ACTION RESEARCH FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF A NEGOTIATION SUPPORT TOOL TOWARDS DECENTRALISED WATER MANAGEMENT IN SOUTH AFRICA

In 1998 the South African government adopted water legislation that provides a new constitutional framework for water management. Economic efficiency, social equity, and environmental sustainability are the guiding criteria of the new South African water policy. Water management will be implemented through decentralized institutions (Catchment Management Agencies and Committees, Water Users Associations). These institutions will be in charge of local negotiations and the decision-making processes regarding resource allocation among stakeholders. The new water management institutions have the complex context characterized by inequalities, lack or asymmetry of information, and conflicting interests. Hence, a clear need for negotiation and decision support tools for these institutions is perceived. An action research project was initiated at the University of Pretoria in 2001. It has the main objective of supporting the sustainable establishment of decentralized water management institutions as negotiation and decision-making entities on water resource management at basin level. This paper describes and discusses the participatory approach, aimed at developing a negotiation support tool called Action-research and Watershed Analyses for Resource and Economic sustainability (AWARE). More precisely, the phases of development of the model in close collaboration with DWAF officers are analysed. The choice of involving different stakeholders at different stages of the process, and its possible consequences on the nature of the tool is discussed.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Bayesian participatory-based decision analysis : an evolutionary, adaptive formalism for integrated analysis of complex challenges to social-ecological system sustainability

Includes bibliographical references (pages. 379-400).This dissertation responds to the need for integration between researchers and decision-makers who are dealing with complex social-ecological system sustainability and decision-making challenges. To this end, we propose a new approach, called Bayesian Participatory-based Decision Analysis (BPDA), which makes use of graphical causal maps and Bayesian networks to facilitate integration at the appropriate scales and levels of descriptions. The BPDA approach is not a predictive approach, but rather, caters for a wide range of future scenarios in anticipation of the need to adapt to unforeseeable changes as they occur. We argue that the graphical causal models and Bayesian networks constitute an evolutionary, adaptive formalism for integrating research and decision-making for sustainable development. The approach was implemented in a number of different interdisciplinary case studies that were concerned with social-ecological system scale challenges and problems, culminating in a study where the approach was implemented with decision-makers in Government. This dissertation introduces the BPDA approach, and shows how the approach helps identify critical cross-scale and cross-sector linkages and sensitivities, and addresses critical requirements for understanding system resilience and adaptive capacity

Collaborative water-resource governance in the UK: Understanding network structure and functionality of a catchment-based approach to water-quality management

Since 2011 water resource governance in the UK has begun to integrate a collaborative multi-stakeholder approach to water-quality management. The Catchment-Based Approach (CaBA) facilitates local partnerships of stakeholders to co-create plans, align actions, and make collective decisions about efforts to improve and protect local river and stream environments. The approach offers potential for the enactment of effective, equitable and sustainable water management, but it is often unclear how such efforts are characterised practically. The multiplicity of stakeholders and complexity of issues and influences contribute to difficulty in discerning how governance change is functioning. This thesis uses a case study of the River Wear Catchment, North East England, where stakeholders have been operating CaBA, to begin to explore the patterns and drivers of actions and interactions that facilitate collaborative water-resource governance at the stakeholder level. Drawing on the concept of the catchment as a complex, social-environmental system, this research utilises insights from stakeholders and a combination of analytical methods, including a network approach and agent-based modelling, to provide new perspectives on the network structure and functioning of multi-stakeholder water management. A network approach is used to build a picture of interactions amongst stakeholders and to reveal the nature of the new relationships built through CaBA. Qualitative analysis of interview data identifies key influences on the decision-making of stakeholders and the functionality of new and existing networks of relations at three levels; the interactional, individual and contextual. Agent-based modelling is then used as a heuristic research tool to combine knowledge of relational structures with influences on stakeholder behaviour to experiment with potential dynamics of the system through a specific water-quality, problem-based scenario. The combination of these analytical methods allows a more in-depth and dynamic understanding of the patterns and processes of CaBA than has been revealed previously. The thesis ultimately comments on the utility of such methods for creating new understandings of the operationalisation of water governance processes, and for the utility of those new understandings to inform and question the facilitation of effective and satisfactory delivery of collaborative multi-stakeholder water-quality management at the catchment-scale