Abstract
Participatory approaches to water management, and specifically to transboundary river management, have been widely applied over recent decades. Regarding transboundary rivers, the active involvement of key actors in policy planning is of great importance. In this context, a participatory approach has been used to identify sectors of interest and priorities related to water and development in the Mékrou transboundary River Basin involving three countries: Benin, Burkina Faso and Niger. We conducted a web-based survey to quantify expert opinion on sectors of water management policy and priorities for the Mékrou River Basin. The same set of questions was then put to a sample of local stakeholders living in this river basin. Our analysis reveals some points of convergence and some discrepancies between the opinions of experts and local stakeholders. Overall, it provides a comparative analysis of how experts and local stakeholders prioritize water policy measures, which could influence decision-making.
Highlights
Given the complex nature of water management problems, a flexible and transparent decision-making process is required in order to account for the diversity of knowledge and values [1].For this reason, expert knowledge and stakeholder participation have been increasingly used in river basin modeling and, more generally, in environmental decision-making [2].In this paper, we propose a participatory approach to elicit expert and local stakeholder opinions on sectors of interest and on policy priorities related to water management in the Mékrou RiverBasin, a transboundary river basin located in West Africa
This paper addresses the following research questions: (a) to which extent experts and local stakeholders share similar opinions on water management priorities; and (b) how decision making and project planning can be benefited by ranking water-management priorities based on expert and stakeholder opinions
In the eight municipalities located in the Beninese part of the Mékrou River Basin, we identified a set of 27 possible local stakeholders
Summary
Given the complex nature of water management problems, a flexible and transparent decision-making process is required in order to account for the diversity of knowledge and values [1].For this reason, expert knowledge and stakeholder participation have been increasingly used in river basin modeling and, more generally, in environmental decision-making [2].In this paper, we propose a participatory approach to elicit expert and local stakeholder opinions on sectors of interest and on policy priorities related to water management in the Mékrou RiverBasin, a transboundary river basin located in West Africa. Given the complex nature of water management problems, a flexible and transparent decision-making process is required in order to account for the diversity of knowledge and values [1]. For this reason, expert knowledge and stakeholder participation have been increasingly used in river basin modeling and, more generally, in environmental decision-making [2]. The Mékrou River Basin has some specific characteristics It is a transboundary river basin shared by three countries, namely Benin, Burkina Faso and Niger.
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