In 2024, the province of British Columbia (BC) released the BC Coastal Marine Strategy, a first-of-its-kind strategy co-developed with several First Nation communities (Government of British Columbia, 2024). Engaging with residents, community members, and users of these spaces has become central to understanding the place-based issues that occur. As part of the strategy to inform governance, spatial mapping has been identified as a key component to advance integrated and balanced management (Government of British Columbia, 2024, p. 58).

 

Despite clear evidence that human wellbeing is both deeply place-based and increasingly recognized in environmental management agendas, dominant geospatial representations (such as remote sensing, GIS) often fail to represent lived wellbeing or plural ways of knowing (Foley, 2020). Understanding how perceptions of wellbeing vary within and between communities, and how to address these diverse needs in coastal planning, is one of the key gaps that exist within this strategy.

 

Conventional forms of engagement have been observed through top-down reflections of the landscape based on static processes; however, these dynamic environments are constantly changing. As such, there is a need to critically engage with who is represented, how knowledge is produced, whose interests coastal mapping serves, and in what ways these forms of knowledge are being represented.