Browsing by Subject "Osallistaminen"

Urban forests have recreational values in daily life of people. Planning the use of urban forest is considered through social, ecological, economical and cultural sustainability goals. Besides a forest plan that focuses on concrete forest use, many Finnish municipalities also have a forest strategy. Forest strategy gives a longer perspective for the goals of the use of the forest. Public participation is used as part of the forest planning in municipalities in varying levels. This master’s thesis focuses on the use of different public participation methods in forest planning in Finnish municipalities. The main focus is to explore what kind of methods/ combinations of methods are used and how the municipalities’ forestry experts view the main benefits, problems and chances of improvement in the used practices. The study is carried out as a qualitative study, interviewing forestry experts from 14 Finnish municipalities and analyzing the interviews using qualitative content analysis. The interviews are targeted to municipalities, that have made a forest plan and used public participation in the planning process. The results show that the participatory processes varied a lot between municipalities and each municipality had made their own way of including participatory methods into the forest planning process. However, the methods used were mostly the same, the most used being different kinds of online surveys and surveys using spatial information, common meetings, and forest walks. Two of the municipalities used participatory planning, that involved stakeholders in the planning group. It’s more conventional to use lighter participatory methods, that don’t require as much involvement from the participants. According to the interviews, the main benefits brought by public participation are trust-building, informing residents and having an insight into the public opinion, along with reaching an approved plan. The main problems considering public participation are limited resources and time for the planning, single strong opinions that dominate the conversation, conflicting interests and skills for executing public participation.The ways to improve public participation process included more thorough planning of the process and sufficient amount of time for it, using participatory experts thorugh a consult firm or from municipality’s own workforce, explaining and visualizing effects of forest use for the public and more active ways to inform the public.

During the last years participation has become a topic reaching great interest in the field of educational science. The increased emphasis on childrens’ participation in the latest curricula of 2014 is one example indicating participations’ increase in popularity. Regarding comments in educational science, participation seems valued, yet at the same time studies and reports indicate that childrens’ possibilities to participate and get their voice heard at school leaves room for improvement. In addition, children are not well informed about their possibilities to affect issues that consern them. This bachelor’s thesis has been conducted as a literature review and the databases used are from educational -, social- and sosiological fields. The study begins with defining the consept of participation, which turns out to be a rather complex concept with many interpretative meanings. Also the consepts of citizenship and agency are introduced. This literature review discusses reasons impeding students’ possibilties to participate. A significant issue children face is what Gretschel calls ”quasi-participating” (näennäisosallistaminen). Another problem children face is that they are not given opportunities to participate because it is not considered important. The issues stem from social reasons such as how children are seen and how childhood is definied. Social discourses of children consider ideas such as ”children as future citizens”, ”children as the object of care” and ”children as adolescents”. Another dilemma is the extent of the consept, where various activities and action may be put into practise under participation’s name. This has lead to a situation, where children are compelled to take part in various kinds of projects that are ostensibly ”participative”, but the intentions behind them do not advance equality. As a solution to the poor participation possibilities this study proposes that teachers should be critical and acknowledge the mechanisms that cause ”quasi-participating” and ignoring childrens’ participation. Along with increased critical thinking this study presents solutions how teachers can improve school practices towards a more participative approach in three ways: teachership and interaction, democratic atmosphere and pedagogical ideas. These aspects contribute in the school’s development towards a more participative environment for children.