Participatory Approaches and the Role of Facilitative Leadership

Involving a broad range of stakeholders in the management of river basins is one of the three key principles of risk-informed river basin management. This chapter describes the role of the facilitative leader in involving stakeholders. He or she guides and assists actors in designing the participatory process and thus helps to improve the process of decision-making, as opposed to other actors, who are primarily focused on influencing the content of the decision. Three examples from practice are described of the work of the facilitative leader in water management related cases. The first case addresses the collaborative development of a groundwater model in the four Northern provinces of the Netherlands, i.e., Groningen, Friesland, Overijssel, and Drenthe. Prerequisite in that development was that the model had to be usable by a variety of governmental actors. The second case addresses the development of a set of policy recommendations for the accommodation of water in the spatial planning of the town of Arnemuiden and its immediate surroundings (province Zeeland in the southwest of the Netherlands). The third case addresses a duo facilitative leadership in the river Dhünn, i.e., a small river in the valley of the German river Wupper that is a tributary of the river Rhine. In this case, stakeholder participation aimed to facilitate the connection between science and regional policy making and to facilitate participation in water management. All three examples demonstrated the important and central role the facilitative leader plays in (1) designing and implementing the collaborative process, (2) assisting the stakeholders in choosing the participatory methodology, (3) translating between professional and other kinds of jargon, and (4) forming a stable element in contentious and complex water management related decision-making processes.