Key sustainability issues in European sensitive areas – a participatory approach

Abstract

This chapter describes the integration of stakeholder perspectives into the analysis of policy impacts within SENSOR. In particular, the chapter reports on a phase of ‘extensive’ research in selected ‘Sensitive Areas Case Studies’ (SACS), resulting in an overview of stakeholder perspectives on key sustainability issues. An understanding of these issues is presented as a critical reference point for subsequent research phases focusing on the impact assessment of land use policies. The discussion engages with one of the project’s central preoccupations, namely, that the production of thorough- going policy impact assessments which describe changes in social, economic and environmental systems across European regions is limited by current modelling capacity and data availability. In response, SENSOR proposes to extend the analytical scope of the automated tools through participatory research in selected ‘case study’ regions. The results of this research will be made available to the end user through the SIAT user interface. Results of the early, extensive phases of participatory research are presented and some implications for the ongoing design and analytical extension of the tools are discussed.