Right from the very outset of a wetland assessment exercise, it is important to identify and involve the multiple national, regional and local stakeholders living in the area or otherwise influencing or being influenced by the situation. Just as relevant as describing the physical aspects of the wetlands and the aquatic resources in a given area or watershed, is the mapping out of who lives there, who uses and manages the resources, who controls the management practices, who depends on the resources for their livelihoods, and who influences the resources through their legal positions, economic activities or everyday life practices. Their knowledge, understanding and opinions about management concerns, objectives, and issues are crucial to take into account when making an analysis of a current situation in view of identifying which management issues are to be addressed.

The importance given to stakeholder involvement is characteristic for communicative approaches to planning and planning theories. Involving stakeholders in all the steps of the assessment and planning processes has many advantages. It brings the planners and central-level decision-makers closer to the reality lived by the people in the area. It allows for bringing local knowledge into the recognized knowledge base informing the decision-making. It also creates a social situation where the state of the resource, drivers, pressures and impacts can be identified and the multiple management issues and response options be brought to everybody’s attention, and where viewpoints on this can be advocated, debated, discussed and negotiated.

As a reader of this toolkit, you may have different entry points, concerns or roles in relation to wetland assessments. You may belong to a local group of farmers or fishers who wish to take up some issue; you may be professional planners employed by local authorities; you may come from an international or a local NGO concerned about sustainable development; or having a concern from some different position. In this toolkit, the methods and tools given to allow stakeholder participation in the planning process are mostly intended for academic researchers or technical planners who are not familiar with such tools. If you belong to a local community group, you may read this section if you are curious to know how the planners and researchers talk about how to work with you. Maybe it could inspire your own initiatives in producing guidelines for people like yourselves on how to work more efficiently with planners and researchers in order to promote and address your own concerns and ideas.

The Assessment Phase

As the wetland assessment process evolves, you should be producing a series of outputs at the level of stakeholder engagement.

The first task is always to identify the relevant stakeholders. This is sometimes referred to as stakeholder mapping. The output of the stakeholder mapping is a data-base (or “map”) of the concerned stakeholders (communities, organizations, institutions, authorities) at the various local, provincial and national levels. Who are they? Where can they be contacted? How are they concerned by the assessment? What is their role in the assessment?

Once the relevant stakeholders have been identified, the next series of tasks concern the effective involvement of the identified stakeholders in the assessment process in various ways. Stakeholders can be involved in providing information and local knowledge about the characteristics and “state” of the wetlands under assessment. They can be involved in identifying (competing) uses or issues of management and conflicts of interest to be addressed. Some stakeholders may evolve into actual partners for joint planning of actions, others will be involved on a more consultative basis or invited to assist the assessment team in the data collection and observation activities.

In all types of involvement, the establishment of some kind of social relations between the assessment team and the identified stakeholders is of paramount importance. The nature of such relations can differ from merely creating a basic common ground of mutual recognition and trust to actual working relationships or partnerships.

The outputs of the various activities of stakeholder involvement may be expressed in terms of number of stakeholder meetings organized, agendas discussed, and attendance to the meetings. Outputs may also be registered as responses to questionnaires or interviews; or reports documenting stakeholder resource management practices, knowledge, views on the state or use of the wetlands, livelihood situations, resource use conflicts or concerns, or desired outcomes to be achieved in the future. The establishment of social relations, working relations, routines of communication, negotiated solutions to resolve conflicts, etc. can also be seen as outputs. Finally, enhanced stakeholder capacity to address conservation, livelihoods or policy and resource governance issues (knowledge, competencies, and skills) is often a relevant aspect to consider in terms of outputs.

The Action Planning Phase

At the end of the assessment phase, it can be very useful to organise State-of-the-System (SOS) Meetings or workshops with the local stakeholders and authorities. The objective of an SOS meeting is to provide a setting where all concerned parties have the opportunity of reaching a common understanding of the state of the aquatic ecosystems of the local area, and what kind of resource management problems and livelihood concerns are to be addressed.

The setting of such meetings should be carefully considered in each case.

• Should all identified stakeholder groups be invited to attend the same session, or is it better to separate into two or more groups of stakeholders? Local community representatives may not wish to speak up so much in front of the local authorities, women may not feel comfortable in speaking up in front of the men, etc.


• Where should the meetings be held? In a meeting room of the local government? In the house of the local village chief? Other places?


• How should they be organized? PowerPoint slide shows? Talks by the experts? Group work and participations amongst participants with expert-facilitators giving inputs? Etc.


• How do you decide on the issues or aspects to be presented for shared learning and discussion during the SOS workshops?

As outcomes of such meetings you are trying to get commitment and support from all stakeholders to engage in a process of analysing the results of the assessments made, and provide additional data which can help an action planning process to take shape.

Additional data collection may consist in household interviews;focus group discussions; expert interviews; resource inventories; stakeholder Delphi surveys; etc.

The main outcomes of the action planning phase are the suggestions (targets) for the action plans to be addressing. Note that the action plans should have been assessed by the local participating stakeholders, and each of them should have a main responsible implementing stakeholder.

The Implementation, Monitoring and Evaluation Phase

Stakeholder engagement continues to be of importance during implementation, monitoring and evaluation. At this stage, it is important that stakeholders understand and commit themselves to making work plans, selecting and observing indicators, and discussing the findings in view of identifying possible needs for corrections and follow-up actions. Tools and types of outputs for this can be drawn from existing tool-boxes of Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation, some of which are listed in 2.3 Implementation, Monitoring and Evaluation.

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