Long-term social effects of participatory river revitalization projects:
The analysis of the interviews in the five case studies revealed the most relevant social effects and pro-cess conditions for these effects.
The most relevant long-term social effects we found was social learning on three aspects: learning about the benefits of ecological measures, leading a participatory process and interacting appropriately with others.
A very notable result of the interview analysis was that trust-building was mentioned by only few stake-holders. Trust was mainly emphasised as outcome of participatory planning when conflict had occurred in an earlier phase of the process. In particular governmental and municipal actors reported about changes in relationships. Most often, however, trust was mentioned in an inverse sense, namely that conflicts and loss of trust could be avoided through the participatory process.
Furthermore, we found no evidence of participatory planning process extending into the wider regional population. A couple of interviewees, however, spoke of a preparatory value for other revitalization pro-jects in the same watershed.
Our results challenge earlier research as we could neither identify relevant trust-building nor extension of social effects into the wider population (as have been suggested by Innes and Booher 1999). Our results, however, confirm earlier findings on time requirements of social learning (Leach et al. 2002).
In terms of favourable conditions for effective participatory river restoration projects, we found three main aspects: that the stakeholders received the relevant information on the projects directly from the project leaders (and not from newspapers), that participation takes place directly in the field and (also) in the implementation phase, and that the leaders clearly state which topics are subject to negotiation and which not. We thus confirm the crucial role of leadership as noted by earlier researchers (Carr et al. 1998; Ols-son et al. 2004; Mosert et al. 2007).
Fig. 2. The new course of the Flaz river (March 2010): © Matthias Buchecker.
Fig. 3. The revitalized Kander at Augand (February 2010): © Matthias Buchecker.
Interactions between process qualities and trust building:
The three different analysis approaches to the data gathered in the pre/post survey revealed different relationships between the process qualities and the process outcome in terms of trust building.
The regression analysis based on repeated measurement data of assessments of 28 individuals – the most reliable approach – highlighted the variables of the concepts “expected outcome” and “appreciation and efficiency” as significantly contributing predictors of trust building. When, however, “appreciation and efficiency” was included into the model, the effect of “expected outcome” was no longer significant. The variables of the concepts “transparency and fairness” and (in a stronger degree) “extent of stakeholder influence” appeared to be not-significantly negatively related to trust building.
The regression analysis based on the pooled data across time revealed again the effects of the variable
“expected outcome”, but also the one of the variable “extent of stakeholder influence” as significant. The effects, however, referred to referred to trust and not to trust building, and the time effects were found to be not significant for both variables.
In the group analysis based on the aggregated data of the single case studies, the variables of the con-cepts “expected outcomes”, “extent of stakeholder influence” and “transparency and fairness” showed all a positive bivariate relationship to the outcome variable “trust building”. For the variable “appreciation and efficiency”, this relationship appeared to be negative. Overall, the trust-building was only in two cases positive and in the three others negative.
Our data suggest that different process features are of particular importance in a particular setting. A may be as justified interpretation is that trust-building in institutions is in many cases not a relevant outcome variable.
Key insights
The results of the two sub-studies suggest that trust-building is at least in the Swiss context not a very rel-evant social effect produced through participatory river revitalization projects. More relrel-evant social effects appeared to be learning processes in terms of a better appreciation of river revitalization and acquisition of procedural knowledge regarding the organisation of successful participatory planning processes. On the other hand, avoiding and rebuilding the loss of social capital appeared to be a core motivation and value-added of participatory processes for the involved stakeholders. This finding emphasises that imple-menting ecological enhancement projects is always an intervention into established social structures, and avoiding a major social damage seems to be a main challenge. Another challenge is to give stakeholders a chance to understand the value of ecologically motivated interventions and to give them the opportunity to identify their benefits on the personal level, e. g. through the new and attractive recreational spaces they provide. This avoids the impression on the side of stakeholders of being colonized from outside and associated feelings of helplessness. Participatory processes can help, if well done, to soften and locally digest these interventions but also to transform them into an impulse for innovations and learning. This learning concerns in particular how to communicate and collaborate. Implementations of ecological en-hancement projects therefore always implicate chances for social learning and social enen-hancement.
A second key insight of the two sub-studies is that the success of participatory ecological enhancement projects depends considerably on the quality of the participatory processes. The analysis of the pre-/
post-measurements of participatory planning projects could not determine a clear ranking of the main influence factors. But in combination with the findings of the retrospective evaluation of completed revitali-zation projects, the analysis suggests that, most importantly, the roles and competences of the involved actors should be clarified and respected. All thus connected aspects such as appreciation of actors’
contributions, a clear definition of non-negotiable givens and an efficient negotiation process appeared to be of particular relevance. A meaningful participatory learning process also requires a certain openness of the outcome from all sides. This implicates for the side of the natural scientists that for each ecological enhancement project, it should be clearly differentiated which the core and which the more marginal and thus negotiable aspects are.
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