Harmonising Stakeholders’ Perspectives: a Watershed Project Desirability Index

Any watershed project is a multi-stakeholder endeavour incorporating diverse socio-hydrological dimensions of a region. The project’s worth is correlated with the stakeholders’ willingness to continue. Identifying the most desirable watershed parameters is challenging for watershed managers. This research aims to explore critical parameters and construct a watershed project desirability indexing framework to examine the congruence of stakeholders’ perceptions on a hypothetical watershed parameter list. It contains 31 critical operational areas (or sub-domains) in eight domains incorporating different management mechanisms and socio-economic and environmental activities covering diverse watershed inventories based on watershed management protocols, including the Integrated Watershed Management Programme (IWMP), Integrated Water Resource Management Programme (IWRM), World Bank directives and government guidelines, and relevant literature. Stakeholders’ agreeability was recorded from two stratified stakeholder groups at the Satpokholi watershed project in the Brahmaputra Valley, India, using a structured questionnaire based on a 5-point Likert Scale. Subsequently, the degree of alignment of the perception of stakeholder groups regarding the sub-domains and domains and the relative desirability are evaluated by applying statistical and mathematical operations. Results reveal that this watershed project desirability indexing (WPDI) would help identify the congruency of views regarding adopted watershed domains and sub-domains. Applying the same WPDI, stakeholders’ desirability in two other adjacent watershed projects (Kaldia and Turkunijan) was evaluated. Findings were validated by a series of expert interviews, which shows the potential of this WPDI to assess different watershed projects operating in an analogous environment. This indexing method might be modified to manage and reengineer multi-stakeholder projects where incongruent perceptions exist.