Dissertation Research: Informational Exchanges Among Hawaii's Marine Stakeholders

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This Dissertation Improvement Grant in the Science and Society Policy Studies in Science, Engineering, and Technology focuses on a qualitative study that will extend prior NSF supported research to identify a comprehensive range of Hawaii's marine resource stakeholders (HMS), and will provide insights about their informational exchanges. The study will employ the Social Actor Model, developed through prior NSF-funded research by Lamb & Kling, to examine the dynamics of community involvement in the management of marine resources. This empirically derived and theoretically supported approach will guide a systematic exploration of the concepts of marine resources co-management in concert with concepts about informational exchanges to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the developments taking shape across different communities of practice. This approach constructs a view of HMS as social actors, each as part of an institution, both enabling and constraining interactions, affiliations, environments and identities. NSF will support the collection of data that addresses three basic questions central to the objectives of this research. First, how do selected Hawaii's marine stakeholders obtain and use information on the local marine environment? Secondly, which factors influence the formation of groups and alliances among Hawaii's marine stakeholders? And third, how does environmental information shape Hawaii's marine stakeholders' practices, identities, affiliations and interactions with other groups and agencies (and in turn become shaped by them)? These questions will be addressed through a series of interviews and related participatory data gathering meetings, accompanied by document review and network analysis. The interviewing will focus on stakeholders in three distinct sites around the Hawaiian Islands, and will be conducted over the course of one year in partial fulfillment of the doctoral dissertation requirements of the University of Hawaii. The sites will vary in terms of key HMS characteristics, operating under different institutions and different contexts: one site will focus attention on mostly extractive activities, another will focus on exclusive conservation, and the final site will balance both extractive and non-extractive uses. This research will provide a characterization of the informational exchanges among Hawaii's marine stakeholders, and will explain how these exchanges shape the uses and management of the local ocean resources. This research will also identify and describe some successful partnerships among diverse stakeholders in ways that will help other researchers develop further studies of environmental activities more generally.