Learning from the local scale: identifying and addressing local blind spots in Arctic environmental governance

Abstract

Environmental governance in the context of climate change adaptation brings together diverse actors and stakeholders to develop and enact policies across a broad range of scales. However, local needs and priorities are often mismatched with those pursued by entities at different levels of decision-making. This mismatch is perpetuated, in part, by the dominating influence of the Western worldview in knowledge processes involving the creation, sharing, and use of environmental knowledge. Persistent biases that favor Western science and technical information while marginalizing other important sources like local and Indigenous knowledge create blind spots that may adversely affect adaptation outcomes. In this research, a case study of the Native Village of Wainwright, Alaska is used to explore the topic of information blind spots in environmental governance resulting from 1) low resolution tools employed within broad scale adaptation initiatives; 2) preferences for easily quantifiable information; and 3) the challenge of communicating context-rich details to outside decision makers, given disciplinary biases and organizational conventions. This dissertation comprises manuscripts based on three studies undertaken to address the above blind spots in specific areas of adaptation planning. The first manuscript furthers conventional methods of adaptation classification through a place-based approach that uses directed content analysis to identify aspects of local adaptation not readily captured by low resolution frameworks. The second manuscript employs contextual analysis and extends Ostrom's Institutional Analysis and Development framework to characterize the role of local informal institutions in adaptation and provide insights into how difficult-to-quantify social and cultural norms might be leveraged in planned adaptation initiatives. The third manuscript reports on a formative endeavor that looked practically at conventions for communicating environmental change to public sector decision-makers, and tested a survey that explored the potential for context-rich visuals and other reporting strategies to effectively convey information about local observations and experiences of change.