Abstract
In the Mediterranean basin, climate models predict future scenarios characterized by more frequently uncertain hydrological services. European policies increasingly promote new models of water management based on river basins as socioecological systems and participatory strategies to ensure better inclusiveness and representativeness of all local actors. Practice has demonstrated the value of stakeholder engagement for achieving more productive and beneficial outcomes of decision-making in landscape management and conservation policies. However, sometimes participatory processes do not lead to effective results. One reason could be related to different understandings of concepts. There is, in fact, still limited research assessing whether the concepts or technical terms used in those processes are understood in the same way by the participants. Therefore, our study aims to explore the mental constructs of stakeholders through a combination of semi-structured interviews and hand-made drawings, using the concept of the river basin as a study concept. We found differences in the relationships between stakeholders’ ways of drawing and describing the river basin starting from its mental constructs. The results also showed that the way stakeholders construct ideas and views related to the landscape influenced some factors that stakeholders used to express them, such as the drawing shape, drawing length, emotions and associated values used in the descriptions. Likewise, mental constructs were influenced by stakeholders’ profiles and their working position. This study highlights that a better understanding of stakeholders' perceptions and their understandings could be essential if we are to achieve more effective and inclusive participatory processes in complex and dynamic socioecological contexts.
Highlights
The Mediterranean Basin, understood as an ecoregion (Blondel, 2006; Olson et al, 2001), is recognized as an important hotspot for biodiversity
We found that 36.7% of the drawings were accurate, that is, they were similar to the empirical boundaries, while 63.3% were completely different or quite different from the actual boundaries
A total of 63.3% of drawings used a river basin perspective, including in the drawings different land uses of the landscape, such as mountains, agricultural fields, and wetlands, while 32.7% drew the river basin area with a river perspective, including only the river or the area immediately surrounding it
Summary
The Mediterranean Basin, understood as an ecoregion (Blondel, 2006; Olson et al, 2001), is recognized as an important hotspot for biodiversity. Climate models predict future scenarios characterized by an intense degradation of Mediterranean ecosystems and their capacity to supply ecosystem services, which will affect aquatic ecosystems (Cramer et al, 2018; Vollmer et al, 2018). European policies such as the European Water Framework Directive emphasize the need to consider a broader scale for the spatial organi zation of water, based on a river basin perspective (Commission, 2000), and the ability to recognize the spatial unit of the river basin as a system (Giakoumis & Voulvoulis, 2018b). There is an urgent need to apply a radical shift in the paradigm of water resources and aquatic ecosystem management with respect to the pre vious models, with the goal of identifying more integrated, participatory and multi-scalar planning and management strategies (Giakoumis & Voulvoulis, 2018a; Iniesta-Arandia, 2011), those that consider river basins as delimited complex socioecological systems (Martín-Lopez et al, 2017)
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