Social Impacts Research for Marine Protected Areas and Priority Marine Features Management in Scottish Waters

Appendix 1.0 The social value conceptual framework and the socio-impact assessment

Research for Marine Directorate on the social impact of offshore renewables^[44] provided the framework for identifying clusters of social values (henceforth social value clusters) through conversations with communities in a range of coastal locations.

The research on the social impact of offshore renewables involved dialogue in group sessions involving residents in six coastal locations. The social value clusters were identified as things (both tangible things like buildings, industries, habitats or infrastructure, and intangible things like relationships, social networks and culture) that are important to people’s daily lives and that could be affected by marine management measures or developments, such as offshore renewables. The social value clusters together with the range of evidence of how they are experienced in daily life, constitute key elements of the conceptual framework on social values.

We used the methodology to identify social values clusters from the research on the impact of offshore renewables, to explore the topics and values that were expressed by local community stakeholders during the MPA and PMF social impacts research engagement. We applied the qualitative and mixed methods research software Dedoose^[45] to excerpt, code and analyse the information obtained from the engagement events. This allowed us to synthesise the data as a set of high-level themes.

Because the MPA and PMF social impacts research relates to the introduction of fisheries management measures, fishing was a core theme that emerged as both an economic activity and an activity around which communities and cultural identities coalesce, and the social values that were mentioned most frequently across the six locations were livelihoods and community and culture.

We compared the themes emerging from the MPA and PMF social impacts research with the social values clusters identified in the earlier research on the impacts of offshore renewables, to test the comprehensiveness of the social values obtained. We found a high level of consistency between the social values clusters framework and the key themes emerging from the SEIA participation, as shown in Table 3.