Co-engineering participatory modelling processes for water planning and management

Abstract

Broad-scale multi-stakeholder decision-aiding processes for complex water planning and management issues are typically organised or co-engineered by several agencies or actors. These participatory processes are therefore co-initiated, co-designed and co-implemented by a number of people. It is postulated here that this co-engineering can critically impact on both the participatory processes and their outcomes. Co-engineering has received scant attention in studies of participatory decision-making and remains an important gap in current knowledge. The method of intervention research was used to investigate the co-engineering of two participatory modelling processes: the creation of the Lower Hawkesbury Estuary Management Plan, a regional risk management planning project on the northern edge of Sydney in Australia; and the Living with Floods and Droughts capacity building project for co-managing flood and drought risks in the Sofia region of Bulgaria. From these research interventions and their comparative evaluations, a number of important innovations and insights have been identified, including that multiple and divergent objectives within co-engineering project teams can lead to conflicts which can have major impacts on the implemented participatory modelling processes. Support was found for the hypothesis that co-engineering can critically impact on both participatory processes and their water management outcomes. This research shows that there are therefore two processes to organise to aid multi-stakeholder decision-making for water planning and management: the co-engineering process and the participatory modelling process.