U@MareNostrum: Strengthening Public Participation for water protection and management
The pilot project entitled “U@MARENOSTRUM” aims to involve, thanks to ICT and Geographical Information Systems, citizens and local actors from the Mediterranean coastal zones in decision-making processes for the adoption and implementation of water and marine environmental protection policies and legislations in the Mediterranean region in accordance with the EU environmental legislation. Public Participation GIS is defined as the use of geographic information systems to broaden public involvement in policymaking. Thus, the project will support the citizens and local actors to identify environmental problems that need to be solved immediately in order to result in positive development in the French Riviera (http://riviera-francaise.fr/uatmarenostrum), Valencia (http://marenostrum.gva.es) and Ionian Islands (http://uatmarenostrumionianislands.gr) regions as well as providing a way to solve them.
The specific objectives of the project are the following:
- Advance the concept of environmental democracy via the use of ICT
- Present new ways of effectively presenting information and communicating adding to the improving the transparency in tracking legislation and decision making process
- Introduce and test Public Participation GIS to manage geospatial boundary and statistical information that can support well-informed decisions for the management of water and marine environmental protection in the Mediterranean region.
- To make EU environmental legislation accessible for everyone through electronic means.
- To support the citizens and local actors to monitor the implementation of the EU water and maritime environmental policies in the in the Mediterranean region.
- To obtain public input for designing long term environmental policies to be implemented in the French Riviera, Valencia and Ionian Islands regions that are in line with the EU environmental policies.
- To make possible for citizens with limited knowledge of the subject area and low level IT skills to profit for eParticipation tools.
From a technical point of view, these will be achieved by improving the accessibility and usability of the already running eParticipation platform called “Gov2DemOSS” in the framework of the Demos@Work and VoicE projects, which will be customized and integrated with a new tool- a geographic information system (GIS). A visualization of the legislative process already created for the VoicE project will also be customized.
