Creating opportunities for engagement: Exploring the relationship between the Burren landscape, civil society and community
Date
2022-01-27Embargo Date
2026-01-27
Author
Williams, Elaine
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Abstract
Research has demonstrated a need to explore the significant contribution communities make towards the conservation and management of some of our most protected landscapes. Due to significant budgetary cuts within the environmental and voluntary sector, civil society organisations (CSOs) and charities have become over-stretched and underfunded. This has resulted in a high dependency on volunteer supports to meet needs on the ground. However, these voluntary contributions are undervalued and underappreciated within the Irish State. More specifically, conservation volunteering (CV) as a practice is not recognised as its own category of volunteering within the Irish statistics databases, with no research to date exploring the broader community benefits associated with engaging in voluntary practices like CV in Ireland. In addition, there is little research to date examining the role of CSOs in encouraging and sustaining engagement in landscape management and CV practices across the literature.
Focusing on the Burren region in the West of Ireland, this research examines the role civil society organisations (CSOs) (in this instance a case study of Burrenbeo Trust - BBT) play in encouraging engagement across communities and with this unique landscape. Centrally this engagement critically responds to the under-researched, complex and multifaceted nexus transecting the landscape, communities and CSOs. Unique in its approach, a participatory action research (PAR) design steers this project, delivering outputs derived from embedded experiences in the field that spanned two years gathering data. PAR was facilitated through the Researcher’s role of Burrenbeo Trust’s ‘Community Engagement Officer’. Fieldwork was achieved during a 14 month period in this role with an additional 10 months spent conducting a multi-method approach to enquiry with BBT communities. Reflective journals (n=97), semi-structured interviews (n=40), walkabout interviews (n=6) and biographical narrative interpretive method interviews (BNIM) (n=12) were used to unpack research findings that respond to the broader needs of academic knowledge, civil society and community forums alike.
This study has produced extensive and valuable insights into some of the core conservation challenges facing the Burren today, while also addressing BBT’s role within the landscape as an Environmental CSO. It explores how CSOs akin to BBT generate social and symbolic capital engaging and reaching communities through multifaceted networks. This research has outlined suggestions that aim to aid BBT’s future and sustained community engagement, while also demonstrate their role in providing opportunities to enhance community wellbeing. Key to this, findings within this research challenge traditional ideas of conservation volunteering, looking beyond the environmental impact and focusing on the personal benefits associated with engaging in the practice. Through the lens of habitus combined with BNIM, this research unpacks the wellbeing benefits of CV in the Burren via an exploration of volunteer life stories. In doing so, it also provides a novel framework for measuring wellbeing benefits that can be adapted and utilised within other communities nationally and internationally.
Due to the unique approach of this research and the embedded experience in the field as both a community engagement official and researcher, this thesis offers unique contributions to the field of PAR. It demonstrates the challenges of researcher positionality in the field and advocates that acknowledgement of the everyday ‘messiness’ of participatory research is a significant contribution to knowledge. In addition, this research delivers original and innovative insights in unpacking community-university relationships, while also advocating for more collaborative community-based research.