BuSK – Building Shared Knowledge capital to support natural resource governance in the Northern periphery – is a research project, which develops planning tools that enhance the use of participatory techniques, and gives assistance for decision makers concerning land use planning and natural resource governance.
Peripheral livelihoods and land use depend heavily on natural resources, but their management is often contested by various stakeholder interests. The challenge of reconciling various land-use modes is how to acknowledge, combine and make use of local, scientific and other expert knowledge, and how to select relevant knowledge in decision making.
BuSK focuses on several rural land and natural resource use modes such as forestry, reindeer herding, agriculture, mining, tourism and recreation. The results will increase the capacity of remote and sparsely populated communities for sustainable environmental management by involving all stakeholders to land use planning and natural resource use decisions.
The objectives of BuSK are:
- To develop the collection of local knowledge in land use planning – especially by using participatory GIS
- To develop and apply web-based participatory GIS method for sparsely populated areas
- To combine science-based knowledge with experience-based knowledge and help the decision makers to select relevant knowledge.
BuSK is mainly funded by The Northern Periphery and Arctic 2014-2020 Programme and coordinated by Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke). The three-year project began on 1th of March 2016 and it ends on 28th of February 2019.
