Darya Hirsch

Integrating local and technical knowledge to support soil salinity monitoring in the Amudarya river basin

The role of monitoring is changing due to the increasing awareness of complexity and uncertainty in environmental resources management. Monitoring systems are required to support critical reflection about the effectiveness of actions toward the achievement of management objectives. To this aim, monitoring should be based on a strong integrated and multi-scale approach. Monitoring costs could be prohibitive if the monitoring is only based on traditional scientific methods of measurements. To deal with these issues, the design of an innovative monitoring system should be based on the integration between different sources of knowledge and information. In this work the usability of local knowledge to support environmental monitoring is investigated. A multi-step participatory monitoring design process has been implemented aiming to design a program for soil salinity monitoring in the lower Amudarya river basin in Uzbekistan. Although there is an increasing awareness of the importance of stakeholders being involved in decision processes, the current socio-cultural and institutional context is not favourable to the participatory approach. The choice of method to be implemented in this work was influenced by such conditions. The analysis of the lessons learned from the experiences gained in this project revealed some important clues concerning the development of a locally-based monitoring program. These lessons can be subdivided according to three fundamental issues: the long term involvement of local community members in monitoring activities, the acceptance of locally-based monitoring systems by decision makers, and the reliability of monitoring information.

Participatory Research for Adaptive Water Management in a Transition Country - a Case Study from Uzbekistan

Participatory research has in recent years become a popular approach for problem-oriented scientific research that aims to tackle complex problems in a real management context. Within the European Union project NeWater, stakeholder processes were initiated in seven case studies to develop approaches for adaptive water management. The Uzbek part of the Amudarya River basin was one of the studied river basins. However, given the current political and cultural context in Uzbekistan, which provides little room for stakeholder participation, it was unclear to what extent participation could be realized there. In this paper, we present an evaluation of the participatory research carried out in the Amudarya case study with respect to (i) the choice and application of different participatory methods and their adaptation to the given political, socioeconomic, and cultural environment, (ii) their usefulness in improving system understanding and developing strategies and measures to improve water management and monitoring, and (iii) their acceptance and suitability for enhancing policy-making processes in the Amudarya River basin context. The main lessons learned from the comparison of the different participatory methods were (1) the stakeholder process provided an opportunity for meetings and discussions among stakeholders from different organizational levels and thus promoted communication between different levels and organizations, and (2) in a context where most stakeholders are not generally involved in policy-making, there is a danger of raising expectations that a research project cannot meet, e.g., of transferring local interests to higher levels. Our experience shows that in order to choose participatory methods and adapt them to the Uzbek cultural and political setting (and most likely this applies to other post-Soviet transition countries as well), four aspects should be taken into account: the time required to prepare and apply the method, good information about the participants and the context in which the method will be applied, knowledge of the local language(s), and careful training of local moderators. While these aspects are relevant to any application of participatory methods, they become even more important in a political and socio-cultural setting such as that found in Uzbekistan. One added value of the activities and a crucial aspect of a participatory research processes was the capacity building of local scientists and practitioners, which facilitates the further application of the methods.

Politics of Agricultural Water Management in Khorezm, Uzbekistan

On the basis of intensive fieldwork in the period 2002–2006, which combined interviews with direct observations, the implementation of two policies in the field of agricultural water management in Uzbekistan is analysed: the reform of the water bureaucracy along basin boundaries and the establishment of Water Users Associations. It is shown that the Uzbek government used these policies creatively for addressing some pressing issues, while the inherent decentralisation objective was pushed to the far background. Both reforms are used to strengthen the state’s grip on agricultural production regulation. The latter is at the centre of day-to-day agricultural water management dynamics. It is shown that decentralisation policies originally developed in society-centric policy processes cannot be easily applied in countries with state-centric politics such as Uzbekistan.

Identification of Key Components for a new Urban Food Strategy – Results of a Delphi Study in Cologne, Germany

Urban food systems consist of many stakeholders with different perspectives, different interests and different governance tools. This study aimed at developing potential future scenarios for the food system of Cologne by analysing the system with a Delphi approach. In our research-design, the suitability of the Delphi-method was evaluated not only as a tool for future modelling and scenario design, but also as a communication tool among the group of participants on a multi-stakeholder-platform. As a case study, the Food Policy Council of Cologne, Germany was used. Cologne can be seen as a forerunner among German cities in the development of a new urban food policy. Some of the successful steps to re-envisioning food as an urban system include joining the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact, the decision of the City Council to become an edible city and the establishment of a Food Policy Council. For the study it was important to capture participants’ visions of a common goal regarding the governance of the urban food system and also to identify mental ‘silos’. It was obvious that the municipality of Cologne together with the Food Policy Council made great efforts towards participatory processes to build a vision for a sustainable and regional food supply. However, many stakeholder-groups in the process still work exclusively among themselves and do not actively practice the confrontation with the viewpoints of other relevant groups. This supports the maintenance of ‘silos’ and leaves little room for face-to-face discussions. Therefore, the primary aim of this study is to explore key components of food provisioning in the future for Cologne while confronting all stakeholders (municipal administration and politicians, farmers and food activists) with the perspectives of all group members. We used a multi-stakeholder Delphi approach with 19 panellists to find out essential components of the municipal regional food provisioning system in Cologne. Unique in this Delphi study is the bringing together of municipal administration, regional urban farmers and food activists. The research is still on-going, but preliminary results show that more communication among all relevant actors, especially horizontally among different city departments, in the urban food system is needed.

Chapter 2.6:Stakeholder Responsive Research as an Approach to Support Adaptive Integrated Water Management: Examples from the NeWater Project

In the past decade, a major change in the rhetoric surrounding water resources management has become evident. The debate is now dominated by an increased awareness of integrated management approaches, taking into account environmental, economic and social considerations, and by the search for strate...