What Influences Participation in Coastal Governance? Exploring the Impact of Political Identity and Trust

Coastal areas face multidimensional challenges that require participatory, community-driven planning processes to address. Public participation in decision-making is shaped by identity-based and attitudinal factors, including social identity and trust in management entities. Political identity is increasingly recognized as a social identity impacting public trust in government, science, and management approaches. However, little information is known about how political identity impacts participation in coastal governance. We investigated the relationships between political identity, trust, and participation in state-level decision-making processes using an online survey panel of North Carolina residents (N = 1200). Political identity shaped concerns and priorities for coastal management, trust in management entities, and information sources about coastal issues, but did not impact participation in decision-making. Participation in decision-making was positively correlated to trust in management entities and household income and was inversely correlated to age and female gender, meaning that participants were likely to be younger, higher-income, male, and trusting of management entities. These findings can be leveraged to navigate identity-based divisions in coastal communities and bolster public participation in decision-making processes, especially amid the heightened political polarization of environmental and scientific issues that has followed the COVID-19 pandemic.