Abstract Title

Public Involvement in environmental protection projects

Author

Gordon Okumu

Email

[email protected] or [email protected]

Phone

(541)393-4697

Organization

King County’s Hazardous Waste Management Program (Seattle, WA)

Job Title

Health & Environmental Investigator II

Learning Objectives

1.       Overview of the public involvement in environmental protection activities within communities

2.       Community coordination

3.       Implementation of cost of operations in public involvement

4.       Systems and research and what to research about

5.       Public participation planning

Content of the abstract

Public participation in environmental projects is one of the many important aspects of environmental protection ventures.  When the public is involved in activities affecting them, it brings out a positive change that can help. Public participation in every decision improves the confidence of the citizens in government or nonprofit activities.  On the contrary, government projects and activities sometimes are complex and requires extreme level of technical understanding to become viable success for the community hence difficult to involve the public at all levels.

In this presentation, I’ll report about the positive effects of public participation and how public administrators can determine the extent of public participation in an environmental protection project. This can be achieved through the determination of community groups, governance policy, tools, and processes of engagement that I’ll share during the presentation. I am also going to discuss the capacity development strategy for engaging the public as well as stakeholder identification and management through community-based dialogue.

In so doing, we shall be able to find out the public’s interests, perspectives, capacities, and interactions and this will enable us to display multiple dimensions of stakeholders’ attributes in a radargram which in return will guide us in knowing the stakeholders within the public and their individual abilities within the society so that they may be placed in the right spot within the spectrum for public participation.

The basic idea of this presentation is to provide an overview and holistic approach on how to involve the public in activities that requires public participation. The research process, identification, and categorization of the publics will be part of the presentation.

Several projects that stall in the process of implementation does so because the step of public participation was either ignored during the planning or reviewed shallowly and left as less important yet it’s one of the most important aspect of any realistic project.

This presentation will therefore talk about the community-based participatory action on public involvement in ecological restoration and protection of the environment.

Speaker Bio

Gordon works for King County in Washington State as Health and Environmental Investigator. He is experienced in forest restoration, hazardous waste management and mechanism of pollution prevention.

He works with businesses, trades associations and agencies to develop best management practices while identifying cost-effective options for disposition of the hazardous wastes.

Gordon is also the founder and president of Angels of Africa, a nonprofit organization working with communities in Western Kenya to help restore the lost forest cover as well as training them about environmental protection. The Angels of Africa has so far planted over fifty thousand indigenous trees in western Kenya.

Gordon has a bachelor’s degree in global environmental management from the University of Oregon, a post graduate certificate in Tropical Forest Landscapes from the Yale School of Environment and a bachelor’s in Media Studies - Public Relations major from the Multimedia University of Kenya.