Cry me a river: building trust and maintaining legitimacy in environmental flows

O’Donnell, Erin; Horne, Avril; Godden, Lee; Head, Brian

doi:10.1080/13241583.2019.1586058

Cited by 18 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…This centralized decision making to a larger basin scale of governance. It was justified by an awareness of the environmental crises exacerbated by the millennium drought of 2002-2010 and led to increasingly technocratic solutions that in the region (Jackson and Head 2020), failed to give sufficient attention to local participation and community expectations for legitimacy (O'Donnell et al 2019).…”

Section: The Menindee Lakesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…First, we will discuss how insufficient consideration of the key issues of scale and ecological condition have comprised the effectiveness of the project. Second, we will discuss the administrative legitimacy of the project, which failed in terms of two important factors of adaptive governance (Esty 2006, Cosens and Williams 2012, O'Donnell et al 2019, i.e., objective expertise as the basis for decisions, and the inclusion of public dialogue (and therefore local knowledges) in decision-making processes.…”

Section: Discusssionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, the public's involvement in decision making relies on good engagement to draw on their knowledge, values, and perspectives for sound and rigorous outcomes (Arnstein 1969, Jackson 2019. This transparency and meaningful participation are important components of effectiveness and legitimacy within adaptive governance structures (Hogl et al 2012, O'Donnell et al 2019, and gaps in their implementation can exacerbate the challenges of achieving good governance in multijurisdictional and multiscale systems (Badenoch 2002, Akamani andWilson 2011). This can also reduce trust, exacerbating preexisting conflict among actors when there are competing viewpoints (Lien et al 2021).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Scale, evidence, and community participation matter: lessons in effective and legitimate adaptive governance from decision making for Menindee Lakes in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin

Ford¹,

Jackson²,

Bino³

et al. 2023

E&S

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Rivers and their interdependent human communities form social-ecologically complex systems that reflect basin scale functionally but are often governed by spatially mismatched governance systems. Accounting for this complexity requires flexible adaptive governance systems supported by legitimacy in decision-making processes. Meaningful community dialogue, information exchange, transparency, and scientific rigor are essential to this process. We examined failings in the adaptive governance of the Menindee Lakes system, a major Australian wetland system on the Barka/Darling River of the Murray-Darling Basin. Ecological sustainability of the Menindee Lakes was a casualty of a top-down governance, driven by the New South Wales Government in pursuit of "water savings" for the Murray-Darling Basin, a large scale, federally influenced region. We used quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze long-term social-ecological impacts and stakeholder perceptions of adaptive governance. State and federal government agencies failed basic processes of adaptive governance, ignoring local environmental sustainability in pursuit of basin scale objectives at great cost to governments, communities, humans, and non-humans. This resulted in the development of an ineffective, technocratic solution that lacked community input, leading to a complete loss of support by local communities, including traditional owners. We emphasize the importance of elements of scale in adaptive governance projects, if such projects are going to be effective and legitimate with consequences of coarse commitments to large spatial scale political and environmental objectives.

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Section: The Menindee Lakesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discusssionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Scale, evidence, and community participation matter: lessons in effective and legitimate adaptive governance from decision making for Menindee Lakes in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin

Ford¹,

Jackson²,

Bino³

et al. 2023

E&S

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In countries where federal and state institutions are responsible for e-flows governance, community participation is often mandated through legal instruments that may have a narrow, inflexible definition of engagement (Godden and Ison, 2019). Fostering legitimacy for e-flows programs and associated management is two pronged, requiring focus on both input and output legitimacy (Hogl et al, 2012;O'Donnell et al, 2019). E-flows programs have previously depended largely on building output-based legitimacy, defining their credibility based on the success and efficacy of their management programs as shown through scientific indicators.…”

Section: Fostering Program Legitimacymentioning

confidence: 99%

Purposeful Stakeholder Engagement for Improved Environmental Flow Outcomes

Mussehl

Horne

Webb

et al. 2022

Front. Environ. Sci.

Self Cite

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Rivers are dynamic social-ecological systems that support societies and ecosystems in a multitude of ways, giving rise to a variety of user groups and competing interests. Environmental flows (e-flows) programs developed to protect riverine environments are often conceived by water managers and researchers. This is despite continued calls for increased public participation to include local communities and Indigenous peoples in the development process. Failure to do so undermines social legitimacy and program effectiveness. In this paper, we describe how adaptive management of e-flows allows an opportunity to incorporate a diversity of stakeholder views through an iterative process. However, to achieve this, stakeholder engagement must be intentionally integrated into the adaptive management cycle. Stakeholder engagement in e-flows allows for the creation of a shared understanding of a river and opens collaborative and innovative management strategies that address multiple axes of uncertainty. Here, we describe a holistic framework that unifies current participatory engagement attempts and existing technical methods into a complete strategy. The framework identifies the primary steps in an e-flows adaptive management cycle, describes potential roles of various stakeholders, and proposes potential engagement tools. Restructuring e-flows methods to adequately include stakeholders requires a shift from being driven by deliverables, such as reports and flow recommendations, to focusing on people-oriented outcomes, such as continuous learning and fostering relationships. While our work has been placed in the context of e-flows, the intentional integration of stakeholder engagement in adaptive management is pertinent to natural resources management generally.

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“…This has often generated conflicting understandings of problems, driven by multiple bodies of expertise and knowledge on the same issues, which are embodied by diverse actors in society (see e.g., Arts et al 2017). Since the expansion of environmental movements in the 1970s and 1980s around conservation and environmental protection, the environmental policy domain has long been a prominent arena for the tension between these two trends (increased information availability and calls for participation) (e.g., O'Donnell et al 2019;Long 2019). However, the current digital age has rapidly exacerbated the availability of multiple, and at times contradictory, bodies of information.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What is Policy Analytics? An Exploration of 5 Years of Environmental Management Applications

Meinard

Barreteau

Boschet

et al. 2021

Environmental Management

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Our digital age is characterized by both a generalized access to data and an increased call for participation of the public and other stakeholders and communities in policy design and decision-making. This context raises new challenges for political decision-makers and analysts in providing these actors with new means and moral duties for decision support, including in the area of environmental policy. The concept of "policy analytics" was introduced in 2013 as an attempt to develop a framework, tools, and methods to address these challenges. This conceptual initiative prompted numerous research teams to develop empirical applications of this framework and to reflect on their own decision-support practice at the science-policy interface in various environmental domains around the world. During a workshop in Paris in 2018, participants shared and discussed their experiences of these applications and practices. In this paper, we present and analyze a set of applications to identify a series of key properties that underpin a policy analytics approach, in order to provide the conceptual foundation for policy analytics to address current policy design and decision-making challenges. The induced properties are demandorientedness, performativity, normative transparency, and data meaningfulness. We show how these properties materialized through these six case studies, and we explain why we consider them key to effective policy analytics applications, particularly in environmental policy design and decision-making on environmental issues. This clarification of the policy analytics concept eventually enables us to highlight research frontiers to further improve the concept.

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Cry me a river: building trust and maintaining legitimacy in environmental flows

Cited by 18 publications

References 25 publications

Scale, evidence, and community participation matter: lessons in effective and legitimate adaptive governance from decision making for Menindee Lakes in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin

Scale, evidence, and community participation matter: lessons in effective and legitimate adaptive governance from decision making for Menindee Lakes in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin

Purposeful Stakeholder Engagement for Improved Environmental Flow Outcomes

What is Policy Analytics? An Exploration of 5 Years of Environmental Management Applications

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