Organisational performance
Evaluating organisational performance is an important part of catchment management. From a catchment perspective organisational performance is an input, not an outcome. But it has two major virtues as a focus for evaluation:
- organisations generally commit to taking particular actions, so checking whether actions have been done is evaluating them against standards that make sense to them (it is, after all, extremely rare for an organisation to be able to control catchment outcomes), and
- whether actions have been done as planned is relatively easy to assess; by contrast the socio-economic and ecological effects of catchment management can be very hard to discern, because the influence of management is usually evident as a long term trend discerned amidst noisy system dynamics.
A useful form of organisational assessment is a management system audit - see the Stormwater Management System documentation for an example.
Socio-economic and ecological outcomes
Socio-economic and ecological outcomes are what really matter to people, and to plants and animals. So they are the bottom line of catchment management performance.
See Evaluating socio-economic and ecological outcomes for an overview, and the Ecology section for more detail on ecological assessment.
Revising plans
Quite often, in practice, the way a plan is 'revised' is that a new plan is developed. So see Planning for an overview of that. Obviously this involves a lot of 'reinventing the wheel', and there is scope for a more organic relationship to plans: evolving them as issues change and new information emerges.
A strong plan will include processes to govern its revision within it, so see the Case Studies for some examples.
A few examples of plan review and revision processes follow.
Catchment management plans
Watershed Protection Audit (US)
An audit protocol to appraise an existing watershed management plan.
Examples of Catchment Management Plan reviews:
Stormwater management plans
Implementation of Stormwater Management Plans – “It Costs a Lot To Build Bad Products” (doc)
Review of implementation of stormwater management plans in South Creek catchment (Western Sydney)
Examples of Stormwater Management Plan reviews:
