This was a good news and start into the New Year for the Chair for Strategic Landscape Planning and Management: MSc graduate Dayana Ramirez Gutierrez has been awarded this year’s SRM AWARD 2019 for her Master’s Thesis „Stakeholder Knowledge Mapping: Comprehensive Review of the Concept and Application for Stakeholder Participation“. The Award has been issued by the AUDI Foundation for Environment in 2010 for promoting special achievements in the field of sustainable resource management. It honours graduates of the Master’s Program “Sustainable Resource Management” of TUM for outstanding master’s theses´ results with a prize of EUR 1.500,00.
On occasion of the Awarding Ceremony, which took place at TUM on 28th January, 2020, the graduate’s excellent work was honoured by Prof. Dr. Klaus Richter (Study Program Director Forest Sciences and Resource Management, TUM), Dr. Rüdiger Recknagel (Audi Foundation for Environment), Dr. Thomas Knoke (Head of the Master’s Program Sustainable Resource Management, TUM) and Dr. Isabel Augenstein (Laudatio and Supervisor of the Master’s Thesis, TUM), whilst acknowledging the priority meaning of a Sustainable Resource Management on the background of the urging global challenges being in place.
The Master's Thesis was issued under the supervision of Dr. Isabel Augenstein and Dipl. Geogr. Sandra Fohlmeister in the context of the EU-funded research project PHUSICOS, which aims to advance the development and acceptance of nature-based solutions to adapt to climate change in rural Europe by actively involving the relevant actors in a Living Lab approach. For enabling the targeted design of a toolbox, which is meant to support the collaborative development of nature-based solutions in the Living Labs, it was first necessary to clarify the undefined concept "Stakeholder Knowledge Mapping".
With her Master’s Thesis, Dayana Ramirez Gutierrez has made a significant contribution towards a more rigorous understanding of SKM, a term and concept that recently popped up in the academic debate, still lacking a fundamental theoretical underpinning. Based on an extensive systematic literature review, she traced potential origins of using visualisations to capture and represent the (tacit) knowledge of individuals, social groups and organisations, and researched related concepts. Through skilled analysis and thoughtful interpretations of the results, she did not only manage to propose a definition of SKM but also to recommend a transferable framework to operationalise SKM. Nearly from scratch, Dayana Ramirez Gutierrez has established a coherent and plausible construct of ideas by connecting information from various thematic fields and disciplines. To complete the picture, the thesis portrays potential tools for the application of SKM and summarises experiences hitherto made to shed light on the strengths and limitations of these techniques. The findings also have important theoretical implications, by informing some of the challenges associated with stakeholder involvement and the integration of local knowledge in environmental planning and decision-making processes.
(News article: I. Augenstein & S. Fohlmeister)