Public Participation Skills for Natural Resource Managers course

• Start Date: October 04, 2010
• End Date: October 05, 2010
• City: Revelstoke BC
• Instructor: Dr. Ajit Krishnaswamy

This 1.5 day course was instructed by Dr. Ajit Krishnaswamy, of FORREX Forum for Research and Extension in Natural Resources, to a class of 15 people.

Course description

Participation is…“various forms of direct public involvement where people, individually or through organized groups, can exchange information, express opinions and articulate interests, and have the potential to influence decisions or the outcome of specific issues.” (UN FAO 2000 )

This course introduced the basic concepts and skills for planning and implementing a public participation process. Although participation is widely recognized as a critical aspect of natural resource management, and is a regulatory requirement for a variety of environmental and natural resource management processes, few resource managers have had formal training or professional development opportunities in this field. Many practitioners “do” participation every day, but do not have the opportunity to reflect on their practice or to contemplate ways to do it better. This course provided this opportunity, by using the collective experience of participants themselves as the key learning content. The course also provided a suite of resources that allow these activities to be grounded in some basic common concepts, and a set of tools that can be adopted and adapted by practitioners.

This course assisted participants in developing:

• An understanding of basic concepts and best practices of participation;
• Familiarity with different tools that can be used for effective public participation, and an awareness of which tools are appropriate under different circumstances;
• Strategies to assess the effectiveness of participatory processes; and,
• An understanding of the limits of their knowledge and where they can go for help.