taking a wholly apolitical perspective!) and minimizing harm, we are left with the problem that Locally Unwanted Land Uses (LULUs) have to go somewhere and there can be opposition in almost every direction. Alternatively, environmental decision-making may be concerned with the allocation of scarce resources that are desired in a number of places. Public funding for regeneration, amenity or conservation associated investments such as woodland planting, access enhancement, wetland creation or ‘re-wilding’ schemes1 may be subject to what is in effect a bidding process, attempting to ‘win’ the proposed development or other measures. This might be described as NIMBYism without the N. In neither case of course are positions going to be universally held within any given community or locality, for instance in the case of wind farms where the landowner and development company may be united in their support, against the wishes of other local stakeholders. Determining which options are ‘best’ lies at the core of environmental decision-making. This chapter draws on research and consultancy experience for a range of organizations in the UK. These include projects on wind energy, community forests and the mapping of tranquillity2-7. The experience spans what might be simplistically identified as a divide between ‘development’ and ‘conservation’ interests, enabling us to offer a commentary on some of the values that are often implicit, and sometimes explicit, in what may generally be termed environmental decision-making. 79 © 2008 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC 80 GIS for environmental decision-making Conducting these studies has provided the authors with a viewpoint on a range of issues and debates which are pertinent to the application of GI and GIS to environmental decision-making at the policy and planning levels. Planning is used here in a relatively broad rather than a technically specific sense, focusing primarily on regional and sub-regional scale activities such as Regional Spatial Strategies8 and sectoral policies such as the Regional Forestry Strategies9. Land-use planning within the statutory framework of Town and Country Planning is not the primary focus, although many of the issues are equally relevant and applicable at that level given the hierarchically consistent nature of the system, further tightened up with recent revisions10. A number of key themes are elaborated in the next section. This is followed by a review of several projects and the chapter concludes with a discussion that draws out some lessons learnt from them and their implications for research and practice. 5.2 BACKGROUND: KEY THEMES Broadly speaking, there are different kinds of information (including GI) used in decision-making and different stages at which they may be sought or created: ! Background: various sources, experiences, networks and the media ! Exploratory: sought out, more structured and categorized ! Analytical: selected, a focus on defensibility ! Confirmatory: related to formal evaluation to confirm decision or to retrospectively support a position adopted. Information is thus central to the social processes of arriving at and defending a position. However, if the information was unequivocal, if the evidence base was not open to challenge, if variable interpretations of the available data and information did not have the power to carry people to different conclusions, there would be no problem and no literature on the subject. More to the point, there would be uniformity and consensus instead of dispute, challenge and opposition. The convention is that both planning, taken in the broadest sense, and organized opposition needs to be ‘evidence-based’ to be effective. Evidence-based (good) practice is a key element in the lexicon of the current government, but evidence can be constructed and construed in many different ways. What then is the role of information, including GI, in environmental policy and planning? To answer this it is important to review, although in summary, some different views on the nature of planning and the role of technical information in support of it. Early models of planning were procedural, systematic, rational and apolitical – things happened in a process that had a beginning and an end point, and where all options were considered on the basis of the available information, before selecting or making an optimal decision. Over time these have been challenged and replaced © 2008 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Strategic and site-based planning 81 with models that emphasize the nature of planning as a more interactive, communicative activity. Figure 5.1 illustrates the sequential, procedural model of planning and in each of its stages information plays a distinctive role. The name of the stage appears at the top, what happens during this phase is in [square brackets] and the role of information is in (brackets). Figure 5.1 The role of information in the sequential model of the planning/policy cycle (after Danziger et al.11, Barkenbus12, and Stephenson 13). Stephenson13, p241, commenting on the sequential, procedural model, noted that ‘the notion of a process where information is collected, a choice of policy is made, the policy is adopted and then implemented was too simple when compared with reality, where the process was far more messy’, yet it is an approach that is publicly adhered to as good practice. Campbell and Masser14, p153 critically observe that ‘much of the folklore surrounding computers endows them with the capacity to compensate for the inadequacies of human intellect … and [that] this sentiment is reflected in much of the current writing about geographic information technologies’. Klosterman15, p47 builds on this, arguing that ‘planning practice … takes current technology largely as given and moulds planning to fit the technology … [something] … that is particularly relevant to the current fascination with GIS among planning academics and practitioners’. GIS, it could be argued, has the potential to reinvent planning as an applied science with its emphasis on locations that are optimized on the basis of data describing defined parameters and criteria. However, this would be naïve as the literature has developed an extensive critique of the neutrality of evidence and indeed the neutrality of planning. The planning as communication and planning as reasoning models15,16 are essentially premised on the contested nature of planning processes and their outcomes, and they embed a more inclusive © 2008 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC 82 GIS for environmental decision-making approach, at least to some degree, in the planning process. In turn GIS applications are developing to accommodate these new models, and the planning as reasoning together approach has underpinned the emergence of the grandly titled ‘participatory geographic information science’. ‘This surge of interest in collaborative spatial decision-making in particular, and participatory decision-making more generally has been spurred on … by the realisation that effective solutions to spatial decision problems require collaboration and consensus building… [which] require the participation and collaboration of people representing diverse areas of competence, political agendas, and social interests’17, p2-3. So, attempting to briefly summarize the literatures on planning, opposition, information and GIS: ! There is a geography to the impact of developments; ! There is a geography to the opposition to developments; ! Models which seek to rationally identify optimal locations have been discredited by many authors (e.g., Pickles18) and GIS have been re-cast as decision support tools; ! In spite of the above, GIS retains substantial credibility as a planning tool, and the emergent literature on participatory applications of ICTs in general and GIS in particular has established a tool for communicative planning (e.g., web-based mapping) and reasoning together models. ! It is questionable whether reasoning together moves us forward, however much the process is facilitated by evidence, new media and participatory digital frameworks for debate. This chapter relates our experience to these issues and problems, based upon a series of case studies that all involved the Centre for Environmental and Spatial Analysis (CESA) at Northumbria University. Cutting across these we can identify a change in focus away from individual site proposals to regional or national frameworks which explicitly articulate objectives and establish priorities in a spatial form. Admirable as the latter can be, the problem remains that developments have to actually go somewhere specific. This engenders a need for strategic policies to mesh with more local frameworks to guide individual proposals to actual locations that satisfy (or perhaps more accurately, address) the various demands that the state, the developer, local communities and other interest groups have in relation to the planned activity and the site. © 2008 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ... - tailieumienphi.vn