Inclusive Stakeholder Participation in Watershed Management: The Danube River Protection Convention and Silicon Valley’s Watershed Management Initiative
In the Science Talk, ʻInclusive Stakeholder Participation in Watershed Management’, Michael Stanley-Jones, Environmental Policy and Governance Fellow UNU-INWEH, explored how to mobilize the participation of the civic stakeholders in the negotiation, adoption and implementation of legally binding policies affecting the management of two major watersheds: the Danube River Basin and the Santa Clara Basin Basin in California’s Silicon Valley region.
Both cases illustrate how inclusion of environmental and other civic stakeholders led to success negotiation and implementation of the Danube Environmental Protection Convention (1994) and the regional watershed management and pollution prevention plans )1998-2002) aimed at protecting and enhacing the watershed of the Lower South San Francisco Bay.
The Danube River stretches 2,780 kilometers from Germany’s Black Forest to the Danube Delta on the western shore of the Black Sea. The Danube River Basin covers 10% of Europe, a total area of over 800,000 square kilometers. The basin today includes the territories of 19 countries, making it the world’s most international river basin. It is also home to 81 million people with a variety of cultures, languages and histories.
By the 1990s, in a time of unprecedented political and economic change in the Danubian countries, it was understood that efforts to restore the Danube would need broad, unprecedented international cooperation. How this could happen in practice was unclear. Mobilizing nascent civil society in the region was one strategy many decision-makers thought could play a significant role.
The Global Environment Facility (GEF) / United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) project, Strengthening the Implementation for Nutrient Reduction and Transboundary Cooperation in the Danube River Basin (DRP), lauched in 1991, was the first transboundary water project funded through the GEF.
DRP’s goal was to strengthen existing basin management structures and activities, including by building upon the cooperation of civil society, and facilitating the participation of regional, national and local NGOs in the processes around negotiation of the International Danube River Protection Convention (ICPDR).
Through its Small Grants Programme, the GEF helped create the Danube Environmental Forum, the umbrella organization for the largest network of NGOs and local communities in the basin. At its peak the Danube Environment Forum consisted of 174 member organizations from 13 Danube countries. The Danube Small Grants Programme marked the first time the GEF had provided support to NGOs working on watershed management.
The Czech NGO Union for the Morava River approached UNDP in 1993 with a proposal to draft a scheme of nongovernmental representation in the negotiation of the Danube Convention, to ensure widespread stakeholder participation. The scheme had as its key components
(i) the establishment of a separate NGO Forum which would meet and elect its spokespersons to participate as observers in the Danube Task Force charged with completing negotiation of the international agreement;
(ii) NGO Forum spokespersons would be drawn from the Upper, Middle and Lower Danube Basin, with one representative elected from among its membership in each region;
(iii) Austria, Czech Republic and Germany were designated as ‘Upper Basin’ countries; Hungary, Slovenia and Slovakia as ‘Middle Basin’ countries; and Bulgaria, Moldova and Romania as ‘Lower Basin’ countries, thereby ensuring wide geographic representation in the Forum’s activities.
The proposal was quickly endorsed by the Danube Coordination Unit and GEF funding made available for convening an NGO-led meeting. The Danube Environmental Forum elected its representatives at its first meeting in Sibiu, Romania, in early 1994, to serve as observers in the Danube Task Force. The adoption of the Danube River Protection Convention was then supported by the Danube Environment Forum during the concluding phase fo the negotiations.
The experience gained in the Danube programme would be widely applied. “Ultimately, GEF and UNDP efforts in the Danube–Black Sea area”, GEF’s official account of the Danube Environmental Forum reported, became a model for expanding public awareness of the need to embrace integrated water resource management as a way to ensure that economies can grow without environmental destruction.”
Lessons from these negotiations were applied to California’s Santa Clara Basin Watershed Management Initiative (WMI), in which integrated urban governance was practiced through the participation of all relevant stakeholders, incorporating civil society and business in making and implementing decisions at regional and state level.
The WMI’s watershed, the Santa Clara Basin, encompasses southern South San Francisco Bay and the 840-square-mile (2,176 km2) area that drains to it. The basin is complex, spanning across two counties, dozens of municipalities and the catchments of eleven watersheds, which flow into the Lower South San Francisco Bay. It has population of 1.7 million, slightly less than that of Slovenia. The WMI’s mission is to protect and enhance the watershed, creating a sustainable future for the community and the environment.
The WMI Core Group responsible for guiding management of the basin studied the Principle of Subsidiarity applied by European Union in the Danube programme. The aim of the Principle of Subsidiarity is to guarantee a degree of independence for a lower authority in relation to a higher body or for a local authority in relation to central government. It involves the sharing of powers between several levels of authority, a principle which forms the institutional basis for federal states.
In the sphere of watershed management, the importance of applying subsidiarity to decision-making is evident. Local knowledge plays an outsized role in policies affecting the protection and restoration of riparian corridors; whereas jurisdictional boundaries and complexity require regional policy to emerge from stakeholder dialogue and integration in decision-making. Taken together, we may call this ‘top-up’ decision-making, whereby lower levels of implementation inform higher levels having the authority to carry out public policy at scale, thereby adding value to the decisions they reach.
This consensual model of multistakeholder environmental planning practiced by the WMI led to the adoption of a regional Watershed Management Plan and historic Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) pollution prevention measures to protect the Lower South San Francisco Bay and support restoration of the San Francisco estuary.
Abstracting from these two very different cases, some common features shared between them can be identified. They both featured:
- Jurisdictional complexity demanding transboundary or interregional strategies of policy governance;
- Broad geographic and multi-stakeholder representation in decision-making processes;
- Long-term engagement in planning and implementation of legally binding agreements;
- Opportunities for green groups to associate outside of the formal processes and reach internal agreements on their representation and policy proposals;
- Mobilization of knowledge from local communities and the exchange of scientific information between stakeholders;
- Application of the Principle of Subsidiarity at appropriate scale.
Addressing these features, we can construct an ideal-type of a participatory watershed management process.
The two cases may not be replicable, as they emerged under historical conditions that can never be repeated. Nonetheless, their histories illustrate the GEF belief in the necessity of working at various spatial, temporal, and political scales. A better understanding can give decision-makers confidence that longer-term joint interventions can tackle complex problems more effectively for the benefit of watershed health and human communities alike.
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