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How Wetlands’ Meanings and Participation in Their Management are Linked: Case Studies of Lough Boora Park (Ireland) and Bendimahi Delta (Türkiye)

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Abstract

Despite their potential benefits for participatory wetland management, wetland meanings have not been taken into account in this process. Furthermore, it is still unclear how these meanings develop through wetland-human interactions and how they interrelate in different contexts. This research aims to narrow this gap by exploring and comparing the meanings of a cutaway bog in Ireland and a deltaic floodplain in Turkey through a comparative qualitative case study methodology based on the interpretive phenomenological approach (IPA). Data were collected through semi-structured, face to face interviews with 18 local respondents and analysed using content and discourse analyses based on deductive and inductive coding techniques. The findings revealed that physical and socio-cultural landscape features, landscape experiences, place meanings at all layers, and participation in management were all mutually influential in the case wetlands. The meanings of Lough Boora (Ireland) highlight the importance of landscape change and collective action with a shared vision in the transformation of community links with landscape and place meanings. It is concluded that identity expressive and socio-cultural meanings, as important antecedents and predictors of attitudes towards participation, have potentials to inform about the issues and opportunities for participation in decision-making for wetland landscapes. Accordingly, wetland meanings should be considered from the early management planning stages to improve the inclusiveness of plans. While strengthening relationships between wetland stakeholders through context-relevant, participatory activities appear as a key strategy to increase the inclusiveness of management, improving wetlands’ meanings through enhancement of the environmental and recreation-tourism infrastructure appears to be another.

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Data Availability

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

The interviewees and Conor Newman, Senior Lecturer from the Archaeology Department at the University of Galway (IE) who supervised the research and the field study, deserve special thanks. Their support made this research possible. I would also like to express my sincere thanks to the anonymous reviewers and Prof. Dr. Felix Kienast whose insightful comments improved the previous version of this paper.

Funding

The author received research funding for the field research from the “Moore Institute–Visiting Researcher Programme” of the National University of Galway-Ireland in 2018. This funding was used to carry out the on-site, face to face interviews in Offaly (IE) with the stakeholder representatives of the Lough Boora landscape as well as with the researchers who work about the research area and topic in Irish universities.

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  1. Faculty of Architecture, Department of Landscape Architecture, Trakya University, Edirne, Türkiye

    Emel Baylan

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All the study stages from conception and design, material preparation, data collection, and analysis were performed by Dr. Emel Baylan. All the parts of the first draft of the manuscript were written by Dr. Emel Baylan.

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Correspondence to Emel Baylan.

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Baylan, E. How Wetlands’ Meanings and Participation in Their Management are Linked: Case Studies of Lough Boora Park (Ireland) and Bendimahi Delta (Türkiye). Wetlands 43, 77 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13157-023-01724-0

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