Because what happens in the water cycle affects whole communities, its management is a matter of public interest. So governments are naturally key players in water cycle management.

A useful way of helping both a local community and a local government organisation to consider changed approaches to urban water management is to facilitate community involvement in decision-making. There are many ways to do this, including:

• advisory committees
• citizen juries
• focus groups
• open space workshops.

1. "Because it is a good thing in itself".
   By valuing democratic traditions, we value having an informed community deliberating with care about how it should act. Processes which open up decision-making to give citizens richer input are aligned with these democratic ideals.
2. When you want to broaden the range of issues and options considered
   Involving more people in conversation about what should be done usually widens the range of issues considered. This can be helpful when you want to promote an innovation, and your own organisation is disinclined to consider it seriously.
3. When you want to make decision-making processes more transparent
   Transparency helps foster principled and accountable decision-making.

If you are employed within a government body (e.g. a local Council), the extent to which you can proactively increase community involvement in decision-making will be influenced strongly by local politics and by senior management culture. As with all change management practices, we each need to explore what is possible within our own situations.

Methods

• Citizen science toolkit
  A toolkit from the Coastal CRC of over 60 ways in which communities can be involved in decision-making, including:
  • advisory committees
  • citizen juries
  • focus groups
  • open space workshops.

  "Citizen science is a participatory process for including all sectors of society - general public, government and industry - in the development and conduct of public-interest research in order to bridge the gaps between science and the community and between scientific research and policy, decision-making and planning. Bridging these gaps involves a process of social learning through sound environmental research, full public participation, the adoption of adaptive management practices and the development of democratic values, skills and institutions for an active civil society."
  
  See also:

  • annotated bibliography of citizen science
  • papers on citizen science
    
• Community Engagement: Stories and Resources (iPlan - NSW)
  Directory to examples of best practice.

• Towards whole of community engagement: a practical toolkit (pdf)

• Success factors in community engagement (pdf)

• Engaging Stakeholders (Urbanwater.info)
• Toolkits
• Tools and Approaches
• Case Studies
• Indigenous Communities
  
• On the Path to Becoming a Green Community (US EPA)

Case studies

• Bronte catchment: Citizens' Jury - summary case study

• Case studies from the CRC for Coastal Zone, Estuary and Waterway Management

Facilitating community involvement in decision-making helps because:

1. Actively involving one's local community increases the transparency of decision-making and increases the accountability of organisations to each other and to local people.
• More transparency and accountability improve the quality of decision-making.
• They also improve the stability of decisions, because the decisions are jointly owned.
2. Broadening the input into decision-making improves the quality of decisions, because many of the worst policy failures have their roots in poor scoping at the beginning of decision-making processes.
3. It deepens local people's ownership of the decisions, which makes implementation easier if their cooperation is required.

On involving stakeholders

• Adaptive Management
  
• Engaging stakeholders
  
• Principled negotiation
  
• Selected references on collaborative decision making and natural resource management

On democracy

In Australia "representative democracy" is the standard model: we elect representatives to govern our communities - locally, at state level, and nationally. There are other approaches to democracy. Many of these are forms of "participatory democracy", in which citizens participate directly in decision-making.

See also Community Development and Education