Collaborative workshop for identifying and prioritising transboundary problems
Length of workshop:
Approximately 3 hours + of the first TDA Development Workshop
Structure:
Plenary with the full TDA Development Team
Purpose:
To reach a consensus between the TDA Development Team of the priority transboundary problems affecting the water system.
The Task:
- With the aid of a good facilitator, the TDA Development Team is encouraged to brainstorm a complete list of the transboundary problems for the water system. The facilitator should prompt and write ALL answers on a flip chart or white board.
- Once a list has been created, encourage the team to focus in on the real transboundary environmental problems (many in the list are likely to be governance causes or impacts).
- In addition, identify the geographical scale of each problem and how strongly transboundary the problems are – a number of problems are likely to be shared rather than transboundary.
- Finally get the team members to prioritise the problems based on a set of easily understandable criteria using printed score sheets. Each team member should score the transboundary problems individually.
Transboundary Problem Prioritisation Criteria:
Examples of prioritisation criteria are shown below. This list is not prescriptive – types of criteria will be dependent on the transboundary system being studied.
- Transboundary nature of a problem – geographical and temporal scale.
- Future risk of the problem.
- Relationship with other transboundary problems.
- Expected multiple benefits that might be achieved by addressing a problem.
- Lack of perceived progress in addressing/solving a problem at the national level.
- Recognised multi-country water conflicts.
- Reversibility/irreversibility of the problem
Based on a set of defined criteria, assign a score to each transboundary problem between 0 (no importance), 1 (low importance, 2 (moderate importance) and 3 (high importance) to determine the relevance of the problem from the perspective of the present day and a pre-defined point in the future (e.g. 25 years) based on a business as usual scenario.
Report Back and Discussion:
Summarise the results in a spreadsheet and present to the team for discussion. Conduct a critical discussion on the outputs and ensure all comments are captured by a rapporteur.
Outputs:
- List of transboundary problems, complete with information on geographical scale
- Agreed set of Transboundary Problem Prioritisation Criteria
- Detailed list of prioritised transboundary problems with scoring data
- Annotated list of comments from TDA Development Team