Engaging stakeholders in water and dam development management programs

The World Bank Report on infrastructure of 1994 argued that as economies grow, an increasing share of infrastructure investment will be taken up by energy generation projects. Increasingly scarce fossil fuels and their carbon emissions have made the use of energy from renewable resources (such as hydropower) highly desirable. A 2007 report from the inter-governmental panel on climate change also highlighted the increased vulnerability of water supplies justifying a greater degree of active water management. Water and dam development management programs present a highly complex picture for those engaged in program management. Water resources are spatially complex. Surface runoff alone can operate over different regions, states and countries giving rise to water usage disputes between different political authorities. Hydrological and technological issues may not be well understood at local level creating political difficulties for political leaders. Conversely, large water management programs (such as the Sardar Sarovar Dam in India and the Three Gorges Dam in China) involving large scale population displacement, faced the risk of putting communities in potential difficulties through failure to understand their needs. The work of Flyvbjerg and others on the importance of accountability in the evaluation of megaprojects together with available methods of evaluation (social cost benefit analysis or some form of multi-criteria decision model) require both the identification of relevant stakeholders and modelling of their requirements. Additionally such decision models generally involve the valuation of non-market benefits or costs – often involving stated preference techniques. The problem with various forms of stated preference techniques used to measure the relative value of some particular benefit is that they have to assume the form of the problem in the minds of the stakeholders most affected. Thus techniques such as Conjoint Analysis or Analytical Hierarchy Process may yield locally optimal preferences within a pre-defined set of choices but those responding to such choices have no power to challenge the choices set before them. Contingent Valuation techniques on the other hand are dependent on the subjective estimation of values by respondents. The problem here is that in situations involving an overall set of stakeholders with a wide distribution of income and/or wealth, those at the lower end may provide values which are low in absolute terms but represent high values in relation to their own net worth or earning potential. Furthermore in a situation where a long indigenous people are to be displaced by some water dam project, those affected may not have the ability to value their earning potential (or lack of it) in an alternative location. The carrying out of such valuations is additionally a professional-led exercise in which the respondents act as individuals making discrete theoretical choices for themselves or their household. There is also an underlying assumption that the professionals have fully elicited the stakeholders’ needs in order to determine the choice set or benefits to be valued. It is particularly important that a suitable interface is found whereby the needs of stakeholders less able to articulate their requirements in technical terms can be modelled and mediated with the requirements of others and the relative strength of their importance understood. The concept of large scale stakeholder simulation gaming was developed in the 1970’s as a means of addressing such issues. However, the complexity of the issues and data made for a very slow and cumbersome process. The advent of modern information and communications technology has now revolutionised the possibilities for this form of interactive evaluation and learning processes. It is one thing to articulate individual stakeholder needs. It is quite another to understand their interaction. One method of doing this is through a simulation gaming of multiple stakeholders articulating both common and conflicting requirements. This can reveal the emergent properties of the complexity of such requirements. It can also contribute to an understanding of where hard choices have to be made or where there are possibilities for welfare-augmenting trade-offs. Research has already been carried out by others in relation to water management schemes in Nigeria, Tanzania, France and Thailand, but four countries. This indicates a positive place for role-playing simulation games. These have benefits for the stakeholder participants in the form of learning and in capacity development as well as in the ability to better articulate their requirements and to explore alternative choice sets and scenarios. Using field experience this paper aims to contribute to a growing body of research literature which shows how such methods can contribute to the understanding of the identification and evaluation of the needs of the most vulnerable stakeholders in the water management program process