Approaches to resolve conflict and support collaborative decision making in participatory transboundary watershed management

Transboundary watersheds are often such large and complex systems that no one person can have complete knowledge of the hydrological, environmental, political, legal, economic, and social processes that interplay within them. With multiple jurisdictions using and maintaining the water system, no one individual or entity has the power to fully control how the system is governed. This means that when it comes to making decisions about how to manage watersheds, current best practice puts a lot of focus on collaborative processes that bring together a broad range of stakeholders with knowledge about distinct aspects of the watershed’s systems alongside those with different responsibilities and powers to govern it. Bringing together diverse stakeholders, who view the watershed from a range of perspectives, has the potential to lead to either conflict or cooperation. The challenge for transboundary water resources management is to find the means to bring together diverse perspectives in a way that fosters communication, and not confrontation. The aim of the present work is to contribute to addressing this challenge.The upper St Lawrence watershed is used as a case study to explore the themes of conflict and cooperation in transboundary watershed management. The study is broken down into two parts. The first looks to the recent past and presents a critical analysis of the stakeholder engagement and conflict resolution processes employed by the International Joint Commission during negotiations to change the management regime of the St Lawrence River. Audio recordings and transcriptions of public and technical hearings held by the IJC in 2013 were systematically analysed to assess the extent to which this process was able to achieve consensus in decision making, and understand the root causes of any residual conflict. The second part of the study looks to the future. Serious games have been touted as a novel tool with applicable value in supporting collaborative decision making. Seminal literature presenting a variety of distinctly different approaches to decision making was selected and reviewed to survey the breadth of decision making processes employed. Exploratory interviews were conducted with water resource managers across the St Lawrence region to explore whether a serious game might be useful in this particular context.A general conclusion is reached that both Shared Vision Planning and Serious Games increase the likelihood that, when diverse perspectives are brought together, collaboration will prevail over conflict. In the case of Shared Vision Planning, this is achieved by identification and resolution of disputed causal associations through collaborative model building; in the case of Serious Games, it is achieved by expanding the experience and awareness of actors by allowing them to role play another perspective. It is suggested that the Serious Games approach may have the advantage of helping develop empathy, as games can be designed to allow players to experience the challenges faced by other stakeholders first-hand.

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