Democracy's Wild Side: Using LocalView to Understand Municipal Council Discourse on Wildlife
Loading...
Authors
Payette, Ashley
Issue Date
2024
Type
Poster
Language
en_US
Keywords
Sustainability , Wildlife , City Council , Local Government
Alternative Title
Abstract
This project emerged as a culmination between Dr. Johnson’s and my interests. Dr. Johnson wanted to explore how city councils operate, whereas I was intrigued by how they engage with wildlife. We combined these ideas to create the question for this research project: How do city councils address wildlife? The purpose of this project is to understand the way in which issues regarding wildlife – and more generally sustainability – are discussed on the local government level by city councils, including what issues are most pressing and how cities implement solutions. As we approached this topic, we began with literature review. We explored efforts that municipalities across the globe have made to address environmental and sustainability concerns. We then moved to analyzing local government city council meeting agendas, organizing them by topics of interest. Next, we created a list of key words that we predicted would appear in the agendas, referencing our literature review and the topics that cities seem most likely to address in relation to wildlife. We are interested in discovering how often cities address sustainability issues, if at all, and what actions they take, if any. We are currently in the process of collecting and analyzing this data. We hope this data can be used to understand the process by which wildlife regulation and sustainability is implemented in order to improve the way that city councils approach this topic.