Evaluating participation in water resource management: A review

Abstract

.[1] Key documents such as the European Water Framework Directive and the U.S. Clean Water Act state that public and stakeholder participation in water resource management is required. Participation aims to enhance resource management and involve individuals and groups in a democratic way. Evaluation of participatory programs and projects is necessary to assess whether these objectives are being achieved and to identify how participatory programs and projects can be improved. The different methods of evaluation can be classified into three groups: (i) process evaluation assesses the quality of participation process, for example, whether it is legitimate and promotes equal power between participants, (ii) intermediary outcome evaluation assesses the achievement of mainly nontangible outcomes, such as trust and communication, as well as short-to medium-term tangible outcomes, such as agreements and institutional change, and (iii) resource management outcome evaluation assesses the achievement of changes in resource management, such as water quality improvements. Process evaluation forms a major component of the literature but can rarely indicate whether a participation program improves water resource management. Resource management outcome evaluation is challenging because resource changes often emerge beyond the typical period covered by the evaluation and because changes cannot always be clearly related to participation activities. Intermediary outcome evaluation has been given less attention than process evaluation but can identify some real achievements and side benefits that emerge through participation. This review suggests that intermediary outcome evaluation should play a more important role in evaluating participation in water resource management.

Developing a dynamic framework to examine the interplay between environmental stress, stakeholder participation processes and hydrological systems

“…This reveals that facilitation, inclusion of participant knowledge and dialogue are critical process factors. Many researchers have highlighted the importance of facilitation to participatory processes (see Carr et al 2012) and this research supports the need to emphasise to those running participation programmes that a well facilitated process is critical. Inclusion of participant knowledge is less commonly identified in the literature as an important process factor but this work suggests it is also essential for achieving intermediary outcomes.…”

“…Using a detailed literature review approach of how participation programmes and projects have been evaluated by researchers (Carr et al 2012), a framework has been developed for this research that captures and links together five aspects of stakeholder involvement (Fig. 1).…”

Stakeholder Engagement and Knowledge Co-Creation in Water Planning: Can Public Participation Increase Cost-Effectiveness?

“…Koontz and Newig [41] state that based on evidence, participation input in Germany may have very little impact on the shaping of RBMPs and PoMs. The relationship between public participation and different outputs and outcomes obviously needs to be better understood and evaluated, as consistently emphasized in research [37,[42][43][44][45][46][47][48].…”

Outlining an ‘Evaluation Continuum’: Structuring Evaluation Methodologies for Infrastructure-Related Decision Making Tools

“…In particular, when a blackout causes energy to become a scarce resource, water management methods can be considered. Specifically, it was suggested [5] that water resource management particularly concerns the following features:…”