Aquaculture Lease Hearing Analysis

Project Description

The project’s goal is to measure and explain historical variations in social acceptance of and conflict over aquaculture as a means of understanding social carrying capacity and social sustainability of the social-ecological system. The main data source is the Department of Marine Resources (DMR) lease hearing documents, which provide an overview of hearing testimonies. Project personnel collected these documents from DMR and coded them for content using NVivo11 software. The process and software allowed researchers to create a measure of conflict (or lack thereof) in each hearing. After an initial round of coding covering all documents, project personnel presented preliminary findings to key stakeholders and obtained advice on additional coding.

After re-coding all hearing documents, quantitative differences in conflicts levels and types of conflict between regions were analyzed. US Census Bureau data were employed to compare conflict levels to community characteristics, particularly those related to economic development, population trends, and rural gentrification. Stakeholder interviews conducted by Theme 4 provided background and context for the regions to help contextualize the results from the analysis. This project contributes understanding about the governance systems and social carrying capacity.

Results and Accomplishments

This project contributed data to two papers in 2017-2018 and contributed a measure of conflicts as a part of an assessment of social capacity to the overall SES research.

Summary of Data Being Collected

Data	Type	Quantity	Location
Aquaculture lease hearing transcripts	Qualitative	263	Coast Wide