Co-designing Possible Flooding Solutions : Participatory Mapping Methods to Identify Flood Management Options from a UK Borders Case Study

This paper reports on the findings developed by a funded project within the UK Rural Economy and Land Use Programme: ‘Managing borderlands: adaptive decision making amongst specialists and non-specialists’. The project focuses specifically on the development of a nested-scale participatory GIS (PGIS) method to identify spatially local perceptions and experiential knowledge of the risk and vulnerability of two catchments in the Scottish–English Borders. The method attempts to move beyond mapping risk towards the co-design of possible solutions. This will highlight the potential for improved inclusion of local perspectives on risk afforded by using PGIS mapping approaches in the UK context. The potential of the approach to generate co-designed community preferences leading to more resilient solutions (particularly in terms of social and economic consequences) to environmental change will also be discussed.