Doctoral dissertation: A map-based questionnaire improves participation in land use planning

A map-based questionnaire helps to develop interaction in sparsely populated northern areas. What is important is that a questionnaire is used for a real and acute need for land use planning. In this way, it is easier to motivate people to respond and the probability of using the results in practice increases.

The doctoral dissertation by Sini Kantola (M.Sc.), a visiting researcher at the Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke), studies the use of a public participation geographic information system (PPGIS) in land use planning and decision making in sparsely populated northern areas. In these areas, land is usually in public ownership, involving various interests. It is necessary to coordinate different forms of land use (e.g., travel, nature conservation, mining, forestry, indigenous peoples, recreation, opinions of local and out-of-town residents, and reindeer husbandry). The key questions are who and what interests guide land use planning and decision making, and how different parties can be engaged in land use planning.

Maintaining and developing participation opportunities in land use planning is an integral part of a democratic society. It is important to maintain a dialogue, debate, criticism, and the right of appeal related to land use planning also in the future.

“Northern areas involve various land use interests, and there is no single right way for engagement. It is important to address and assess the context in every place and situation: the engagement process and the people and groups to be engaged,” says Kantola.

This study highlights the benefits of a map-based questionnaire, or PPGIS, such as visualisation and the presentation of material as geospatial data, the possibility to collect data from a large group of people, as well as the ability to process and merge large volumes of digital geospatial data.

“PPGIS may encourage people to participate in planning processes because the method enables anonymous participation,” says Kantola.

The PPGIS method alone cannot replace other forms of engagement, and it should be seen as a single tool for engagement and a way of collecting social geospatial data. While creating a map-based questionnaire on the Internet is fairly easy, it is important to allocate enough time and resources to conduct an analysis after collecting the results by means of geospatial analyses, for example. It is important that PPGIS data is saved systematically in an organisation’s IT systems so that it is easily available for any later use.

In this study, participation opportunities were developed through multi-method research. This is a case study, and it includes three different datasets collected from Lapland, Finland, during 2015–2019. The datasets were collected using PPGIS available online and on paper, and they also included interviews and the analysis of reports and documents.