In this module, you'll learn about the process of stakeholder engagement for strategic planning for water management, and upon completion, you should be able to:
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One technique is the future workshop process developed by Robert Jungk, (pronounce Junk) which supports stakeholders in developing new solutions by way of creative decision-making.
This technique includes four phases:
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The stakeholder in the strategic planning process is led through different phases of engagement.
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Often, local government agencies (in particular, higher-level strategic departments) act as coordinators of stakeholder engagement processes. They hold the mandate to ensure the well-being of the community, foster collaboration with other internal or external partners, have some decision-making power, and emphasize the commitment of the local government.
Other possible coordinators are universities, playing a role as honest and independent brokers.
Regardless of government or academic affiliation, the responsibility of the coordinator is to convince and inspire stakeholders to join the process and serve as a liaison between the internal stakeholders, such as local government agencies, utilities, and local councils, and external stakeholders.
Coordinators ensure the coherence of the stakeholder engagement process and its results with other local or regional strategies and policies, including the development of the terms of references within the process, the planning of a budget, and the hiring and management of a facilitator.
For IUWM, these are the stakeholders which are involved, affected by, or interested in the field of urban water management, considering the whole urban water cycle (including upstream and downstream users). Similarly, for IWRM, the stakeholders on catchment scale should be considered.
Stakeholders can be categorized as:
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Primary stakeholders include those who are directly affected, positively or negatively, by water management strategies.
Secondary stakeholders are those who have an intermediary stake or interest in water management.
Stakeholder analysis should be part of the scoping process at the very beginning of the process. This is important because besides the obvious stakeholders (such as water utilities managers) there are also stakeholders who might only be identified in this more detailed analysis. Since leaving out stakeholders can have an adverse effect on the whole stakeholder engagement process, the identification of the right stakeholders is of critical importance.
Stakeholder analysis can start with a list of stakeholders developed in a short scoping exercise. With proper research, this initial list is then expanded to capture all relevant key, primary, and secondary stakeholders. In addition, the background of each stakeholder should be explored.
Guiding questions for this analysis are:
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The initial stakeholder process should focus particularly on stakeholders with high influence and high importance. Existing stakeholders may provide different perspectives and knowledge about additional stakeholders and help to develop a more complete picture.
If so, the new and existing stakeholder engagement processes should be coordinated closely or merged to enable the groups to capitalize on the existing experiences and structures.
Finally, the list of stakeholders is used to invite the initial set of stakeholders. For an informal process, it could be sufficient to directly contact selected representatives of stakeholders, which would participate on a more individual basis without any major rights or duties. A more formal stakeholder engagement process involves contacting senior representatives of the stakeholders and asking them to nominate an official representative in the process. This would include a more formal commitment to the course and the outcomes of the engagement process.
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Ensuring early outputs and highlighting success: If the stakeholder engagement process only consists of meetings and discussions, stakeholders may become disappointed because of the (perceived) lack of progress. To avoid this, have some early and tangible results (such as demonstrations projects) before the actual strategic plan is completed, so that the stakeholders can see that their efforts will be successful and will result in tangible changes. Small, but tangible, milestones can maintain a sense of progress among participants.
Raising the profile of stakeholders: A public recognition should be provided to all stakeholders who are willing to spend their time and resources.
Building consensus: Decisions such as the development of a joint vision or objectives should be made in consensus between the different stakeholders, not just in a majority vote. To achieve a compromise, the facilitator must provide transparency regarding each stakeholder’s interests, in order to maintain trust and mutual respect. The discussion and negotiation process should focus on common needs, rather than the interest of single stakeholder, Stakeholders must be willing to compromise, while at the same time, the consensus should be more than the least common denominator.
Employing conflict mediation: Manage conflicts constructively to overcome barriers.
This is done during the rapid assessment phase, where required information for carrying out subsequent phases of the planning process is collected.
Topics to be covered in the rapid assessment should include:
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Step 1: Identifying and agreeing on objectives
Step 2: Identifying availability and quality of sources
Step 3: Performing a rapid assessment
Step 4: Compiling an information base
Step 3 is the performance of the rapid assessment. This should include questions such as: What is the quantity and quality of the water resources? What are the conditions of the main elements of the water infrastructure? Who are the different water users?
Finally, Step 4 is compiling an information base taken from the results of the assessment. The results should be presented in a form that can be easily understood by all stakeholders. The ultimate purpose of this information base is to serve as a foundation where all stakeholders have access to the same information.
A visioning exercise is particularly suitable for stakeholder engagement processes as it provides the opportunity for the stakeholders to exchange and discuss views and opinions. It encourages them to look beyond the day-to-day problems and challenges and provides a productive atmosphere for considering what might be achieved in the future. Without early agreement on a common goal, there is the danger that the stakeholders will continue to follow their own narrow - and often conflicting - agendas. Only if these narrow agendas are overcome and a common vision of the desired future of water management on catchment or city scale is agreed upon, is it possible to achieve strategies for IWRM or IUWM.
Agreeing on the scope of the vision, such as the area of interest and timeframe
Reviewing existing visions and taking them into consideration for the development of the new vision
Setting the scene: Having “scene-setting” presentations from experts to promote certain issues provides background knowledge and guides the discussion. Just be sure that the visioning exercise isn’t dominated by the experts, but by the stakeholders, to ensure the ownership of the vision.
Identifying and prioritizing the main issues: Based on the rapid assessment, these should include issues that are directly related to water management (such as water demand and climate change) as well as indirectly linked issues (such as economic growth and energy costs).
Defining objectives: Describing the desired change of the water management strategy and developing indicators that reflect progress towards those objectives to strengthen the vision.
Developing a vision: Visions should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timebound (SMART) using a mix of descriptive narratives supported by numerical objectives. An agreement on the draft of the vision should be achieved and an outline of the vision should then be developed. The vision provides an overview of the intended future state, while the detailed required changes are described in the objectives.
The goal of scenario planning is to identify strategies about how the vision for the water sector can be achieved in spite of uncertainties. This also helps stakeholders to identify the uncertainties within their particular operation and those outside of their direct control. As the uncertainties cannot be eliminated, scenario planning helps them to identify these uncertainties and develop strategies to cope with them. As stated by Batchelor & Butterworth, “Scenario building is not about knowing the future, it is about trying to minimize the chances of being seriously wrong.”
This entails presenting a scenario planning approach that focuses on how stakeholders perceive future drivers and trends by combining different information, views, and opinions.
Scenarios should be developed in a participatory process with a wide range of stakeholders to prevent a situation where certain future drivers and factors from outside the core sector are overlooked. This scenario-planning process can be supported by informed judgments and advice from experts, but should not be dominated by them.
The scenario-planning approach includes the following steps:
Step 1: System Analysis
Step 2: Future Drivers
Step 3: Future Trends
Step 4: Scenario Storylines
Step 1, System analysis, involves analyzing the water system and its input and output factors. This step is supported by rapid water assessment.
Step 2, Future drivers, is based on the results from the system analysis, involves identifying future drivers that might affect the future performance of water systems and the success of the vision. One example of a guiding question to initiate this process is to consider all factors and drivers that had a bearing on the success or failure of previous projects. The drivers could be clustered into local and external factors. Local drivers are in the control of the stakeholders themselves, while the external drivers are outside their control (such as climate change, general urban development trends, and global economic trends).
Drivers should be ranked according to their importance for the system performance as well as the associated future uncertainties. The scenarios should be focused on the more important, more uncertain drivers.
Step 3, Future trends, involves identifying the expected range of future trends and resulting states. The results of the trends should be the realistic upper and lower limits of future states for these drivers in a certain time in future. Discussions should include existing future predictions and statistical analysis, as well as stakeholder’s expert opinions. The trend analysis should balance the consideration of the lessons learned from early projects and the recognition that the future rarely resembles the past.
Finally, in this step, Scenario storylines combine different future drivers and their developmental tendencies into coherent future scenarios. Within the range of possible future tendencies, choose a limited number of relevant developments and combinations of the important future drivers and trends. All scenarios should be internally consistent and equally valid. The selection is supported by ”scenario storylines,” which represent a coherent combination of future developments that include an understanding of the interactions within the system. These scenario storylines describe the logic of each of the scenarios and should provide a memorable name to represent them. As a result of the analysis, the future uncertainties of urban water systems are presented in coherent future scenarios.
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To complete this process in a participatory way, either the stakeholders should be informed by preliminary assessment results or the strategy development should include two meetings, one selecting a possible range of components and the other making the final decision based on the assessment results. The components could include a wide range of integrated water management strategies and technologies. A technology selection tool may support the selection of appropriate strategies.
In addition, the strategic components and the performance and costs of the different strategic components and their risks, in relation to the different future scenarios, should be analyzed. Additionally, one must ensure that the combination of the different strategic components is coherent. Modeling tools, such as the integrated water balance tool, supports this assessment.
Based on the strategy chosen, an action plan is developed in order to implement the activities. The action plan ensures that activities of the action plan are mainstreamed into the work of the different departments responsible for implementation. The purpose of this step is about converting the strategic components into a set of implementable actions. The responsible departments have to be closely involved, in order to mainstream the strategy into implementation programs. As part of this process, the actions to be implemented are prioritized and a time frame for implementation is developed. In addition, the required budgets, staff, and timelines have to be allocated.
Projects have a theory of change; a description of how the different deliverables of the project will lead to the intended outcomes as described by the objective.
The monitoring and evaluation process has to be supported by process documentation, which considers the change process achieved by the stakeholder process and tracks how this change has happened. Process documentation serves as the project memory so that events and steps can be understood in retrospect. Often, the terms “monitoring” and “evaluation” are used interchangeably; however, there are significant differences between them.
Monitoring is the on-going assessment of the progress of a project in relation to its work plan. It’s an internal management process that keeps track of whether the stakeholder engagement process is making progress, identifies shortcomings of the process, and prevents the waste of resources. It considers the actual implementation of the stakeholder engagement process in order to improve the management of the project and to take remedial action or to update plans. It also supports those coordinating and managing the stakeholder engagement process to better understand the actual course of the project. The core reason for monitoring is to assess whether the project deliverables are completed on time and to a desirable quality. In addition, it looks at whether external changes make it necessary to adjust the project design of the stakeholder engagement process.
Evaluation is a long-term assessment, which is often done after the completion of the stakeholder engagement process, in order to determine the impacts that were actually achieved by the program and how sustainable the results are likely to be.
While monitoring is focused on the project outputs/ deliverables, evaluation is more focused on whether the project goals (described by the vision) are achieved.
Evaluation is often done by external agencies and supported by the results of the process documentation. The process documentation should serve for reflections about what worked well, and about what did not work successfully. The evaluation provides accountability to the stakeholders about the program success, and the results of the evaluation should be shared with the core stakeholders, to allow for their review about whether the objectives of the process are being met. In addition, it provides lessons-learned and recommendations for the improvement of future projects. Therefore, it documents the barriers during the process that have to be overcome in order to achieve successful changes.
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Activities are the actual activities undertaken in the stakeholder process. They are tangible and easy to monitor.
Outputs are the tangible outcomes of the different process steps and are often equivalent with the deliverables. They are the activities and results that the project coordinators have committed to. These deliverables are easy to measure; the indicator would be the completion of the deliverables in time and with sufficient quality. At this point, it is determined whether the deliverable, such as the vision, scenarios, or strategy, is complete. In addition, the uncertainties in relation to the completion of these deliverables should be described. It is assumed that if outputs are successfully completed, the intended outcomes are achieved.
Outcomes are the short- to medium-term changes in the activities and behaviors of the partners in the stakeholder engagement process (in relation to the project objective of improving urban water management) which can be linked to project activities. In particular, it focuses on how the project outputs (deliverables) have resulted in a change. The outcomes can be described by performance indicators, which do not look only at the delivery of an activity but at the actual change in the performance of the water system (or at least the performance of the stakeholder engagement process). The uncertainties pertaining to how the outputs result in the intended outcomes should be specified, so that they can be monitored in detail.
Goals are the ultimate long-term effects caused by the stakeholder engagement process. They describe how the outputs and outcomes have resulted in the final objective of the process. While the evaluation process is focused on the positive and intended impacts, the negative and unintended long-term effects should also be considered. Typical long-term effects may include the performance of the city’s water management and the subsequent improved environment described by performance indicators, such as access to water, or improved collaboration between stakeholders, within the city.