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Water planning and management are faced with increasing levels of uncertainty, complexity and conflict. Multiple decision makers and managers, legislative requirements, competing interests, resource scarcity and uncertainties about the future in a more connected and rapidly changing world, are drivers for the need to develop improved approaches to aid decision making in the water sector.
This case study-based research aims to contribute to this need by focussing on the development, implementation and evaluation of methods to aid collective water related decision making for communities, policy makers, managers, and technical experts. The research is interdisciplinary and integrative, drawing on theory and practice from water engineering, natural resources management, decision aiding, participatory methods and modelling, learning and knowledge creation, planning theories and evaluation.
The two case study applications of this work are: the creation of the Lower Hawkesbury Estuary Management Plan, a regional planning project funded by the Hornsby Shire Council in NSW, Australia; and a participatory risk management process, “living with floods and droughts”, in the Sofia region of Bulgaria, funded by the European AquaStress Project. 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).
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