COLLABORATIVE LEARNING AS A TOOL FOR ANALYSIS AND DELIBERATION IN WATERSHED POLICY DEVELOPMENT

Watershed-scale management of water quality requires integration of a variety of scales of ecosystem processes with complex social and regulatory jurisdictions. In order to capture the spatial and temporal complexity of ecosystem processes within a policy framework, we developed a watershed nutrient management decision support system (DSS) for both agricultural and urban landscapes. Our approach for developing the DSS integrates stakeholder participation in each step of the project using Analysis and Deliberation (A/D. Analysis is used to inform policy deliberation so that the best information is brought to bear upon the problem to be solved (“getting the science right”). Deliberation is used not only to make a decision, but also to frame the analysis and to empower participants in understanding analytic findings (“getting the right science”). Thus, risk management in resource decision-making is not solely within the discretion of the analysts. All interested and affected parties (stakeholders) decide what information should be considered in the analysis, what approaches should be used to predict impacts, and how to evaluate alternative impact management schemes. Non-technical stakeholders also participate in framing the issues that are salient to the decision problem. Such issues include deciding what information should be considered, what further studies should be performed to reduce uncertainty, what models should be used to predict impacts and to evaluate alternatives, what assumptions and defaults should be used in these models, and so on. This approach can be applied to different watersheds with minor modification for local processes.