Incorporating objectives of stakeholders in strategic planning of urban water management

ABSTRACT

Urban water management (UWM) strategies are difficult to implement in the urban space due to conflicting professional objectives and lack of communication tools. We explore stakeholders, objectives and indicators for urban water management and urban planning to make UWM relevant for other urban disciplines. Stakeholder analysis was applied to systematically identify stakeholders and their objectives by screening literature published in professional journals and conference proceedings. The literature study was supplemented with three workshops. Similar sets of planning objectives and stakeholders were identified in the two analyses. Fourteen stakeholders were identified, from the utility to legal stakeholders. We identified 17 objectives and nine sub-objectives, that can be divided into four overall groups; welfare for citizens, environmental protection, economic growth and technical objectives. Our results are relevant for a variety of UWM projects, providing a common terminology when discussing objectives between stakeholders and enabling an exploration of multifunctional UWM strategies.

KEYWORDS:

• Stakeholder analysis
• planning objectives
• structured decision-making
• urban water management
• urban planning

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Odense municipality, VandCenter Syd (VCS Denmark), Ramboll and KLIKOVAND for aiding us in the data collection. We would also like to thank Shane Carnohan and Ursula S. McKnight from DTU Environment for their valuable feedback on our manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplementary data can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded by Innovation Fund Denmark through the Water Smart Cities Project [Grant no. 5157-00009B].