Public Access Strategy - Key Principles Community Participation & Social Inclusion

The policy audit highlighted the potential importance of the Social Inclusion Strategy for Scotland in influencing access planning.  Amongst it's aims, the Social Inclusion Strategy aims to ensure that everyone has access to a decent quality of life.  This can be achieved through a wide range of initiatives, including stimulating employment opportunities, caring for the elderly and encouraging participation in community activities.

This Public Access Strategy is based on the notion that access is about more than countryside recreation.  Implementation of access plans has the potential to play an important role in delivering North Lanarkshire Council's commitment to social inclusion.  Within the Action Area Plans, specific opportunities for achieving this have already been outlined, particularly in areas that contain Social Inclusion Partnerships.  However, the demand audit showed that there are many concentrated pockets of social exclusion, scattered across North Lanarkshire.  It is therefore important that access planning and management at the local level, is undertaken with social inclusion playing an integral role.  This might be achieved in a number of ways:

• providing opportunities for local communities to become involved in planning and managing their local access resources.  The proposals set out above for the establishment of Local Access Groups, aim to stimulate local level interest and involvement in access planning.
• Providing a source of training and employment for local people. Access can provide a wide range of opportunities, from gaining experience in path maintenance through voluntary work, to creative involvement in the development of publicity or educational materials. There may be funding to support such initiatives, through Scottish enterprise Lanarkshire, or from EU structural funds.
• Improving access to local recreation resources.  This aspect of social inclusion has been highlighted within a number of the Action Area Plans (particularly Area H) where specific initiatives are likely to be most effective, in terms of targeting people who are least likely to exercise regularly, or get involved in community activities.

It is important to recognise that communities lie at different points on the 'access spectrum'.  Some may be heavily involved already, using paths and making an input to planning and managing networks.  Others, often the communities where potential benefits are greatest, are not involved and require an attitudinal shift before they will engage with access. Clearly, the approach to such communities will differ significantly.

There are also a number of broader initiatives which can help to ensure that community consultation becomes inclusive and participative, extending beyond organised initiatives to take on board the views of the wider population.  The proposals set out above for the North Lanarkshire Public Access Forum and Local Access Groups may go some way towards achieving this.  However, wider experience shows that it is important to undertake outreach work, to ensure that all members of the community are included in activities, as opposed to remaining limited to the 'usual suspects'.  Some examples of how this can be achieved include:

• school based initiatives to involve children and their parents; a number of ways of linking involvement with education have emerged, including schools involvement in an 'adopt a path' scheme, or inviting local land managers to visit schools to explain more about the countryside and what responsible access means;
• keying into other initiatives, for example those designed to improve health or increase participation in active informal sports, or working with Local Agenda 21 groups or similar;
• encouraging people to walk or cycle to their work, local services, or community facilities can make significant improvements to health in the long term, building exercise into everyday routines.  It can also help to ensure that socially excluded people can have more equal access to facilities and employment.
• using events, promotion material and other activities to stimulate interest, for example inviting local user groups to lead walks in a community woodland area for a weekend, organising competitive or sponsored walking, cycling or riding, or motivating local voluntary groups to play a more active role in maintenance.

In terms of the process of community participation itself, a wide range of techniques have emerged in relation to access and related planning projects in recent years.  Innovative techniques can help to ensure that consultation extends beyond discussion with the 'usual suspects' to become something which is more representative and accessible.  This might be achieved through paying careful attention to the following preparation for the consultation, perhaps through undertaking background research and establishing contacts early in the process, or by raising general awareness through the local media.  Similarly, any consultation should be followed up with feedback, to ensure that participants recognise they have become part of long term decision making processes (as opposed to being involved in a one-off exercise).

The participatory planning techniques can vary, depending on the characteristics of the local community, existing levels of interest, and aims of the consultation:

• Community workshops can provide a forum for exchanging views, and this can be particularly valuable where users, communities and land managers all take part (opening dialogue).  However, they can be dominated by more vocal minorities, if not actively facilitated.
• Surveys can also be good way of gathering a wide range of views, however they require careful design.  For example, open ended questions can result in valuable comments from interested individuals, but may generate less responses from those who are not already well acquainted with the issues.
• Focus groups / stakeholder meetings could be held, perhaps through grouping 'interests' such as land management, user types, communities, enabling bodies etc.  Whilst this is often a good way of understanding issues, needs and aspirations in detail, it can lack the dimension of ' inter-stakeholder dialogue' which can be achieved in a broader, more integrated setting.
• Outreach work can be most effective in communities that are not already involved, or interested in access.  For example, access officers could go along to non-related community meetings with existing groups, to explain the aims of this strategy and explore scope for more focused community action.

These processes, and more detailed advice on community participation, are considered more fully in the SNH Local Authority Pilot Project Guidance Report 2a.