Case Lead of the Valencia Region is Oscar Barberà Aresté, associate professor of politics and governance at the University of Valencia. He is joined in this interview by Irene Lujan Climent (PhD) and Joan Enguer Saus (postdoc). In the Valencia Region the workshops 1 and 2 have been held.
Oscar Barberà Aresté:
“We find that institutions are less accustomed to deal with EU-projects, but after we spoke to all the stakeholders and local institutions, including the 6 natural parks that are central in our case study, we work closely together. We decided to hold our second workshop in 4 sessions on location in the parks. For example, in the Valencia area rice farming makes salinity a critical issue, while lagoons in the south actually benefit from high salt content for industrial salt production.
At the workshops on location we welcomed roughly 15–30 people per workshop, totalling almost 90 participants across the 4 sessions. That’s almost 10 times as much as workshop 1! But there is a clear difference between younger park directors (who understand the need for change but lack resources) and older, long-serving public servants who have difficulty imagining things being different.”
Oscar Barberà Aresté:
“Yes, we think the method is very helpful to solve governance problems, and that it can be extended to other sites that face such problems. Digital tools such as the deliberation dashboard are a great help in the evaluation process. But we find it is difficult to ask stakeholders to imagine different realities, because they feel they are unable to change things from the way directors do them. They find it hard to imagine an optimistic future.”
Oscar Barberà Aresté:
“We are still developing this, it is not very common. Policy making in Spain is very reactive: there is a problem, let’s find a solution. We are not used to looking far ahead, let alone 50-100 years. So there is some resistance to overcome.
On the other hand, we find that the narrative about the scenarios is perhaps even more important than the dashboard itself.”
Oscar Barberà Aresté:
“Many people are aware that the future is going to be difficult. Especially the people in the communities feel that they are going to be losers, but this differs from park to park. That was another reason why it was better to do the second workshop on four locations. So our main message is: let’s try to mitigate their losses and the environmental and human pressures.”
Oscar Barberà Aresté:
“We offer stakeholders help if they want to use the dashboard. Unfortunately it was not completely finished before our Workshop 2, so we could only use the dashboard in one of the sessions, but we showed screenshots of future projections to give people an idea in the other three sessions. One of the problems is that not all data is available in Copernicus, the open data source, such as salinity and water quality. You have to depend on what data the government feels they want to make available. We know it will be bad, but we need numbers! In this project we are social scientists, but there is a lot of research done by biologists and environmentalists, and we don’t always manage to include them. Our contribution is to help stakeholders with the governance.
Apart from BGG, university experts are very interested in the dashboard and the cumulative impact assessment tool, also to use in other projects.”
Oscar Barberà Aresté:
“Based on the dashboard projections, we constructed two scenarios. Scenario 1 (“Revealing”) represents a diagnostic baseline that visualizes the cumulative impacts of current pressures. Scenario 2 (“Policy-Driven”) integrates anticipated regulatory and policy developments, especially those linked to European ecosystem restoration objectives. The comparison between both scenarios provides a quantitative and evidence-based foundation for discussion, which will support the development of Scenario 3 (“Compromise”) in the next phase through a dedicated policy dialogue focused on negotiation and consensus-building.”
Oscar Barberà Aresté:
“Well, we’re not sure, yet. We see that locals are starting to engage on future projections, but we’re not sure they’re willing to change anything. I hope we can help them do better.”
An interview with Oscar Barberà Aresté, Lead of Case Study Valencia Region Case Lead of the Valencia Region is Oscar Barberà Aresté, associate professor of politics and governance at the
An interview with Aridane González, Lead of Case Study Canary Islands The Canary Islands are an autonomous community of Spain, located west of Morocco and Western Sahara. They are an
Landscape of The Scheldt: (Saxifraga-Tom Heijnen) An interview with Ellen Fobé, Work Package 1 Lead Starting the programme Blue Green Governance, it was important to assess the current situation. In
An interview with Jean Marc Douguet, Work Package 2 Lead Work Package 2 (WP2) of the BlueGreen Governance project focuses on one central question: how can governance systems at the