Participatory Criteria Selection: Finding Conflictive Positions in Environmental Postassessment of Land Management and Restoration Actions

Abstract

Stakeholder participation in environmental assessment of past land management and restoration actions in drylands is important to improve knowledge and management of these ecosystems. Participatory identification and prioritization of monitoring and assessment criteria, while increasingly incorporated into assessment, is still perceived as challenging due to conflicting values and perspectives among stakeholders. As this research demonstrates, a two-step participatory (n = 33) process consisting of a semistructured interview followed by the revised Simos procedure for the identification and prioritization of criteria to assess five actions in the San Simon watershed (Arizona), proved useful to (1) identify and prioritize criteria and (2) expose the source of individual priorities. This flexible but structured process provides a first pass at identifying participant assessment criteria and reducing conflict associated with differing values and perspectives of those with a direct stake in both past and future management and planning of land management and restoration actions.

Keywords:

• conflictive values
• criteria selection
• participatory assessment
• social preferences
• weight elicitation

Acknowledgments

Our thanks to the Gila Watershed Partnership and the University of Arizona Cooperative Extension office in Safford for their logistic support during these interviews. Finally, our thanks to the stakeholders who gladly agreed to participate in this study and share with us their views about the San Simon watershed.

Notes

This research was approved by the Institutional Review Board for the Protection of Human Subjects (IRB project number: project number 13-0297; FWA number: FWA00004218).