Abstract
This study reviews the success of the process used in the Second Red River Basin Sector Project. That Project concerned Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) in the Red River Basin of northern Vietnam and cut across the issues of institutional capacity-building, public awareness, poverty alleviation, gender, and stakeholder participation.
Stakeholder involvement was highlighted in the study by a combination of two processes: from the province level upward initially, and then from the province level downward into local community involvement. First, the stakeholder involvement process was used to successfully set up a procedure for consensus-building in 25 provincial workshops, followed by clustering into five sub-basin workshops and finally by stakeholder interaction with the national-level administration to identify priorities and possible solutions for IWRM in the whole basin. The highest priority issues identified by stakeholders were irrigation agriculture, water supply and sanitation, flood control, and environment/biodiversity. Second, from the first stakeholder process, stakeholders were deeply involved in the process of water-sector planning in the priority water sub-sectors. This process was developed and successfully implemented beyond the expectation of most, given the scale. The facilitation process allowed stakeholders to interact in a transparent way, by building capacity and awareness and by setting up a rigid interaction process, with decisions taken stepwise. This method proved very empowering for participants because it even allowed consensus to be reached in highly resource-competitive situations on a strictly logical basis.
In this stakeholder process, the case studies were carried out stepwise within two selected provinces in the northern Upland and then downward into smaller sub-basins until the commune and village levels were finally reached. Throughout, active stakeholder involvement took place in three main streams, aiming at informed decision-making over IWRM priorities. The stakeholder streams were (1) local authorities and (2) stakeholders at the province, district, and commune/village levels being the decision-makers and utilizing (3) technical experts providing specialized assessments. To begin with, the decision-makers, consisting of (1) and (2), succeeded in combining their views on water resource management and socio-economic development plans, thus taking responsibility for IWRM directed at poverty reduction. Local authorities and water users thereby set up informed decision-making process drawing on the technical experts' specialized assessments. This facilitation process in the case study project embodies the following lessons on institutional and local community involvement and learning through carefully structured stakeholder interaction: (i) stakeholder interaction processes in IWRM are essential in terms of shifting responsibility for project formulation and implementation toward the water users; (ii) the developed and tested participatory investment planning process has the potential to be scaled- up into broad applications; (iii) sub-projects could be formulated in this way at the pre-feasibility level in the two selected provinces; (iv) a priority list of potential sub-projects, prioritized by technical feasibility and poverty-reduction capacity can be set up; and (v) the selection process must involve awareness-raising and capacity-building.
