Using Participatory Natural Capital Decision Making to Improve Collaborative Water Management in River Catchment Partnerships

Abstract:

Management of river catchments (watershed management) to provide vital ecosystem services to society requires strategic and deliberative stakeholder participation in decision making. Utilising the concept of natural capital offers a new perspective on river catchment systems with the potential for nature-based solutions to be realised. For example, natural capital could allow evidence-based decisions to be made to protect, maintain and improve the ecosystem services yielded in catchments. In collaboration with catchment partnerships in London, participatory techniques will be co-developed with stakeholders to produce a systems understanding of natural capital within a catchment. To ensure equity in decision making, this technique will engage with a wide range of stakeholders such as local residents, planning authorities, environmental charities and academics. The interdisciplinary approach combines qualitative interviews and workshops, and quantitative techniques of participatory system dynamic modelling, conducted over a 12 month engagement cycle. This matches the need for data driven evidence with stakeholder learning. These methods will provide vital evidence that demonstrates the importance of conserving and investing in natural capital and nature-based solutions and supports decision making by allowing stakeholders to visualise and understand their catchment system. The catchment scale requires the research to be tailored to a specific location, therefore co-design is at the heart of the engagement framework, recognising local expertise as vital to success. This presentation will describe the proposed work and present initial understandings from the project.