Developing Water Leaders as Catalysts for Change: The Nebraska Water Leaders Academy

Abstract

Managing water resources is increasingly complex and dynamic. Sustaining freshwater ecosystem services in the face of increasing challenges and emerging threats is a supreme leadership challenge. Leadership development program designers should look to social science theories and methods to prepare leaders to catalyze the change necessary to meet future challenges. This paper provides evidence that a new generation of water leaders is needed; and correspondingly, there is a need for new leadership development programs. The Nebraska Water Leaders Academy and its evaluation is presented as a case study of a successful program training leaders in social science‐based skills in order to produce catalysts of change. The Academy is theoretically grounded in transformational leadership, champions of innovation, civic capacity, and entrepreneurial leadership. The Academy employs a process‐based curriculum with developmental experiences that includes key components of assessment, challenge, and support. Formative assessment provides constructive feedback from participants and guides the development of future sessions and curriculum. Summative assessment is used to gauge participants’ leadership knowledge, skills, and behaviors, and evaluate the instructional methods used in the Academy. Results of pre‐ and post‐Academy assessments of participants from both the participants’ and raters’ perspectives indicate statistically significant increases in transformational leadership behaviors, champion of innovation behaviors, civic capacity, entrepreneurial leadership behavior, awareness of Nebraska water issues, and engagement with Nebraska water issues.

A Conceptual Framework for Social, Behavioral, and Environmental Change through Stakeholder Engagement in Water Resource Management

“…These factors include individual level characteristics, for instance, technical skills and capacities in assessing dimensions of environmental problems (Popa, Guillermin, and Dedeurwaerdere 2015). This also includes civic skills including willingness to learn (Knowles, Elwood, and Swanson 2011), the ability to listen to perspectives that may conflict with one's values, ability to effectively communicate one's own perspectives (Kearns 2012), emotional skills such as knowing and feeling how others experience a situation and responsiveness to other's needs (Goodin and Niemeyer 2003;Rodela 2014), leadership skills (Burbach and Reimers-Hild 2019), willingness to trust others (Popa, Guillermin, and Dedeurwaerdere 2015), and boundary spanning (i.e., linking to external sources of information) (Cash et al 2006). Beyond individual characteristics, this category of preexisting conditions also incorporates local context and historical relationships among stakeholders including (a) asymmetries in power, resources, and knowledge; (b) incentives and constraints on participation; and (c) the history of cooperation or conflict within particular locales (Ansell and Gash 2007).…”