Participatory Approaches for Addressing Local Climate Change Impacts

There has been increasing interest in participatory approaches to climate change adaptation, where local stakeholders are brought together with scientists, government, private, and civic actors, to collaboratively develop approaches for understanding and addressing the imminent impacts of climate change. In this paper, we discuss findings from a collaborative, 2.5 year-long project, in which we used social network analysis (SNA) as a means to evaluate how participation in the project i) facilitated tie formation and/or ii) enhanced understanding of others’ views regarding climate change. The project took place on Deal Island Peninsula, Maryland, USA, a rural coastal area of the USA that has already experienced a number of social-ecological changes in recent years and likely to experience more in the future due to rising sea levels and increased storms resulting from climate change. The project led to two successful, collaborative outcomes – the creation of research report reflecting both local and scientific knowledge, and funding for future shoreline restoration. Our findings suggest that, although participation did not significantly predict changes in stakeholders’ social-ecological views regarding climate change and the DIP, participation did predict tie formation, in particular those ties based on perceived understanding. Our findings thus contribute to the growing body of literature considering the role participatory projects play in addressing environmental problems, and how to conceptualize and measure the relative success of such projects from a network approach.