Decision Support Systems in Water Resources Planning and Management: Stakeholder Participation and the Sustainable Path to Science-Based Decision Making - Efficient Decision Support Systems: Practice and Challenges from Current to Future - page 425

A good representation of the state of the art in 1990 is given by the proceedings of an
international workshop on DSS for water resources research and management (Loucks and
de Costa, 1991). It is interesting to note that the majority of its 24 articles are focused on
software structure (pre and post-processing, databases, numerical models) user interfaces
and visualization of results. Beyond mentioning the necessity for dialogue with the 'model
client', very few articles referred to interactions with the end users, much less the
stakeholders that were to be affected by the decisions. A notable exception is an article about
USACE Hydrologic Engineering Center (HEC) software products, which attributes
widespread use of its products mainly to interactions with the users: it describes a problem-
driven research approach that listens to the users and tries to understand their specific
needs, its program to train users, and the need for long term support in model
implementation and analysis.
With few exceptions, therefore, models were developed mostly in support of the tasks to be
performed by planners, managers and decision-makers, and were detached or disengaged
from the challenges of being a decision-maker operating within the constraints of their
constituencies and their part in the decision-making process. Not surprisingly, these
prescriptive models were developed by engineers and technocrats, often viewed as the only
source of trusted information, and with little or no stakeholder input (Cardwell et al. 2010).
Historically this has caused difficulties in the implementation of decisions, resulting in
lower than expected model usefulness, and low rates of project success.
3. Integrative science and models
The traditional approaches - with their optimization algorithms and their objective
functions - were unable to successfully include into their computations the variety of
important factors that are important to decision makers, and in ways that are transparent to
the public. Their engineering-focused methods were unable to properly assign numbers to
societal preferences and environmental values. Further, they were unable to reflect the
possibility of solutions involving negotiated trade-off in a transparent way. There was no
mechanism for representing the values of intangible assets, essential but invaluable
variables, or the long term impacts on the resources of the commons (air quality, riparian
impacts, land cover and landscape values, etc.).
During the past two decades the need for holistic approaches and cross-disciplinary teams
that can address complex interactions at the basin scale and can evaluate alternative futures
has become increasingly more evident. Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM)
has emerged as the new paradigm for decision-making in relation to water. This approach
adopts the basin scale as the natural unit enabling water issues to be considered both in their
broader context and through the more focused lenses of economic efficiency, social equity
and environmental sustainability. This progression towards a holistic view of water
resources research and decision-making has become reflected in new initiatives and
programs within funding and donor agencies, sometimes making cross-disciplinary
collaboration a basic requirement.
The need to handle information from diverse physical and social datasets, and to develop
holistic and integrative decision support systems, has given rise to a new type of modeling
tool in water resources planning: namely ' system dynamics modeling '. Initially developed at
MIT in the late 1960's (Forrester, 1968) for economic and business applications, system
dynamics platforms facilitate flexible representations of the relevant behaviors from each