ABSTRACT
Recent decades have witnessed a steady increase in efforts from a range of actors to facilitate and support meaningful and effective engagement with coastal communities and stakeholders. Indeed, this move towards improved participatory approaches are increasingly framed as being integral to successful and sustainable management of coastal resources and spaces, including in the context of climate adaptation The effectiveness of the processes, structures and frameworks underpinning coastal community engagement has always been subject to external and internal drivers;however, the global threat posed by COVID-19 presented, and continues to present, an unexpected shift in approach, and the need for rapid adaptation by those of us working within these spheres. Using the Coastal Communities Adapting Together (CCAT) project as a case study, we explore how engagement with coastal communities and stakeholders in the project areas of Fingal, Ireland, and Pembrokeshire, Wales, has been impacted and forced to adapt as a result of COVID-19. Through a qualitative data collection process, we explore how project teams across different scales have rapidly adapted their models of community and stakeholder engagement, identify successes and failures, and explore challenges that have been faced. Finally, we consider if the legacy of COVID-19 has provided an opportunity for coastal community engagement approaches being used across the globe to become more diverse, adapting to new technologies and increasing accessibility and effectiveness. Insights identified as fundamental to successful adaptation and enhancing resilience include: a rapid response to change, adoption of a diversity of techniques, broadened participation and supported social learning and knowledge exchange.
ABSTRACT
Purpose: The archives gathered in this collection engage in the current COVID-19 moment. They do so in order to attempt to understand it, to think and feel with others and to create a collectivity that, beyond the slogan “we are in this together”, seriously contemplates the implications of what it means to be given an opportunity to alter the course of history, to begin to learn to live and educate otherwise. Design/methodology/approach: This paper is collectively written by twelve academics in March 2020, a few weeks into the first closing down of common spaces in 2020, Victoria, Australia. Writing through and against “social isolation”, the twelve quarantine archives in this paper are all at once questions, methods, data, analysis, implications and limitations of these pandemic times and their afterlives. Findings: These quarantine archives reveal a profound sense of dislocation, relatability and concern. Several of the findings in this piece succeed at failing to explain in generalising terms these un-new upending times and, in the process, raise more questions and propose un-named methodologies. Originality/value: If there is anything this paper could claim as original, it would be its present ability to respond to the current times as a historical moment of intensity. At times when “isolation”, “self” and “contained” are the common terms of reference, the “collective”, “connected” and “socially engaged” nature of this paper defies those very terms. Finally, the socially transformative desire archived in each of the pieces is a form of future history-making that resists the straight order with which history is often written and made. © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited.