On the second day of this symposium, Professor Marie Harder talked on “Articulation of Local Shared Values Creates a Portal for Bottom-Up Input into Multi-Scale Governance”, sharing insights on bridging the gap between the voices of local communities and the needs of policymakers.

Firstly, she said that policymakers in areas such as infrastructure, health, and sustainable development actively seek contribution from ordinary people. Such contribution can make policies not only more suitable but also more broadly recognized and effective on practical grounds. However, Prof. Harder highlighted that a major challenge is: “There is a huge gap between the scientific indicators used by experts and the informal ways local people express what matters to them.”

Further, Prof. Harder suggested that the present participatory methods may not yield top results since they simplify top-down technical concepts for communities and expect them to respond in the same language. This hardly works, as local and external ways of thinking can be primarily poles apart.

To meet with this well-known but unsolved challenge, Prof. Harder presented an innovative approach that considers “local knowledge” as tacit and deeply rooted in lived experience. In this method, community groups are channeled through a specialized process of “accelerated meaning-making in their shared-tacit zone.” The outcome is a set of clearly articulated statements of shared local values, along with a narrative which shows how these values are linked to each other. “These statements act as authentic, face-valid proto-indicators,” Prof. Harder said. “They can be utilized as decision-support tools which ensure that the priorities of local communities are not lost in translation,” Prof. Harder added.

Lastly, Prof. Harder emphasized that this approach is not about substituting present top-down frameworks. But, it is aimed to support them by providing a grounded interface for local values to be meaningfully incorporated.