Participatory water resources planning and management in an Agriculturally Intensive Watershed in Quebec, Canada using Stakeholder Built System Dynamics Models

Abstract

Participatory water resources planning and management in an Agriculturally Intensive Watershed in Quebec, Canada using Stakeholder Built System Dynamics Models The participation of stakeholders is an important component in integrated and adaptive watershed planning and management. In Quebec, Canada watershed organizations are in the process of implementing participatory based watershed planning and management schemes. However, there is a lack of simple and readily implementable frameworks and methods to explicitly involve stakeholders, as well as integrate physical and social processes, in watershed planning and management in Quebec. This paper describes the application of the first three stages of a newly proposed five stage stepwise Participatory Model Building framework that was developed to help facilitate the participatory investigation of problems in watershed planning and management through the use of qualitative system dynamics models. In the agriculturally intensive Du Chene watershed in Quebec, eight individual stakeholder interviews were conducted in cooperation with the local watershed organization to develop qualitative system dynamics models that represent the main physical and social processes in the Du Chene watershed. The proposed Participatory Model Building framework was found to be accessible for all the interviewees, and was deemed to be very useful by the watershed organization to develop an overview of the different perspectives of the main stakeholders in the watershed, as well as to help develop watershed policies and strategies. The individual qualitative system dynamics models developed in this study can subsequently be converted into an overall group built system dynamics model (describing the socio-economic-political components of the watershed), which in turn can be quantified and coupled with a physically based model such as HEC-HMS or SWAT (describing the physical components of the watershed).