Decision-Making in Water Governance: From Conflicting Interests to Shared Values

The development of water infrastructure is a long and complex process that involves multiple stakeholders, multiple scales, various sub-systems and relations of dependence among stakeholders. Stakeholder participation is increasingly seen as an indispensable element of water policymaking. The failure to address stakeholders’ underlying values, however, may create or exacerbate conflicts. In this chapter, we address the difficulty of approaching stakeholder participation in terms of conflicting interests. We illustrate this with an urban flood prevention case, followed by a categorisation of the difficulties presented by such processes. Instead of pursuing an interest-oriented approach, we suggest taking a step back in order to discern the influence of differing conceptions of shared values on multi-stakeholder decision-making processes. The goal of this chapter is to achieve a better understanding of the difficulties entailed in interest-driven decision-making processes in water governance, and how it could be beneficial to pursue a value-sensitive approach in such situations.