The ACCESS/BoFEP 2022 Conference program is available here
The ACCESS/BoFEP 2022 Conference abstracts are available here
Abstract
For over three decades, the Gulf of Maine Council on the Marine Environment (GOMC) has served “as a forum for the sharing and exchange of scientific information as a basis for management decisions” in the Gulf or Maine and Bay of Fundy. The Council has produced hundreds of publications and promoted informal communication through many meetings, workshops, and conferences. Previously, we completed analyses of the Council’s published output, but did not explicitly examine its informal communication activities. Informal communication has been shown to be important in environmental management in cross-border and cross-jurisdictional contexts. In the case of GOMC, the ongoing informal communications and information exchanges at the twice-yearly meetings of Council members keep government staff informed about projects occurring in each jurisdiction. This informal communication can be transient, but it is more immediate and timely than the substantially validated information resources offered by formal studies and subsequent publications. In this presentation, we will review GOMC’s information exchange practices, which have seen a decline in the number of publications over the past decade, but a continuation of informal communication. We will place this review in the context of recent research on informal communication strategies of environmental organizations, particularly organizations that fulfil a boundary function. We will give attention to who attends Council meetings, noting the organizations and jurisdictions that they represent and the types of information that are exchanged. In our analysis, we will outline the advantages and limitations of relying on informal communication practices, and, based on this analysis, suggest how GOMC could capitalize on the benefits of its informal communication activities.
Citation
MacDonald, B. H., Long, L., Wells, P. G. (2022). Communication of scientific information: Assessing informal communication practices of the Gulf of Maine Council on the Marine Environment. ACCESS/BoFEP Conference 2022, Truro, Nova Scotia, 17-21 May 2022.
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