Sustainable Coastal Science-Policy-Practice Interface Development: Municipal Coastal Governance Indicator System

Abstract: Coastal research-and-development studies conducted in Latvia do provide clear conclusions that local coastal stakeholders are neither satisfactory informed and knowlegable of their municipal coastal situations and nor aware of problemsolving developments. Looking for multi-stakeholder cross-sectoral and cross-level coastal problem complex governance solutions, first of all shall be done the integration of coastal nature science research results with those of social science research, both having mandatory/important part of citizens science local contribution also, in order to create nature-social science interaction and complementarity understanding for its eventual implementation into municipal integrated coastal management (ICM) agenda setting-planning-implementation, particularly according to the framework of national-local coastal area classification system initial necessary development. Further on for the complex municipal ICM development requested nature-social science interaction results could be transformed into local level science-policy-practice interface process and content development being based on structural design of first time local municipal coastal monitoring system in Latvia as well as complemented by municipal coastal indicator system. Local municipal indicator system simultaneously provides input both, for the municipality ICM and the assessment and achievement of municipal strategic development goals. Assessment of indicator values is carried out by local municipality based on precisely elaborated system of algorithms, assuming active implementation of citizen science principle, external experts can be contracted initially while starting the system and only upon specific necessity later on. System is supplemented by external indicators that can be referred to local territory.