Back to Spring 2009 Newsletter
On March 17, the Water Resources Research Center held its 2009 annual conference at the University of Arizona’s Student Union Memorial Center. The topic was “Best Practices for Stakeholder Engagement in Water Resource Planning.” More than 250 people attended. Following is a description or “mini-proceedings”covering some of the day’s major events.
At first glance, this year’s conference might have seemed easier to understand and more approachable than the complex water issues on the agendas of other meetings. After all, stakeholder engagement is essentially about people working together to identify and achieve a common goal. How difficult can that be?
As it became clear from conference presentations and discussions, it is an issue that can be as fraught with complexity as any other topic in water resources management. Years of theoretical and practical research, seat-of-the-pants experimentation, and personal and professional commitment have gone into understanding and improving stakeholder engagement processes.
No, the topic was not chosen for its simplicity. The reason this year’s WRRC annual conference focused on stakeholder engagement was to highlight the fundamental importance of involving stakeholders in water resources planning. Conference planners sought to move our statewide conversation about water planning forward, and progress can be made only through engagement of everyone with a stake in the outcome.
The conference focus also signaled the commitment of organizers to reaching out and encouraging involvement from a broad range of stakeholders. The 2009 conference was organized in collaboration with the Morris K. Udall Foundation and the Arizona Water Institute. The WRRC has collaborated with AWI on past conferences and other projects, but the partnership with the Udall Foundation was new. The Udall Foundation provides professional training and educational outreach on the environment, and through the U.S. Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution, assists in the resolution of environmental disputes.
One of the well-documented obstacles to stakeholder engagement is the cost of involvement. This year the conference venue was chosen specifically to keep costs low, so that the savings could be passed on through low registration fees. In addition, the generous support of conference sponsors meant that the WRRC could offer fee waivers to all who requested them. In addition, a special effort was made to involve watershed partnerships and similar organizations throughout Arizona. In this effort the support of Arizona NEMO (http://www.srnr.arizona.edu/nemo/ ) and the Master Watershed Stewards Program (http://ag.arizona.edu/watershedsteward/ ) was invaluable.
The commitment of conference organizers to broad outreach paid off, with many audience members attending their first WRRC conference. More than 40 communities were represented, with registrations coming in from Arizona towns such as Maricopa, Golden Valley, Globe, Salome, Duncan, Safford, Bisbee and Wilcox, as well as Phoenix and Tucson area cities. Among the participants were three members from the Great Arizona Outback Rumor & Innuendo Historical Society in the McMullen Valley. Although the organization’s name seems whimsical, these conference participants were serious about establishing connections with other grass-roots organizations and gaining access to information and other resources to help them address their local water resource issues. The day-long conference provided a unique opportunity for people with a wide range of diverse perspectives to hear from experts, share experiences and discuss strategies for improving future practices.
When WRRC Director Sharon Megdal opened the first plenary session, she began with some basic definitions: Who are stakeholders? What is engagement? She talked about the fact that there are different kinds of stakeholders. Some processes focus on engaging policy makers and forget the importance of involving the public. As an early conference announcement stated, “We all have a stake in our water future.” Therefore, we all are stakeholders. The fact that we are also all different, with differing interests, goals, beliefs, histories, etc., makes real stakeholder engagement a challenge.
The keynote speaker, Betsy Rieke, was involved in some of the most challenging stakeholder processes of the past thirty year. Rieke was Director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources from 1991 to 1993. In 1993, she was appointed by President Clinton to head the Office of Water and Science in the U.S. Department of the Interior. In that position she led an interagency, state and federal team involved in a complex negotiated planning process for the California Bay Delta, known as CALFED. Later, as Area Manager for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in Nevada, she was involved in negotiations on the Truckee River and Pyramid Lake restoration plans. Her talk drew lessons from these experiences.
In her keynote address, Rieke set out basic principles for success in resolving complex and contentious environmental and resource issues. She spoke about the need for leadership, what constitutes good leadership, and how to become a good leader in these situations. Key traits she counted off on the fingers of one hand were integrity, listening, team building, persistence, and optimism. She illustrated these principles with “war stories”. Like other war stories, these stories were full of lessons learned the hard way, setbacks and surprises — bad and good, but her overall message was hopeful. Later speakers elaborated on Rieke’s principles with their own specific experiences.
The theme of diversity emerged from the first plenary session “Issues in Stakeholder Engagement.” In her presentation “Tailoring the process to the situation – one size does not fit all,” Megdal spoke about the need to be flexible and adaptable. Different kinds of engagement are needed for different issues and different groups of interested stakeholders. Arizona State University political scientist, Dave White took up a similar theme in presenting the concept of multiple knowledges. According to White, “There are multiple types of knowledge that are legitimate inputs into natural resource decision-making.” What is more, the design of a water planning process — its structure, who has access to information, and the rules and limits on participation — can advantage some and disadvantage others. His research identifies best practices for integrating different types of knowledge into planning processes.
Because of differences in perspective and knowledge systems, in a sense, cross-cultural communication is always a feature of stakeholder processes. Dexter Albert of Intrinsic Consulting talked specifically about engaging native people. Among his key points was the diversity of native people in Arizona. “One size does not fit all” applies to them as well, Albert said. They do not all speak with a single voice. He also reminded the audience that members of tribes are citizens and stakeholders too; they do not always have to be approached through tribal governments. Sensitivity to differences should take into account preferred and customary modes of communication. Some approaches work better than others, like face-to-face meetings to establish relationships and build trust.
Albert’s bottom line could serve as a warning to everyone who approaches stakeholder engagement simplistically. “To sum it up in a nutshell: tribal engagement does not mean conducting a public meeting, holding a public hearing or sending a tribal consultation letter and calling the process complete or successful.”
The midmorning panel focused on the practicalities of building relationships and trust with stakeholders.. Not surprisingly, the experiences of the panelists struck many of the same notes as Rieke’s keynote address. Stakeholder processes require leadership, persistence and optimism.
On the subject of local leadership, Michael Crimmins, University of Arizona climate science extension specialist, said that because climate change is likely to bring more frequent and severe droughts to Arizona, communities must plan for variable water supplies. “Finding the real leaders who can deal with this at the county and local level is really essential,” he said.
Crimmins and Susan Craig, Arizona Department of Water Resources, shared the podium to describe their efforts to build drought planning capacity at the local level. Comparing their original, naive plans with on-the-ground realities provided several lessons. Key among these was that collaborative planning works best when everyone has a clear reason to engage. A drought may be the best reason to engage in drought planning, but what happens when the drought abates? Crimmins and Craig described the challenge of keeping stakeholders involved when the crisis is not immediate.
On the subject of persistence, Carolyn Campbell’s experience with the Pima County Sonoran Desert Conservation plan provided an example. Executive director of the Coalition for Sonoran Desert Protection, Campbell spoke from more than a decade of experience building support for the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan, often considered a landmark example of successful collaboration. Still a work-in-progress, the plan has already protected 77,000 acres of land from suburban sprawl, Campbell said. To come up with the plan, Campbell worked for years on a committee of 50 to 60 people with very different views on appropriate land use and conservation.
In the end, “no one compromised his or her bottom line values. We compromised a number of things that weren’t our bottom lines,” Campbell said.
Illustrating the triumph of optimism over reason, Tom McCann’s blow-by-blow account of the Central Arizona Project’s ADD Water process left the audience with a vivid sense of the overwhelming challenge of bringing large numbers of stakeholders together to tackle complex water resource problems.
McCann, CAP resource planning manager, may have been facetious when he highlighted the importance of cookies, but his remark had a serious intent. Cookies add a warm, friendly, informal touch to a meeting, in addition to providing sustenance for hard work, a serious benefit when hammering out differences, accepting compromises and untangling knotty issues.
For participants who came to the conference looking for tools, the last plenary session of the day provided a look at technology for stakeholder engagement. Maggie McCaffrey, U.S. Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution, described her experience with forest planning using models and interactive decision technology to help forest managers develop plans. UA’s Kristine Uhlman provided a quick overview of the tools Arizona NEMO (Non-point Education for Municipal Officials) has used to engage stakeholders in watershed planning. These tools include training and using volunteers in the wet-dry mapping of intermittent rivers and interactive on-line mapping so that stakeholders can visualize resources, conditions, and scenarios. Tim Lant, Arizona State University’s Institute of Sustainability, talked about WaterSim, a dynamic model for running scenarios and evaluating alternative projects and policies for water management. He also introduced the audience to the Decision Theater at ASU and the tools used there to educate and inform decision makers, facilitate group deliberations, and support decision making.
Posters on display at the conference illustrated other tools and techniques for water planning and stakeholder engagement, along with descriptions of on-going research projects and the experiences of local governments and water professionals. The poster session was intended as an inclusive forum. The 22 posters on display reflected the diversity of the audience, covering a wide range of subjects and styles. Several were prepared by watershed groups.
Arizona NEMO assisted watershed groups, providing templates for poster preparation and printing some of their posters. Master Watershed Stewards provided travel assistance to those watershed group representatives who would otherwise have been unable to attend. A meeting for representatives of many watershed partnerships was held in Tucson the day after the conference to take advantage of all too rare opportunities to get together.
Always entertaining, luncheon speaker Grady Gammage, a Phoenix attorney, former CAP board member and well-known author and speaker on resource policy issues, elicited laughter and groans from the audience with his challenge of the accepted truth that the good life in Arizona depends on non-stop growth.
In a comment from the floor during the morning plenary, conference participant Madeline Kiser, referring to the inauguration of a new president in Washington DC and the major changes it signals, talked about a “new moment” – a rare opportunity to start afresh with new ideas and new strategies for solving the many problems we face. Gammage took the idea of a new moment as a starting point to describe a new way forward for Arizona. Arizona has been hit hard by the nation’s economic slowdown, Gammage said, but there may be a silver lining.
“There is something in how bad Arizona is doing that gives us an opportunity…a new moment,” said Gammage. He called for “rethinking Arizona” by identifying a new economic engine for the state. Decoupling the state economy from perpetual growth could enable more sustainable concepts to take hold, like tying land development to careful water planning and conservation. With housing development expected to slow for several years, Gammage said Arizona communities have a chance to take a step back and decide what they want their communities to look like.
After lunch, three concurrent workshops provided opportunities for participants to interact with speakers and each other on different aspects of stakeholder engagement in water planning. Workshop facilitators were given the task of drawing out questions, concerns, lessons and novel ideas.
The workshop on “Innovations and Experiments” highlighted cutting edge research. Speakers described different research programs, but found similar lessons and raised similar issues. An overarching theme was that water managers are dealing with new challenges and science is producing new tools, but getting the two together presents its own problems. One not entirely facetious suggestion was that scientists should serve apprenticeships in the real world. No one suggested that real people serve apprenticeships in science, but there is a serious foundation for the idea. At least some evidence suggests that people who make the effort to operate in unfamiliar territory learn to understand and solve problems in new ways.
Participants in a second workshop struggled with making the principles of Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) practicable. IWRM is a strategy for tackling complex, interrelated technical, social, economic and environmental issues connected with watersheds. Speakers described their experiences with specific projects illustrating the range of IWRM applications, including management of groundwater resources. Multi-level complexity is the watchword for IWRM. WRRC Director Sharon Megdal and Chris Scott of the University of Arizona Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy described their efforts in the Transboundary Aquifer Assessment Program to establish and maintain stakeholder collaborations across the U.S. – Mexico border. The program aims to establish a common scientific foundation for water management on both sides of the border. Jean Calhoun, director of land and water conservation for the Arizona chapter of The Nature Conservancy, spoke about San Pedro River collaborations and conflicts.
In the San Pedro watershed, the challenge is to balance human water needs with keeping water in Arizona’s few remaining streams that flow year-round. According to Calhoun, large-scale collaborative planning is needed. Implementing any water-saving plan requires political support, Calhoun said. And political support requires building broad support in communities affected by
any new plan.
Getting local communities on board with collaborative planning requires “transparency” from government and scientific authorities, said Calhoun. “Don’t be a Pollyanna,” she told conference participants. “Honestly discuss the difficult choices, implications, and trade-offs.”
The “Getting People to Engage” workshop featured three different facilitators who led the audience in group explorations of ideas. After a joint introduction, they split into smaller groups, each one focusing on a particular project or poster as a basis for discussions of a list of questions. These questions included: What has worked in the past? What do you like and what don’t you like? What would you like to see more of/less of? Small group results were brought back to the larger group for consolidation and reporting to the plenary. The recommendations were many and varied, covering the whole process of stakeholder collaboration from reframing issues to establish common goals to inviting people who are about to check out to suggest changes to the process.
At the end of the conference, Kathy Jacobs, director of the Arizona Water Institute, took on the challenging task of summarizing the day’s lessons. Her list conveyed the broad range of topics and the diversity of participant perspectives. General lessons included the importance of process design and team building; adaptive management; and building capacity to achieve meaningful stakeholder participation. Successful stakeholder engagement must also be inclusive; allow ample time to work through problems and build relationships; acknowledge multiple ways to deal with change, complexity and uncertainty; and recognize leaders who create conditions for others to succeed. Other lessons to improve water resource planning included engaging the next generation of decision-makers; using technology to empower stakeholders; disseminating success stories; and integrating economics, social values and quality of life in water related decisions.
Beyond the many individual lessons, the message that emerged from the conference’s plenary sessions, workshops and poster presentations was that opening up the decision making process can be complicated and time consuming, but it can also lead to more successful and widely supported outcomes.
In video remarks to the conference, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords quoted Benjamin Franklin: “When the well is dry, we know the worth of water.” The people of Arizona have an opportunity now, before the well goes dry, to demonstrate that they understand the worth of water by finding sustainable water management strategies through broad collaboration.
Realizing the conference goals will take maintaining the connections and continuing thedialogues it fostered. The WRRC remains committed to supporting these goals. Director Sharon Megdal urged conference participants to stay in touch and involved.
Tell us what you think and we will keep providing resources and opportunities for connections.
For the full conference agenda, a view of the conference presentations, poster abstracts, and other information about the conference, visit the WRRC website at http://ag.arizona.edu/azwater/programs/conf2009/index.html