Combining systems thinking with a qualitative ...

Aspects of Applied Biology 93, 2009 Integrated Agricultural Systems: Methodologies, Modelling and Measuring

Combining systems thinking with a qualitative stakeholder process: a case study in regional land fragmentation in New Zealand By M E WEDDERBURN1*, B SMALL1*, M O’CONNOR2, T BARNARD3,, D T RUTLEDGE4, B HUSER5, U TREBILCO5, D HOOD6 and M BUTLER7 AgResearch, East Street, P Bag 3123, Hamilton New Zealand Universite de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, Guyancourt, Paris, France 3 SCION, Rotorua, New Zealand 4 Landcare Research, Hamilton, New Zealand 5 Environment Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand 6 Waikato District Health Board, Hamilton, New Zealand 7 Environment Bay of Plenty, Whakatane, New Zealand * Corresponding author 1

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Summary Key to implementing a sustainable development approach is the ability to build and act on knowledge integrated across social, cultural, economic and environmental issues in space and time. This knowledge can be sourced in many forms from a range of people and the acceptability of the resulting conditions deliberated by a number of affected stakeholders before final decisions are implemented. A research project “Creating Futures” centred on the Waikato region of the North Island New Zealand has as a focus the development of a spatial decision support system and a deliberative process to assist regional planning. These methods aim to explore future scenarios and deliberate the consequences of different actions. This paper concentrates on the development of the deliberative process with inclusion of system methodologies to assist in problem definition. It uses a case study on land fragmentation within the Waikato region. Land fragmentation is defined as the splitting off from farms of small blocks of land close to the city and rural towns. We describe the drivers of land fragmentation including demographic change, lifestyle values, and economics of land use; and how fragmentation impacts on social, cultural, economic and environmental issues. A conceptual model of the impacts of current land fragmentation is described and used to populate the Deliberation Matrix with stakeholder perceptions. The current state of the social, cultural, economic and environmental issues under land fragmentation are deliberated for their acceptability by a variety of stakeholders and the outcomes documented. Key words: Deliberation, systems thinking, New Zealand, regional planning Introduction Maintaining environmental integrity is crucial for New Zealand’s well-being because the biological basis to 64% of New Zealand’s export earnings lends significant competitive advantage to international trade and underpins economic growth (MAF, 2008). In a resource constrained 93

environment (MfE, 2007; Environment Waikato, 2008) local and international communities are however demanding that environmental sustainability credentials are proven (MAF, 2008; Barry, 2008). Local councils operate under the Local Government Act 2002 that provides a broad role for them to promote the social, economic, cultural and environmental well being of their communities. They are charged with the production of Long Term Community Council Plans (LTCCP’s) in consultation with their communities to address the four well beings. How to ensure an outcome that allows a ‘win-win’ between all four well beings, in a country that is highly dependent on its natural capital, highlights the dilemma of sustainable development. Land owners, farmers, environmental groups, and urban dwellers are all impacted by policies that manage land and water use. Key to implementing a sustainable development approach is the ability to build and act on knowledge integrated across social, cultural, economic and environmental issues in space and time. As argued in diverse contexts since the 1970s (Rutledge et al., 2008), better integrated knowledge of coupled ecological-socio-economic systems can, in principle, assist policy development and planning in moving towards sustainable development by permitting the assessment of the viability and potentialities of those systems relative to the needs and performance goals (well beings) of current and future generations. However, the fulfilment of these hopes for integrated assessment depends not only on effective and pragmatic systems analyses as the science base, but also on the embedding of systems science in collective learning. This is dependent on the sourcing of knowledge in many forms from a range of people and the acceptability of the resulting conditions deliberated by a number of affected stakeholders before final decisions are implemented. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate some of the design principles being put to work in a programme of applied science and stakeholder consultation on sustainable development in New Zealand. We specifically focus on the linking of systems methodologies with deliberation tools to enable collective learning and decision making related to implementation of regional plans. The research is being undertaken as part of ‘Creating Futures’ an innovative Foundation of Research and Science and Technology programme that is led by a regional council, Environment Waikato, and a consortium of research providers that aims to provide councils with processes and tools to assist in long term integrated planning for the Waikato region . The project has two objectives: (1) developing deliberative processes to support the LTCCP process; and (2) development of a spatial decision support system to support both the deliberation and LTTCP process (Rutledge et al., 2007). Materials and Methods An end user group of five comprising regional, district and health planners interacted with the research team throughout the life of the project. We held five workshops to explore the use and development of a deliberation process and associated tools (O’Connor 1999, 2001, 2006) for evaluating the impact of regional issues and related strategies. The deliberation process consists of six steps: 1. Identify the issue; 2. Organise the issue into a matrix (Deliberation Matrix) that has the strategies for evaluation against the z axis, stakeholders on the y axis and performance criteria along the x axis; 3. Identify and mobilise tools that can represent and populate the performance criteria; 4. Deliberate the consequences of the current system and any proposed strategy with regard to the identified stakeholders and the performance criteria; 5. Report on insights and recommendations; and 6. Return to step one. The Deliberation Matrix (O’Connor, 1999) was the tool that was used to organise the information and to facilitate the stakeholders in making transparent their judgements as part of the deliberation. Our first workshops concentrated on development of the Deliberation Matrix and steps 2–4 of the process with the participants taking on the role of stakeholders and working on an issue predetermined by the research team e.g. a deteriorating trend in water quality (Wedderburn et al., 2008). It became obvious that, although this assisted in identifying the role of the deliberation tool, the identification of the issue was of critical importance as was the development of a shared understanding of the system 94

and the revealing of stakeholder mental models. Over two four hour workshops we concentrated on step 1 ‘identifying the problem’ through the use of system methods (Senge, 1994; Maani & Cavana, 2007; Van den Belt, 2004) and the development of a conceptual model to prepare a sound information and knowledge base for the deliberation process. The end user group had previously identified an issue for study i.e. ‘land fragmentation’, defined as: ‘the increasing fragmentation of rural farm land caused by development of lifestyle blocks’. The systems approach was taken to allow the workshop participants to: (a) develop a shared understanding of the systems/processes that lead to land fragmentation; (b) collectively learn about the impact of land fragmentation on a range of outcomes; (c) identify where interventions could be made to improve the outcomes; and (d) identify data, information and indicator needs to allow evaluation of the current state of land fragmentation and the impact of future strategies. Affinity diagrams (Maani & Cavana, 2007) depicting the drivers that influence land fragmentation and the variables that land fragmentation influences were used to clarify the issue and organise the information for use in deliberation. To deepen the understanding and make transparent their worldviews, individuals developed a causal loop diagram (CLD) of the relationships between the variables that land fragmentation influences (Maani & Cavana, 2007). Each individual approached the subject from their professional expertise i.e. district/regional policy planning, health sector planning and land use research. On completion of the CLD, individuals were asked to identify the key points of influence within the system and what they would like to observe or monitor to assess the condition of the system. This information was used to identify the performance criteria for use in the Deliberation Matrix. When completed each diagram was described by the individual who developed it and clarification and discussion held among the group of participants. A deliberative process was followed with each stakeholder discussing their performance criteria (i.e. reason for choice, clarity of criteria) with an ability to change their choice after group discussion. Each stakeholder then gave a judgement on the state of each performance criteria. The resulting conversation was both documented and taped. Results and Conclusions Due to the high level of overlap between the drivers of land fragmentation and the variables that land fragmentation influenced the results were amalgamated into Table 1. Table 1. Drivers of land fragmentation and variables land fragmentation influences. Driver/ Variable in bold with associated examples extracted from the full set of information Landuse e.g. land management and practice

Business e.g. shop and retail opportunities

Employment e.g. local employment opportunities

Health services e.g. hospitals, clinics

Schools e.g. school attendance

Social Networks e.g. voluntarism

Demographics e.g. peri-urban population

Landscape Aesthetics e.g. noise and light

Housing e.g. affordable homes for locals

Risk e.g. fire, flood, invasive species

Property Boundaries e.g. zoning rules

Government System e.g. rates

Land Affordability e.g. prices

Water Nutrients e.g. flows and state

Farm Enterprise e.g. productive capacity

Recreation Amenity e.g. accessibility to nature

Energy

Natural Capital e.g. soil, vegetation, biodiversity

Te ao Maori

Service Demand e.g. traffic intensity

Infrastructure

e.g. energy use and demand

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e.g. cultural resource

e.g. demand for services

The affinity and causal loop diagrams allowed people to define the linkages and relationships between social, economic and environmental system properties. The process assisted the participants to identify the key points of influence and effect enabling them to determine what they would like to observe or monitor to assess the state of the system and monitor change over time. This resulted in a systemic identification of performance criteria that were highly relevant for measuring system performance across the four well beings and is the direct link into the deliberation process via organisation of the Deliberation Matrix (Table 2). Table 2. Deliberation Matrix: Key performance criteria and judgements on the current state of the system land fragmentation influences Stakeholder (SH)

SH1 – Waikato Health Board

Performance Criteria

Performance Criteria Economic

Performance Criteria Social

Environmental Environment

Performance Criteria Other (e.g. cultural, governance)

Social equity

Social

Landuse planning

Landuse

Landuse

externalities –Distributional access

Social equity

Landscape aesthetics Water use Pollution

SH2 –Environment Bay of Plenty

Water nutrients

Productivity per hectare

Access to social services (employment education goods and services) Social

Access rights

Governance

segregation

(regional) Planner SH3 – Academic

SH4 – Land Use Scientist

Environmental and cultural functions of land

Land affordability/ landuse

Landuse (change)

Opportunity set

Quality of

Rules and reasons

community

justifying affordability and access to diverse conditions of wellbeing

Social networks Identities Social access

Asymmetries of access

Community extinction – community viability

SH5 – Environment Waikato (regional) resource information scientist

Landuse

Access to

Suitability and versatility

employment Access to education

Asymmetries of access to social services

Institutional Community choice

The revealing of the performance criteria by each stakeholder made for robust discussion facilitating clarification and change to the criteria. The following are extracts from the taped conversation: “I haven’t got anything in the social box, which makes me feel a bit…. My point there would be, the wider social equity – given my concern that we are going to get shifting of resources with net loss to others and further investment in those who are already doing rather well. It’s the flow-on effects for other communities that may not be initially identified as being impacted… it’s about total community impact” (stakeholder 1; “externalities” (voice in background)“Social externalities” (2nd voice in background)“Yes, that would be lovely, thanks for couching it”. This led to a strong discussion about a concept that participants initially termed ‘social externalities’ although later 96

discussion considered this term too fuzzy and only meaningful in relation to specific defined boundaries and instead discussed the concept of ‘distributional consequences’ of land fragmentation. This conversation concerned the capturing of changes in the social criteria related to distribution of and opportunity for access to resources between social networks, i.e. access conditions to many things. The process revealed to the participants the requirement for more data and information. Allocation of a judgement to the current state of the performance criteria based on stakeholder perceptions indicated that little or no data or information was known by them to make firm judgements as reflected in the number of don’t know and so-so judgements. It is at this point in the process that the request was made by the stakeholders for more knowledge. This is where the link to the relevancy of science derived information is made that gives permission to the scientists to mobilise sets of relevant information. This occurs in this project through the use of the spatial decision support system. The provision of this information will in turn assist in the verification of the conceptual maps and feed back into the choice of performance criteria. Acknowledgements This research was funded by the New Zealand Foundation of Research science and Technology Contract ENVW0601’Creating Futures’ and Contract CX10 0603 ‘Delivering tools for environmental performance’. References Barry M. 2008. The rise of green consumerism – there is no plan B. Conflict in paradise: the transformation of rural NZ. Environmental Defence Society Conference, Auckland, 11–12 June 2008. Environment Waikato. 2008. The condition of rural water and soil in the Waikato Region: Risks and Opportunities. (http://www.ew.govt.nz/Audiences/For-farmers/). Maani K, Cavana R. 2007. Systems Thinking, System Dynamics – Managing Change and Complexity, 2nd Edn. Prentice Hall, Pearson Education. 278 pp. MAF. 2008. Briefing to Incoming Minister. mafnet/publications/incombrief.html. Ministry for the Environment 2007 Environment New Zealand 2007 – New Zealand’s second national State of the Environment report (released 31 January 2008). http://www.mfe.gov.nz/state/reporting/enz-07. html. O’Connor M. 1999. Dialogue and debate in a post-normal practice of science: A reflexion. Futures 31:671–687. O’Connor M. 2001. ‘Social Costs and Sustainability’. pp.181–202. In Economics, Ethics and Environmental Policy: Contested Choices, pp. 181–202. Eds Daniel Bromley and Jouni Paavola. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. O’Connor M. 2006. Building knowledge partnerships with ICT? Social and technological conditions of conviviality. In Interfaces between science and society. Eds A Guimaraes Pereira, S Guedes Vaz and S Tognetti. Sheffield: Greenleaf. Rutledge D T, Cameron M, Elliot S, Fenton T, Huser B, McBride G, McDonald G, O’Conor M, Phyn D, Poot J, Price R, Scrimgour F, Small B, Tait A, Van Delden H, Wedderburn M E, Woods R A . 2008. Choosing Regional Futures: challenges and choices in building integrated models to support long term regional planning in New Zealand. Regional Science Policy and Practice 1(1):85–108. Rutledge D T, McDonald G, Cameron M, Mcbride G, Poot J et al. 2007. Choosing Regional Futures Spatial Decision Support System draft specificiations. Contract report 0708/063. Hamilton, 97

New Zealand: Landcare Research. Senge P M. 1994. The Fifth Discipline: The art and practice of the learning organisation, Paperback Edn. New York, NY, USA: Currency Doubleday. Van den Belt M. 2004. Mediated modelling: a system dynamics approach to environmental consensus building. Washington DC: Island Press. Wedderburn M E, Small B, Barnard T. 2008. Deliberation Workshop 11 March/16 June/18 Nov 2008 Reports produced for Environment Waikato on behalf of the ‘Creating Futures’ programme. http://www.creatingfutures.co.nz.

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