Gauging levels of public acceptance of the use of visualisation tools in promoting public participation; a case study of wind farm planning in South Wales, UK

Robert Berry and Gary Higgs

Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 2012, vol. 55, issue 2, 229-251

Abstract: There is an increasing interest in the use of IT-based tools to encourage public participation in environmental decision making. Typically, this has involved the development of (predominantly prototype) systems applied in workshop scenarios with those stakeholders with an immediate interest in the planning issue in hand. Increasingly, however, the Internet is being used to explore the use of online visualisation and mapping tools, with evaluation often taking the form of feedback questionnaires that are used to refine such techniques. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how innovative visualisation techniques can enhance existing methods of information provision and public participation in a renewable energy setting. Specifically, we are concerned with examining participant opinions on the use of such tools to promote participation in relation to a proposed wind farm in South Wales. Our findings suggest that survey participants are generally optimistic regarding the potential for such software and overall give strong support for the development and implementation of these technologies in a real-world planning context. However, we suggest that such techniques need to be carefully tailored to the types of public engagement being sought in order to link particular tasks to specific technology types.

Date: 2012
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09640568.2011.591925 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:jenpmg:v:55:y:2012:i:2:p:229-251

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CJEP20

DOI: 10.1080/09640568.2011.591925

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Environmental Planning and Management is currently edited by Dr Neil Powe, Dr Ken Willis and George Bill Page

More articles in Journal of Environmental Planning and Management from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().