The 2026 CAIS Conference program is available here
Full conference proceedings are available here
Abstract
In 2024, the Government of Nova Scotia announced it would not proclaim the Coastal Protection Act. The Act, which received royal assent in 2019, would have prevented developers from building in a designated “coastal protection zone.” The Government’s position was clear: municipalities should be responsible for implementing coastal adaptation solutions. But municipal planners, engineers, and administrators often lack the expertise, staffing capacity, and financial resources to undertake large-scale coastal adaptation projects. They may also have difficulty identifying and selecting the most relevant, credible, and legitimate evidence to inform coastal adaptation policy-making. In this talk, we reflect on the research co-production workshop we held with 12 coastal adaptation practitioners in July 2025. The key informants highlighted the importance of (a) speaking the participants’ language, (b) challenging our preconceived assumptions, and (c) remaining open to diverse research interests. We will present the design of two studies co-produced from the outset with coastal adaptation practitioners in Nova Scotia: (1) a systematic map of the literature on information behaviour in local governance decision-making and (2) a case study of the information behaviour of public servants involved in Lunenburg County’s coastal adaptation projects.
Citation
Legault, A., MacDonald, B. H., Caron, I., & Toze, S. (2026). The information behaviour of municipal staff responsible for coastal adaptation policy design in Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia. Proceedings of the Annual Conference of CAIS | Actes du Congrès Annuel de L’ACSI. Virtual. 22-26 June 2026. https://doi.org/10.29173/cais2022