Who engaged with NFEPA?

The dual aims of NFEPA—knowledge co-production and implementation of a prioritization system for freshwater ecosystem management—drove who the project team invited to engage. On the one hand people were targeted who could contribute knowledge about South Africa’s freshwater ecosystems (experts). On the other hand, people were also sought who had knowledge of institutional settings and practices who could facilitate implementation, both through the design of the outputs and influence over others regarding their use within their institution: “we looked for opinion leaders and people who would just be able to add value” (project team transcript). In practice this meant that the bulk of participants were from the water or environment sectors, both from various levels of government and private consultant firms where a significant proportion of freshwater expertise resides in South Africa.

A snowball sampling process was initiated at the ‘stakeholder inception meeting’ (see Table 12) early in the project co-design process (Nel et al., 2016). This approach was used for identifying participants in knowledge co-production. Knowledge co-production often consisted of small groups of invited science or policy experts who performed specific tasks (Table 12). These were interspersed with larger more open but still invited fora for draft materials to be discussed and particular endpoints such as targets negotiated. While all

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Table 12: Mechanisms by which interviewees engaged with science through NFEPA - adapted from Nel et al. (2016).

Name/descriptor (year undertaken)

Purpose Who attended

Project partner inception (2008)

Draft scope/plan for project scientists, practitioners, & funders from 8 partner agencies (managing or conserving

freshwater ecosystems) Stakeholder

inception (2008)

Review scope/plan; Identify & classify stakeholders;

Seek consensus on input data.

provincial conservation

authorities, national & catchment level water managers, national water planners, scientists Policy & practice

alignment (2008)

Align needs across water & environment sectors

Officials from water & environment sectors Regional workshops:

5 x 3days (2009)

Collate, review & refine data inputs;

Seek expert opinion on priorities & data; Dialogue & co-learning among stakeholders

Local experts: aquatic field ecologists, water resource planners, catchment managers with many years of local knowledge

Catchment pilots: 3 catchments, 2 meetings each (2010)

Explore the implications of using the outputs;

Make recommendations based on testing; Build capacity for use of products.

Catchment managers (water) and provincial conservation agencies

National review (2010)

Review draft FEPAs; Solicit joint negotiation & dialogue;

Solicit consensus across sectors & levels of

governance (on outputs & flagship rivers).

Senior officials in water, environment, & agriculture sectors, local experts from each of the 5 regions

Bridging

organisation (2010)

Discuss ongoing institutional support of products (legacy management)

Directors in SANBI

Steering committee (multiple)

Decide on project scope; Review recommendations; Review progress and give strategic advice.

Senior experts from key participating agencies Technical reference group (multiple) Governance: Decide on technical approaches Experienced conservation planners Expert panels (multiple) Develop methods, provide expert opinion, make decisions

5 expert groups including aquatic ecologists, national, provincial, & catchment-scale practitioners

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engagement activities were invited, several interviewees noted the inclusivity of the project which may indicate a degree of flexibility about who could participate. For example:

NFEPA08: “…it was completely open. If you knew something about an area, you were welcome to come in and talk about it. It wasn’t restricted.”

Three groups with different barriers to engagement emerged however. Decision-makers from the municipal level of government were not targeted in the project although some unplanned- for engagement did occur at provincial workshops (project leader pers comm.) The initial reasoning for excluding municipalities has been lost but likely relates to a perception that they were not end-users of NFEPA products (i.e. they were not considered stakeholders) as products were not designed to be applied at the finer municipal scale. Rightly or wrongly the products are being used in at least one municipality however. Other related reasons for not inviting municipal decision-makers were likely limited project capacity to also engage with these groups as there are many more municipalities than provinces.

Secondly, while a suite of consultants did engage with NFEPA, a couple of interviewees noted that some key consultants did not get involved because they could not afford to devote the unpaid time to workshop attendance:

NFEPA15 “at the end of the day it’s still about at least trying to make a living and so if you’re spending two or three days not billing any time—a lot of consultants just won’t do that.”

Similarly there are indications that participation across provinces was uneven and that poorer, less well-resourced provinces were the ones that participated less (based on the breakdown by province of who I contacted for interview and reflections from the project leader). Finally, there appeared to be some who questioned the legitimacy of the project. Interviewees mentioned some national level decision-makers from the water sector who did not engage because they felt their needs were being met by existing products and processes. Also some scientists questioned the validity of the premise of the project and the methods used:

NFEPA11 “There were people who were not there who should have been there”

Project team “one of our lessons is good enough science is better than no science but academics find it very hard to live with good enough science”

In sum it appears those who engaged with NFEPA closely match those decision-makers who should engage according to my revised normative rationale described in Chapter 3: institutions and individuals within them who can benefit from science. With “who can

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benefit” being determined by an institution’s mandate and an individual’s role within that institution. However, challenges may arise when trying to engage with the private sector and government agencies that don’t have the capacity in terms of staff to engage.

4.4.4 Quality of knowledge

In the AdaptNRM case analysed in Chapter 3, three qualities of scientific knowledge were discussed as being of importance to decision-makers. These were the relevance, accessibility and credibility of science. I will now discuss how participants in the NFEPA project valued science in relation to these criteria and others.

Quality of knowledge: relevant

Relevance and timing of knowledge delivery (also considered salience) are noted as issues determining how decision-makers view science (Cash et al., 2006). The interviewees indicated that they seek out science and conduct research and in a targeted way, not out of general interest: “there’s no room for ivory tower researchers in our organisation” (NFEPA01). In other words, science needs to be relevant or address the matters at hand. The high value placed on relevant science was also evident in the common conceptualisation of science being either pure or applied: “we are not I would almost say pure researchers that you would find in the university you know who is basically doing pure science and the focus is getting out publications” (NFEPA14). The inference being that some interviewees did applied science which was more usable and relevant in their institutional role. The NFEPA project team recognised this and so focused on creating relevant products and promoting their uptake. It may be because of this effort and the co-development of project goals with decision-makers that relevance or lack thereof wasn’t a common theme in the interviews: “having good mapping products is absolutely essential. And I don’t think I could do my work without NFEPA” (NFEPA05). What some felt was a lack of uptake of NFEPA outputs was attributed to a lack of effort to promote uptake or lack of mechanisms for uptake of products rather than their lack of relevance.

Quality of knowledge: accessible

Interviewees mentioned several difficulties related to accessibility of science in general which seem to reflect institutional capacity. Limited budgets meant some decision-makers lacked opportunities to travel and meet with experts face-to-face at workshops etc while others had difficulties accessing journals because their organisation could not afford

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subscription: “the fact that we don’t actually you know have access to journals is a major, major problem” (NFEPA05). On the other hand, inaccessibility of science is also a function of too much information: “we have a situation where there’s so much overload of information and that can actually be quite destructive as well” (NFEPA18). The proliferation of journals and other written information sources was cited by several interviewees as an issue because the volume became overwhelming and they didn’t know where to start to find the information they needed.

Quality of knowledge: credible

The decision-makers interviewed generally saw science as a credible source of knowledge on which to base decisions. Science was credible because it was unbiased and unemotional; impartial in an environment where there could be vested interests in particular management decisions:

[science in comparison to politics] NFEPA10: “we virtually regard it as a law. One and one is two and it will always be two. But elsewhere one and one you know can vary from one and a half to two and a half or whatever.”

NFEPA08: “I think the best value of science is that it takes emotions out of the decision-making process”

Peer-reviewed science and data were seen as the best defense for decisions coming under legal scrutiny: “So if we go to court the science needs to be there and it needs to be rivers and it needs to support implementation when there’s conflict” (NFEPA16). If science is generally regarded as credible by these types of decision-maker, it raises the question around whether boundary work or engagement activities are required to increase the credibility of science. A number of interviewees from different sectors noted that with the development imperatives present in South Africa comes pressure to justify why resources such as water should be allocated for conservation rather than consumption. Interviewees from both the environment and consulting domains noted that the national focus of the NFEPA products and the process of involving multiple reputable institutions and experts in their co-production made them a credible source of science on which to justify conservation recommendations. For example:

NFEPA01: “So the NFEPA process has created credibility as well. And that’s also because of the many scientists involved in the process. Not one person, it’s not one agency.”

This suggests that in contested decision contexts engagement of multiple individuals and institutions in knowledge co-production may result in more credible knowledge than that

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produced in isolation by a single research organisation. I would argue that this credibility of NFEPA products had its foundation in a legitimate process of knowledge co-production i.e. an inclusive process involving reputable people from different sectors.

However, the credibility of NFEPA products was undermined for some because of the inadequacy of data available about wetlands: “I think the rivers and so on were quite fine. But I think the wetlands were very problematic” (NFEPA14). It was noted that the shortfalls in the wetlands components lead to some mistrust of the products generally:

NFEPA17: “So when you talk about NFEPA the biggest weakness would be the inclusion of data which wasn’t accurate. So people when you talk about NFEPA that tainted the whole project”

While all interviewees acknowledged that the NFEPA products were based on best available knowledge, this was not enough in some decision contexts. The accuracy of products in the natural resource management sector generally are also likely to decrease over time if they are not regularly updated to reflect changes in land use for example (discussed under Institutional outcomes).

Quality of knowledge: authoritative

Another theme coming from the interviews was that decision-makers prefer consistent and unambiguous tools and advice: “policy-makers aren’t interested in all of the assumptions and confidence limitations and corollaries that go along with a conclusion that you put forward” (NFEPA09). For example the existence of multiple tools to inform particular decisions was problematic for decision-makers e.g. planning tools developed nationally versus a planning tool developed for a province:

NFEPA16 “So there was not only confusion on how to take freshwater priorities from a biodiversity perspective into mainstream planning, there were two of these [planning products]. And it was easier for the planners—at least at a very early local level just to ignore both”

The decision-makers referred to in this quote had not engaged with NFEPA and for them it appeared to be easier to avoid using any science-based tools rather than trying to understand why they were different and justify using one over the other. This represents a dilemma for engagement with science involving decision-makers. In time-poor environments engagement may not be an option and so there is a preference for unambiguous scientific advice. However, simply pointing to science to justify decisions ignores the values and social biases inherent in deciding how to respond to scientific knowledge (Jasanoff, 2003; Nowotny,

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2007). It also assumes scientists understand the implications of their work in the decision making context.