Before the Master Plan - Restorative Redevelopment of Devastated Ecocultural Landscapes - page 26

If you step back from these questions, you might also say, “Wait a minute, the
real issue is what's going to happen to these people in their territory, part of which is
a marsh-related culture, but part of which isn't.” You have to ask, “What's going to
happen to three-quarters of the land area that's likely to stay dry? And what's going
to happen to three-quarters of the people who are not interested in returning to live
in the marshes? And where is the balance of effort and money between those two
groups?” I'd like to approach this problem as though these were the main questions.
I want to present the framework that we use in organizing regional studies and posit
several other hard questions in the process.
First of all, there are some generalizations that can be made. There are two kinds
of people, at least, involved at the stage of designing studies like this. There are the
people called “stakeholders,” which for the Iraqi marshlands include both the min-
ister of water of Turkey and also the persons in the boats in the marshes themselves;
in other words, it's not just intellectuals rhapsodizing about “Eden” or the minister
of water of Iraq. There is also the technical research team. And our roles as part of
this latter group, in my opinion, are very different; indeed, problems arise when they
are the same.
The stakeholders have a dual perspective. The first is that they have essential
input on the possible future of the region. And the assumption that you always should
make is that they do not agree with each other. They are not going to agree with each
other because they often see it as a zero-sum game. Once you believe that, then all the
bottom-up community work, the handholding, is likely to take longer than the time
span of the problem. It's not going to work. Certainly it's not going to work alone.
Stakeholders have scenarios of what they think a desirable future might be; it may be
partial, it may be speculative, it may be geographically limited, it may be private, it
may be ecologically oriented, and/or it may be profit oriented. But they do have these
ideas. And one problem is getting at those ideas. What we need to do is to organize
information in their language—not in our language, but in their language. We need
to model the processes that they're talking about, compare their scenarios, and pres-
ent them with information for their second essential role. That is the public review
of the process and findings as a component of local debate and decision making
involving local, and in this case also regional and probably international, individuals.
I think it's a mistake when the stakeholders and researchers are the same, because
impartiality is absent. When co-joined, as a researcher you have ideas, you're trying
to sell them, and you're trying to convince people. But that means that you're part of
the problem and you're not reflecting the others' interests.
The question of what the master plan should be or what the decision support
process should be is a complicated one. The likelihood of having a long-term mas-
ter plan in a fluid situation like the Iraq marshes is essentially zero. It's not going
to happen. And if it does happen, it's not going to be effective. Here we are in the
present. It's very clear that the past has a role. The marshlands of Iraq have always
been highly variability (France 2012). The past has therefore not been stable; it has
ebbed and flowed spatially, functionally, hydrologically, and in all cases dramati-
cally. And we are here in the present, yet need to do something for the future by
looking forward in time. And one of the interesting questions is, how far forward
in time? Does this need to be sustainable? For what: a year? Ten years? A hundred