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.
Highlights
Water is a key resource for sustaining livelihoods, producing food, generating energy and enabling healthy ecosystems and the services which they provide [1]
Zwarteveen et al [12] suggested that water governance is mostly informed by ideological hypotheses about how water resources should be managed, rather than by a thorough understanding of how it should work in practice
We demonstrated the value of complementing stakeholder analysis, social network analysis and participatory processes under the umbrella of a theoretical collaborative water governance (CWG) framework
Summary
Water is a key resource for sustaining livelihoods, producing food, generating energy and enabling healthy ecosystems and the services which they provide [1]. Increasing demands, population growth, climate variability, competing uses and interdependencies across multiple sectors (e.g., water-energy-food nexus) are challenging the way in which water resources have traditionally been managed [2,3]. Water governance has been interpreted in a number of different ways [7,8] but can be broadly 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 and implemented, stakeholders articulate their interest and decision-makers are held accountable’ [9]. Zwarteveen et al [12] suggested that water governance is mostly informed by ideological hypotheses about how water resources should be managed, rather than by a thorough understanding of how it should work in practice
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