I have initiated and established collaborations with two communities in NZ to develop EBM-plans for local catchments. To do so necessitated various meetings with key locals to explain the project, point out the benefits of the MCDA-framework, and to build trust. This phase was followed by workshops to gather the values the communities relate to their freshwater systems. I used this information to produce a hierarchy of objectives for each system, discussed and edited this “objectives hierarchies” according to further community input and the national water legislation, and populated the hierarchies with attributes and value functions. To identify the range of subjective preferences, i.e. weightings, for the different objectives available in the communities, I have performed one-on-one interviews with key stakeholders. Based on potential action alternatives, co-identified with the communities, I have applied scenario planning to rank action alternatives according to their estimated performance, with and without stakeholder-specific weightings.
Overview of results:
• Full objectives hierarchies for the two case studies based on community values, approved by the communities through extensive collaboration activities
• Comprehensive collections of available environmental information. For Blueskin estuary, this collection is in form of an access database which is accessible through the Waitati Library. For Lake Wanaka, the collection is in form of an excel database and published in a openly accessible report
• Development of value functions for all attributes and identification of the current status of each attribute
• Implementation of the gathered information in R-scripts to operationalize the objectives hierarchy, including the attributes, value functions and the aggregation of values to analyse the consequences of different management actions and the impact of different weights given to the objectives by key stakeholders on the action ranking
• Development of conceptual social-ecological system models within a Bayesian Belief Network approach for further population with probabilities
From the intensive collaboration in the case studies, four key lessons have been learnt:
• The MCDA-process and its outcomes significantly help visualise and organise community values, identify knowledge gaps and rank action alternatives
• Collaboration with local stakeholders can be uncomplicated, while getting engaged with local decision makers might be more challenging
• Cultural objectives were found to be important to all stakeholders; more important than economic ones but a little less than maintaining a healthy ecosystem
• Māori objectives were identified to be similarly important to all stakeholders when compared with western cultural objectives
Results of SABER CULTURAL can be exploited through science based policy making, i.e. can directly help shaping evidence-based policy in NZ and inform freshwater policies in Europe. This can happen in two ways. Fist, the process taken in SABER CULTURAL is based on true public collaboration and therefore recognizes the democratic drivers behind policy making. This is, for instance, required but rarely executed when developing management plans in the European Union. The process taken in SABER CULTURAL provides the means to directly fill this gap. Second, the integration of people’s cultural preferences in freshwater management provides evidence on how cultural(socio) and ecological freshwater values are linked. This information can be used to revise current freshwater assessment and management to account for, and include, human well-being which is poorly represented in current management strategies in Europe.
