Advancing Collaborative Water Governance: Unravelling Stakeholders’ Relationships and Influences in Contentious River Basins

Abstract

Collaborative water governance (CWG) has emerged as a promising framework to tackle water management challenges. Simple identification of participants however is not enough to unravel the intricacies of stakeholders’ interlinkages, roles and influences for robust CWG. A clear understanding of the stakeholders’ landscape is therefore required to underpin CWG. In this work, we combine stakeholder analysis (SA), social network analysis (SNA) and participatory processes (PP) under a theoretical collaborative governance framework to advance CWG in the contentious Rapel River Basin (RRB), Chile. By combining these techniques, we identified a cohort of leading (and secondary) stakeholders, their relationships and critical roles on basin-wide CWG-enabling networks (collaborative ties, information flows and financial exchanges) and their influence to achieve a shared vision for water planning. The results show members of this cohort perform critical roles (bridging, connecting and gatekeeping) across the networks and in influencing explicit elements of the shared vision. Specific CWG-enabling networks properties indicate a weak adaptive capacity of stakeholders to deal with potential water management challenges and strong prospects for sharing innovative ideas/solutions and achieving long-term water planning goals. A major CWG implementation challenge in the RRB is the lack of a leading organisation. One way forward would be formally organising stakeholders of the identified cohort to advance CWG in the RRB. By implementing the methodological framework, we facilitated social learning, fostered trust among stakeholders and mobilised efforts towards implementing CWG in practice in the contentious RRB.

Improving governance outcomes for water quality: Insights from participatory social network analysis for chalk stream catchments in England

“…There has been increasing use of social network analysis (SNA) to empirically study the formal and informal relationships between actors in natural resource governance, and how they are associated with governance processes and outcomes (Crona & Bodin, 2010; Sandström & Rova, 2010; Ward et al, 2020). SNA has been used to examine the aspects of water governance in a range of contexts, including understanding the networks of resilience communication for the UK water sector (Ward et al, 2020); institutional transitions in the Klamath river basin, United States (Chaffin et al, 2016); governance arrangements in the Mkindo catchment, Tanzania (Stein et al, 2011); formal and informal networks in urban water management in Indonesia (Larson et al, 2013); collaborative governance for floodplain management in The Netherlands (Fliervoet et al, 2015); and stakeholder networks underpinning collaborative water governance in Chile (Rojas et al, 2020). SNA has been successfully used in these studies to evaluate transitions to sustainable modes of governance (Chaffin et al, 2016), identify problems with water governance arrangements, for example, inadequate adaptive capacity (Rojas et al, 2020) and pinpoint interventions to improve water governance (Stein et al, 2011).…”

“…Participatory social network analysis is increasingly used to coproduce network knowledge (Hauck et al, 2015). For example, Rojas et al (2020) combined SNA with a broader participatory process to understand collaborative water governance in Chile, but the participatory process was not specifically linked to the SNA, which limits the conclusions of the SNA. Likewise, Ward et al (2020) used a participatory approach to explore resilience communication in the UK water sector; they provided advanced quantitative analysis but did not present or analyse any qualitative data from their participatory workshop.…”

Cultural Values in Water Management and Governance: Where Do We Stand?

“…In contrast, water governance is defined as "the set of rules, practices and processes (formal and informal) through which decisions for the management of water resources and services are taken, implemented, stakeholders articulate their interest, and decision-makers are Water 2022, 14, 803 2 of 22 held accountable" [14]. This definition therefore makes water governance seemingly more amenable to collective and collaborative decision-making processes [15].…”

When Collaborative Water Governance Meets Authoritarian Environmentalism: The Dilemma of Safe Water Supply Project in Coal Mining Villages of China’s Shanxi Province

“…It is also a crisis of governance. This is why it has been identified as one of the highest global risks [5]. Water is generally perceived as a public good.…”

“…Relevant actors in CWG are typically held together by guidelines, plans and non-binding agreements. Advocates of the CWG approach believe that engaging multiple actors across different levels of government and between the public and the private sectors as well as the participation and cooperation of various stakeholders are essential for opening up decision making related to water governance and bringing local knowledge back in, all of which is expected to yield a higher degree of policy legitimacy and more effective environmental governance [5]. Correspondingly, since the 1980s good governance of water resources has increasingly been linked to institutions and laws that more effectively engage local actors and are more attuned to local ecosystems [9].…”