Proceedings of the Water Planning Tools Project: Workshop on Social and Economic Assessment for Water Planning

A workshop was held in Brisbane on 23 and 24 April 2009 to identify possible methods that could be considered for application in each of these two trial areas. We brought together 5 independent social and economic assessment experts, 4 agency water planning and socio-economic staff from each jurisdiction, and 5 members of the Water Planning Tools project team. The objectives of the workshop were to identify: 1) a suite of social and economic tools/techniques/methods that could be used to assess social and economic implications of water plans. 2) appropriate methods for such assessments at two ‘Water Planning Tools’ trial locations – Upper Condamine groundwater and SA Murray. The workshop involved a two-step process: 1) to get agreement on the questions that need to be answered in terms of social and economic effects of water planning; and then 2) to decide which methods would be most suitable to answer the questions in each trial area. An aim was to provide the basis for developing terms of reference for social and economic studies in each of the two case study areas. It was clear that at the beginning, we would need to develop a common understanding of social and economic assessment and where it fits in water planning. We began the workshop by having experts explain their methods and share case studies in which they have been involved. We followed this with analysis of each of the two case studies to identify where social economic assessment could contribute to water planning. We also aimed to get agreement on how to evaluate the effectiveness of such assessments