hydrosocial issues in the firma project : Tom Downing link to movie of presentation

contents | objectives | agenda | key literature and info sources | what is a hydrosocial issue? | traditional framing of issues | linking social to hydrological | global change | integrating flow attributes and requirements | inventory of issues (write up of course exercise) |

The FIRMA training course is designed to familiarise the participants with different domains of expertise relevant to the project, including hydro-social issues (this presentation), agent-based modelling (Troitsch et al.), hydrology and aquatic ecosystems (Cemagref presentations), water use (EAWAG presentation) and integrated assessment (Rotmans).

This presentation was given as part of an overview/introductory session at the beginning of the course. It includes results of our screening of issues, although this was developed during the session rather than presented as recommendations.

I have also added a summary of a session on the following day that introduced issues in institutional analysis, integrated assessment and agent-based modelling (the FIRMA pilot model). Again, these are included for completeness in the FIRMA project rather than recommendations for other courses, per se.

objectives

The main focus of the introduction was to start a collective process of identifying specific issues that the FIRMA project ought to work on. The entire session--presentation, participatory exercise and summary--was about 60 minutes. So this was not an in-depth ranking/rating of issues. Only a beginning.

The second objective is also important, especially in a new project where people are still learning who is who (and we had some 40 people in the course), what they do, what each team wants to do, and how that can make an effective, collaborative project. The diversity in the project is huge: of disciplines (computer science and engineering to political ecology and policy analysis), the lingua franca was English (difficult enough for speakers in different disciplines let alone different cultures), the mix of experience (beginning post-graduate students, new post-docs, very senior professors, some applied people).

Glossaries from UK Water and a previous project (SIRCH) were distributed but not discussed--the technical details of terms tends to emerge later when people start working on specific issues.

agenda

1. Background material

2. Introduction to hydro-social issues

3. Agenda setting for further elaboration

4. Meta-model exercise

5. Case study on institutional analysis of water issues

6. Log sheet

This agenda spilled over two days. In the first session we focussed on the middle spots. EAWAG (Claudia Pahl-Wostl and others) have developed a participatory method called meta-model building. This helps clarify assumptions and get people thinking about the most important issues. This was to be tried later in the course.

David Sauri presented 30 minutes on property rights and institutional development regarding water. It is very far from modelling, but underlies the larger context of regulation and debate about economic efficiency and environmental equity. This was a separate talk on the next day.

We did not have a full participation/facilitation team in the course. One useful idea is to keep a flip chart sheet of issues and questions that the group raised but did not have time to discuss. These can then be dealt with later or a procedure adopted to work on them off-line. I called this a log sheet, others have used terms such as grab bag. It helps to raise the importance of ideas, while not losing the focus on issues selected for the current session.

key literature and sources of information

SIRCH project: www.eci.ox.ac.uk

Eurowater project

EU water issues n summary fact sheets:

The project recognises that key literature should underpin our collective work, as well as individual developments. We tried to circulate a piece of paper where people could suggest the most important readings, but this did not progress easily.

The SIRCH project has working papers on institutions, new economics of institutions, stakeholders, regional applications, demography, and other topics on its web site. The EuroWater project was a major inventory of national plans and context, with some comparisons across Europe and at the EU level.

what is a hydro-social issue?

Interactions of hydrology, management and consumers

Recurring issues

The inherent notion is that 'hydro-social' is the interaction of traditional domains of explanation and expertise--the natural sciences (of which hydrology is one), policy and operational management (e.g., organisational behaviour) and demand/use of water (consumers in a broad sense).

The issues can be identified by looking at recurring debates, related to changing structures of society and economy, policy from the top (e.g, the EU) and policy from within (debates at a national, regional or local level)

traditional framing of issues from different disciplines:

1. Hydrological/hydraulic

2. Engineering

3. Management

linking social to hydrological:

There are contrasting definitions of integrated issues--taken from the FIRMA proposal. What follows was a way of getting people thinking about how issues are framed, rather than suggest a checklist.

global change

stakeholders

The analysis of stakeholders is essential. This is a qualitative example from the SIRCH project.

The three axes emerge as important, but not necessarily exclusive, ways to differentiate stakeholders. For example, local authorities are primarily operational, work at the local scale. The government environmental ministry (DETR), the Environment Agency (the environmental regulator) and the Office of Water Services (the economic regulator) overlap in their jurisdictions. Water supply companies are private corporations working in this mixed regulator environment.

integrating flow attributes and requirements

This is based on the SIRCH conception of water as an integration of the physical and social. Some biophysical processes can be considered outside of the socio-institutional sphere, but most are directly influenced by human activity. Flow attributes (the biophysical) and flow requirements (the demand and uses) overlap--they cannot be defined without recourse to each other to the extent that purely natural catchments do not exist. The outcome of that interaction feeds into responses, whether reactive, precautionary or proactive.

inventory of issues:

We need to focus the FIRMA project on specific issues of relevance to EU, national and local policy. In a group of this size, a good way to do this is to run a carousel.

Carousel

Groups on:

The four themes are shown--they were chosen to reflect different origins of water policy. But they are arbitrary--other breakdowns could have been around major issues (quantity, drinking quality, pollution, non-use values) or users (domestic, agriculture, industry, environment).

Steps:

Must do in FIRMA, broad importance, relevant to case studies

Important, but less critical focus for the project, might be more local than EU- wide

Still worth pursuing, but of less importance than other issues

Most groups put three stars against a few issues but did not have time to rank the lower order importance

inventory

Three stars

These are the three star issues reported back to the plenary by each group. We reported back by asking each group for their very most important issue in turn, then cycled around the groups again asking for the next most important issue. This helps to put the most important of the important at the top of the list and to get an even reporting across the groups. Many of the issues were similar or the same across the groups--they are grouped together in the above list.

catalogue

Chose issues as the core set to work on

Relate groups of issues to analytical methods

Lead institutes for further development

The issues identified are neither exhaustive nor prioritised in a specific way. The project should go further to identify/rank issues and provide a bit of background for each issue.

One way to do this would be for a lead institute to be assigned this task for each of the priority issues. A key aspect is to link the issue to methodologies in the modelling domain. For example, what are the standard models for pollution, what are the major issues for modelling (e.g., spatial representation of flows through groundwater is very difficult, requiring data that do not exist and complex computations--3D, multi-process flows)

results from four themes

1a. Global change (1)

1b. Global change (2)

2a. European Union policy (1)

2b. European Union policy (2)

3a. Northern Europe

3b. Southern Europe

analysis

Further ideas:

We did not draw together conclusions from the exercise due to a lack of time. It would be useful to do this, looking at:

1. Outcome of the exercise--Is this a good list? What more needs to be done to refine the substance of the exercise. I quickly sketched out a few ideas, but this was not a group process and we did not seek to adopt any further action.

2. Procees evaluation--it is a good idea to evaluate the process as well. Did people like the approach? Did they have comments for improvements? Did they learn something? I felt that the exercise achieved its aims--wide participation, some mixing across regional and age boundaries, a bit of stirring up, and a good first list of major issues. It may have had a subsequent effect on the course--I felt there was less "what should we do?" in the following sessions and a better focus on methodological issues.

Additional issues--it can be useful to post an additional sheet to record things that are brought up but cannot be dealt with at the time--the log sheet. This can then be looked at and decisions made as to when the further issues should be discussed.