PhD Cotutelle Scholar
Co-engineering participatory modelling processes for water planning and management
E-mail: katherine.daniell@anu.edu.au

Broad-scale multi-stakeholder decision-aiding processes for complex water planning and management issues are typically organised or "co-engineered" by several agencies or actors. These participatory processes are therefore co-initiated, co-designed and co-implemented by a number of people. Co-engineering has received scant attention in studies of participatory decision-making and remains an important gap in current knowledge. The method of intervention research was used to investigate the co-engineering of two participatory modelling processes: the creation of the "Lower Hawkesbury Estuary Management Plan", a regional risk management planning project on the northern edge of Sydney in Australia; and the "Living with Floods and Droughts" capacity building project for co-managing flood and drought risks in the Sofia region of Bulgaria. From these research interventions and their comparative evaluations, a number of important innovations and insights have been identified, including that multiple and divergent objectives within co-engineering project teams can lead to conflicts which can have major impacts on the implemented participatory modelling processes. There are therefore two processes to organise to aid multi-stakeholder decision-making: the co-engineering process and the participatory water management process. The cotutelle PhD is principally funded by the General Sir John Monash Foundation and further supported by the ANU/CSIRO (Australia) and Cemagref/AgroParisTech (France).