Suchergebnisse

There is a growing policy interest in participatory processes that combine deliberation with futures visioning. The EU Water Framework Directive, with its mandate for participatory long-term river basin plans, contributes to this "futures turn" in European governance. In this paper we investigate what Deliberative Visioning can do well and what not in the context of resource planning. Our laboratory is a Scenario Workshop for sustainable water management in a Greek island. We conclude that Deliberative Visioning is useful for preparatory and complementary planning activities such as education, community motivation, communication and consultation but it is not well suited for action planning per se. Visions are not substantive decision outputs or bases for a participatory policy options assessment, but effective devices for communication and mutual learning between participants. Our study touches also some broader issues concerning the interface of participation/deliberation, science and decision-making.

The Water Framework Directive institutionalises participatory processes in river basin planning across the European Union. This paper reports on three case studies from southern Europe where conflicts over water exist. In each a different method for participation was experimentally employed: scenario workshops, mediated modelling, and social multicriteria evaluation. Scenario workshops and mediated modelling proved well suited to the early stages of a planning process (problem solving and identification of goals and alternatives) and to be good at educating participants and supporting capacity building. Their performance was less satisfactory with respect to resolving long-standing conflicts and achieving consensus. In comparison, social multicriteria evaluation was better able to address the evaluation of alternatives, reveal trade-offs, and aid convergence between divergent stakeholders' views, but it relied more heavily on experts and allowed less participation and deliberation in goal-setting than the other two methods. These results show complementarities amongst methods which imply that hybrid or combined approaches would be best for aiding the water planning process. They also reveal problems confronting the use of participatory approaches and constraints which prevent theoretical promise from being converted into practical results.