About the Project
About BuSK project
BuSK – Building Shared Knowledge capital to support natural resource governance in the Northern periphery – is a research project, which develops planning tools that enhance the use of participatory techniques, and gives assistance for decision makers concerning land use planning and natural resource governance.
Peripheral livelihoods and land use depend heavily on natural resources, but their management is often contested by various stakeholder interests. The challenge of reconciling various land-use modes is how to acknowledge, combine and make use of local, scientific and other expert knowledge, and how to select relevant knowledge in decision making.
BuSK focuses on several rural land and natural resource use modes such as forestry, reindeer herding, agriculture, mining, tourism and recreation. The results will increase the capacity of remote and sparsely populated communities for sustainable environmental management by involving all stakeholders to land use planning and natural resource use decisions.
The objectives of BuSK are:
- To develop the collection of local knowledge in land use planning – especially by using participatory GIS
- To develop and apply web-based participatory GIS method for sparsely populated areas
- To combine science-based knowledge with experience-based knowledge and help the decision makers to select relevant knowledge.
BuSK is mainly funded by The Northern Periphery and Arctic 2014-2020 Programme and coordinated by Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke). The three-year project began on 1th of March 2016 and it ends on 28th of February 2019.
Work Packages and their outputs
WP1: Indigenous and local knowledge as part of cultural heritage
WP2: Collaborative planning and management of the commons and protected areas
WP3: Building knowledge for creating and developing sustainable community economies
What is PPGIS?
Participatory Mapping (PM) is a term that describes how people can interact, create and communicate knowledge, experience and aspirations about the world by using maps. Today, Public Participating Geographic Information Systems (PPGIS) allow for citizens to mark their important places on maps with Internet based applications without being GIS experts. PPGIS surveys are often made by public authorities to collect citizen information and opinions for land use planning. By overlaying different themes of collected PPGIS map data and land use plans it is possible to locate e.g. important places, places with special values and conflicting interests. In Finland, tourist enterpreneurs views and solutions to tourism crowding were asked with PPGIS in Arctic Cirle tourist village in Rovaniemi. The views of local villages representatives were asked about their views of developing sparserly populated areas, and the possibilities of local tourism as a part of it, in the area of Rovaniemi. The views of locals were mapped to find justifications for Social License to Operate of mining inKittilä, northern Finland. BuSK project also applied PPGIS in transboundary survey extending to three countries in Finnish, Swedish and Norwegian Lapland and asked respondents to tell about their important places, places with special cutural values and land use conflicts, among others. In Faroe Islands PPGIS survey was made to collect knowledge and information about local people’s land use practices and local perceptions of landscape value on the island of Sandoy. Faroes PPGIS survey also assessed the effects of growing tourism into traditional land use. In Sweden participatory mapping system RenGIS was used by reindeer herding communities to collect their important routes and areas for reindeer herding practises.