Mapping cultural enablers and barriers to environmental participation in Connemara: The role of lay knowledge, discourses of sustainability and ‘defensive localism’ in environmental governance

Abstract

This paper focuses upon lay knowledge and sustainability concepts that shape and reflect environmental policy implementation and public reactions to environmental participatory forums in Connemara, Ireland. Drawing on in-depth qualitative fieldwork from a mixed-method study of knowledge in Connemara, the paper argues that local understandings of sustainability which prioritise lay knowledge for future generations both helps and hinders successful environmental participation. These definitions of sustainability are central to how community actors define what constitutes effective environmental participation. Many established locals draw upon these sustainability ideals to justify the deliberate exclusion of recent settlers to the area from environmental participatory forums. Insights revealed here on how local cultural conventions pertaining to language use, ‘defensive localism’ and insider–outsider distinctions affect participation in rural Ireland are highly significant for understanding barriers to effective environmental governance and the complexity of local perceptions of participation, sustainability and policy-making.

Domestic groundwater abstraction in Lagos, Nigeria: a disjuncture in the science-policy-practice interface?

“…In such situations, the decisions, values and understandings of non-state actors can play a decisive role in shaping practice. In the case of urban groundwater in Lagos, the limitations of current scientific knowledge further points to the need to better understand the multiple, lay and often localised and socially-contingent knowledges shaping actions and perceptions of risk within lived communities (Capstick 2013, Howell et al 2016, Moran 2016).…”

Collaboration with community connectors to improve primary care access for hardly reached people: a case comparison of rural Ireland and Australia

“…At a community level, social status is represented through locally understood cultural symbols such as participation or roles in volunteering activities, sporting and social events [18,27,28], and experienced in ways that are gendered, economic and moral [27]. Further markers of difference result from demographic change affecting contemporary rural communities in both Australia and Ireland with internal migration for housing affordability (welfare migration) or life style factors (tree change) where boundaries are drawn between locals with in depth experience of the local culture [29,30] and recently arrived "newcomers" viewed as "outsiders" [26].…”