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

Abstract

Abstract:In 2014, a radical shift took place in Danish water planning. Following years of a top-down water planning approach, 23 regional water councils were established to co-create and provide input to Danish authorities on the development of River Basin Management Plans (RBMP). The water councils advised local authorities on the application of measures to improve the physical conditions in Danish streams within a given economic frame. The paper shows the difference the use of water councils (public participation) made by comparing the final water council proposal included in the 2015 RBMP to the RBMPs proposed by the central government (Nature Agency) in 2014. The study concludes that the measures proposed by the water councils will generally deliver better results than the proposed Nature Agency plans, which do not include the same level of participation. Specifically, the water councils with stakeholder involvement proposed a much longer network of streams (3800 km), yielding a better ecological outcome than the shorter stream network (1615 km) proposed by the Nature Agency for the same budget. Having a structured and fixed institutional frame around public participation (top-down meeting bottom-up) can produce cost-effective results, but the results show that cost-effectiveness was not the only deciding factor, and that local circumstances like the practicalities of implementing the measures were also considered when developing the Programmes of Measures. The findings suggest that the use of water councils in water planning has significant advantages, including the fact that the knowledge of local conditions helps to identify efficient solutions at lower costs, which can be useful for administrators, policy-makers, and other stakeholders implementing the Water Framework Directive in years to come.

Towards More Effective Water Quality Governance: A Review of Social-Economic, Legal and Ecological Perspectives and Their Interactions

“…The issues identified in this study: who to involve, the added value of increased trust, the appropriate scale at which to address issues and the difficulty of identifying a common interest have been raised by other authors in regard to other countries and regions too [19,21,22,[53][54][55][56]. Several authors report that stakeholder involvement can result in more efficient programmes of measures [21,54], but not in all cases [57]. As the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) (2014) explains, a party has to have a specific interest at stake if it is to become engaged.…”

“…In this context, governance is defined as a process of interaction between public and/or private actors ultimately aiming at the realisation of collective goals [18]. The challenges set by these multi-actor, multi-level governance approaches have been described extensively in literature (e.g., [12,13,[19][20][21]).…”

Opportunities and Barriers for Water Co-Governance—A Critical Analysis of Seven Cases of Diffuse Water Pollution from Agriculture in Europe, Australia and North America

“…Evidence from this water council process documents that there is an opportunity for more water co-governance in Denmark and that many local stakeholders are keenly interested in being actively involved in the decision-making process and implementation, despite the mandate of the temporary water councils being quite limited [54][55][56]. The central government, however, has hesitations to whether a co-governance structure would work in practice and the central authorities may not have sufficient capacity to deal with this very different type of governance.…”

Water Economics and Policy

“…Delgado-Serrano et al [29] address an innovative approach to implementing Ostrom principles in a community-based governance context. Graversgaard et al [30] analyse public participation and stakeholder engagement and knowledge co-creation in water planning in the context of EU WFD regulation. Also in this context, Boeuf et al [31] review the application of the concept of disproportionate cost in the WFD, which should be used when a water mass cannot achieve a good environmental status (GES).…”