Outcomes of Collaborative Water Policy Making: Applying Complexity Thinking to Evaluation

Collaborative policy making has become increasingly significant in environmental management, but it is often evaluated by whether or not agreement is reached and implemented. The most important outcomes of such policy dialogues are often invisible or undervalued when seen through the lens of a traditional, modernist paradigm of government and accountability. These dialogues represent a new paradigm of governance that can be best understood in the light of a complex adaptive system model of society. From this perspective collaborative policy making is a way of making a system more flexible, adaptive and intelligent. The authors document such outcomes in three cases of water policy making in California, including the San Francisco Estuary Project, the CALFED Bay-Delta Program and the Sacramento Area Water Forum. The outcomes include social and political capital, agreed-on information, the end of stalemates, high-quality agreements, learning and change, innovation and new practices involving networks and flexibility.     

Estimating the Recreational-Use Value for Hiking in Bellenden Ker National Park, Australia

The recreational-use value of hiking in the Bellenden Ker National Park, Australia has been estimated using a zonal travel cost model. Multiple destination visitors have been accounted for by converting visitors’ own ordinal ranking of the various sites visited to numerical weights, using an expected-value approach. The value of hiking and camping in this national park was found to be $AUS 250,825 per year, or $AUS 144,45 per visitor per year, which is similar to findings from other studies valuing recreational benefits. The management of the park can use these estimates when considering the introduction of a system of user pays fees. In addition, they might be important when decisions need to be made about the allocation of resources for maintenance or upgrade of tracks and facilities.     

Foresight science in conservation: Tools,barriers, and mainstreaming opportunities

Foresight science is a systematic approach to generate future predictions for planning and management by drawing upon analytical and predictive tools to understand the past and present, while providing insights about the future. To illustrate the application of foresight science in conservation, we present three case studies: identification of emerging risks to conservation, conservation of at-risk species, and aid in the development of management strategies for multiple stressors. We highlight barriers to mainstreaming foresight science in conservation including knowledge accessibility/organization, communication across diverse stakeholders/decision makers, and organizational capacity. Finally, we investigate opportunities for mainstreaming foresight science including continued advocacy to showcase its application, incorporating emerging technologies (i.e., artificial intelligence) to increase capacity/decrease costs, and increasing education/training in foresight science via specialized courses and curricula for trainees and practicing professionals. We argue that failure to mainstream foresight science will hinder the ability to achieve future conservation objectives in the Anthropocene.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13280-022-01786-0.     

Research priorities for managing the impacts and dependencies of business upon food,energy, water and the environment

Delivering access to sufficient food, energy and water resources to ensure human wellbeing is a major concern for governments worldwide. However, it is crucial to account for the ‘nexus’ of interactions between these natural resources and the consequent implications for human wellbeing. The private sector has a critical role in driving positive change towards more sustainable nexus management and could reap considerable benefits from collaboration with researchers to devise solutions to some of the foremost sustainability challenges of today. Yet opportunities are missed because the private sector is rarely involved in the formulation of deliverable research priorities. We convened senior research scientists and influential business leaders to collaboratively identify the top forty questions that, if answered, would best help companies understand and manage their food-energy-water-environment nexus dependencies and impacts. Codification of the top order nexus themes highlighted research priorities around development of pragmatic yet credible tools that allow businesses to incorporate nexus interactions into their decision-making; demonstration of the business case for more sustainable nexus management; identification of the most effective levers for behaviour change; and understanding incentives or circumstances that allow individuals and businesses to take a leadership stance. Greater investment in the complex but productive relations between the private sector and research community will create deeper and more meaningful collaboration and cooperation.