*2.2. Nepal*

Nepal's development context includes severe political instability that ended in the early 2000s, followed by a decade of negotiation that led to an agreement to create a federal state with a greater voice for citizens in historically marginalized regions of the country, and a state with more explicit commitments to gender equality and social inclusion. Since the enactment of the 2015 Constitution, Nepal has been undertaking a process of state restructuring, involving the devolution of authority and public revenue to seven new provincial-level governments, and 753 new local government bodies, with local and provincial elections held in 2017. The emergence of provincial agencies involved some transfer of authorities and personnel previously assigned to the central government. At the national level, state restructuring involved negotiations to reorganize and consolidate particular ministries, leading to the emergence of a Ministry of Energy, Water Resources, and Irrigation in 2017.

Since the early 1990s, hydropower development in Nepal has been based on principles of liberalization. Private investment, however, has been constrained by a number of financial and institutional risks [34]. In response, the national government has sought to support hydropower development through greater government involvement—identifying important projects, building national schemes and managing hydropower licensing issues [35]. Water and Energy Commission Secretariat (WECS) started a 2018–2021 study to prepare river basin plans and a hydropower development master plan of all river basins of Nepal, supported by strategic environmental and social assessment of these plans. As with the Ayeyarwady Basin Master Plan project, this is a major investment in strategic planning. It includes hydrological modelling, hydropower optimization studies, and strategic environmental and social assessment. The resultant river basin plans are intended to inform the selection of hydropower, irrigation and water supply infrastructure, as well as natural resource management projects in each basin. As with the Ayeyarwady Basin Master Plan project, this initiative will engage with multiple categories of stakeholder, including representatives of affected communities. In both cases, the process by which stakeholder consultations will lead to stakeholder-agreed outcomes is not explicitly stated [17,36].

## **3. Methodological Commitments and Consequences**

#### *3.1. Formulating Strategy*

Our two river basin planning initiatives in Myanmar and Nepal had compatible aims and conceptual methodologies, focussed on the participatory formulation of strategy. Strategy refers to "the art or practice of planning the future direction or outcome of something especially of a long-term or ambitious nature" [37]. To strategize means to formulate courses of action to realize development values. Values are topics which matter (or arguably could matter) to an actor [38] (e.g., improving women's access to water, as proposed in Nepal's draft National Water Resources Policy [Section 3.4.1]). To strategize means to articulate goals, major means-to-goal, actions and responsible parties (Figure 1, "Development Pathways"). Strategizing further involves assessing the strengths and limitations of alternative courses of action to reach a goal (Figure 1, "Development Scenarios"). Such assessment can be done using techniques such as multi-criteria analysis (Kamala) and exploratory scenario analysis (Ayeyarwady). Development scenarios which have been prioritized through such assessment would then receive analysis to identify how they could be implemented (i.e., institutional and political economy analysis) [39–41] (Figure 1). In our case studies, strategies have the status of non-binding texts, which may mobilize further action and investment.

**Figure 1.** Participatory river basin planning: key components. Source: adapted from [3]. Note: definition of "development pathway" "development scenario", and "development strategy" based on our interpretation of [17]. Note: analysis of performance may use "exploratory scenarios" (Section 3.3).

To support *participatory* formulation of strategy, we anchored both projects to an explicitly deliberative and analytic methodology. By deliberation, we refer to dialogue and argumentation, which aim to generate advice on a set of alternative development strategies or options [38]. An emphasis on deliberation is justifiable, given the weaknesses of participation organized in a top-down, orchestrated manner [42]. Such weaknesses include a tendency to de-politicize values, goals, and means-to-goal actions, for example, by assessing means-to-goal actions using a limited range of evaluation criteria. Accordingly, we reviewed scientific and grey literature on planning approaches which were both

technically-informed, and participatory [1,43–46]. In addition, we reviewed literature on specific relevant methods or techniques, such as scenario formulation [3] (chapter 3), multi-criteria analysis [47, 48], and hydrological modelling [3] (chapter 4, 8).

With respect to grey literature, we drew in particular on terms of reference for the Ayeyarwady Basin Master Plan project [17], on the basis that Nepal and Myanmar share broadly comparable development contexts, and common water sector development partners. (The Ayeyarwady Basin Master Plan project also includes the preparation of operational plans, and investment plans—however, these outputs were beyond the scope and resources of the Kamala initiative.)

#### *3.2. Collaborative Model of Governance, Co-Productive Model of Decision-Making*

An IWRM-based river basin planning process demands meaningful stakeholder participation. In order to facilitate such participation, we based both initiatives on a collaborative model of governance. Emerson et al. [49] describe collaborative governance as working via three processes, which may interact in a virtuous cycle over time. Each process requires particular kinds of interactions between individuals or small groups:


Our river basin planning initiatives sought to catalyse the first two phases of collaborative governance, mentioned above. We proposed designs which were iterative (repeated interactions among a core set of stakeholders); incremental (outputs from earlier activities directly influencing subsequent activities), and deliberative (e.g., use of participatory multi-criteria analysis to support structured argument about water augmentation options in Nepal) (see Figures 2 and 3 below). In doing so, we sought to realize the essence of a *co-productive* model of decision-making in planning, within the limitations of each project (such as language barriers, constrained access to local level stakeholders, and budgetary constraints). In this model, multiple state and non-state actors build knowledge together via processes they value (e.g., processes they regard as credible, legitimate, relevant), leading in turn to outcomes they value (e.g., a strategy regarded as legitimate; citizenship regarded as empowered) [27]. By contrast, in a rational choice model of decision-making, a much narrower group of (elite) policy actors processes information provided by stakeholders and experts, and maximizes societal welfare on the basis of such inputs [24].

Table 1 summarizes the essential components, and important variants, of rational choice and co-production models of decision-making. The models are ideal-types, on a spectrum of models of decision-making. (For example, instrumental versions of co-productive decision-making overlap with variants of rational choice which seek diverse expertise to improve problem and solution framing.) Nonetheless, the models differ with respect to how they conceptualize the process of taking authoritative decisions.

**Figure 2.** Ayeyarwady Basin Exploratory Scoping Study: original and implemented study designs.

**Figure 3.** Kamala basin water resources development strategy: implemented study design. Note: Certain proposed actions were not feasible to evaluate using MCA, given resource constraints.


**Table 1.** Models of decision-making in planning.

Source: Authors, based on [24,27]. Notes: <sup>1</sup> Proportionate to cognitive complexity; assumes non-conflictual relations between actors. <sup>2</sup> Proportionate to cognitive and political complexity [50].

Table 1 refers to governance regimes [51]. We understand the polycentricity of a governance regime as (i) the degree to which power is distributed among centers of authority (centralized vs. distributed), and (ii) the degree to which effective coordination between authorities exists (highly coordinated vs. fragmented) [52]. A rational choice model of decision-making in planning is typically associated with a centralized and coordinated governance regime, and a co-productive model typically associated with a polycentric (i.e., distributed and coordinated) regime, but such association is not a necessary property of either type of governance regime.

Among the project teams of both planning initiatives (Table 2), the rational choice model of decision-making co-existed with a co-productive model. The following two sections describe the tension between these methodological commitments, and the consequences for river basin planning.


**Table 2.** Summary: key elements of river basin planning initiatives (this paper).

<sup>2</sup> Refers to co-existence of both models (Section 3.4).

#### *3.3. Initiative 1: An Exploratory Scoping Study for the Ayeyarwady Basin, Myanmar*

#### 3.3.1. Origins and Actors

The Ayeyarwady Basin Exploratory Scoping Study (BESS) was designed to help bridge the gap between the Ayeyarwady State of the Basin (SOBA) assessment, and the World Bank-supported Basin Master Plan project. BESS was sponsored by the Australian Water Partnership, Myanmar Directorate of Water Resources and Improvement of River Systems (DWIR), and the Australian science agency CSIRO. The focal agency, HIC, is a project-based entity affiliated with the National Water Resources Committee (NWRC). NWRC is an inter-agency group formed in 2015 to advise on water-related risks and development. Implementing partners consisted of Chiang Mai University—Unit for Social and Environmental Research (CMU-USER), eWater Ltd., Flow Matters Pty Ltd., International Centre for Environmental Management (ICEM), and CSIRO.

With respect to participation in BESS, given the project's exploratory scope, advisors to the Basin Master Plan project recommended that a small subset of stakeholders, based primarily in Yangon and Nay Pyi Taw, be recruited. Participation in BESS primarily meant contributing to structured small group discussions in two one-day workshops: a rapid integrated assessment workshop (March 2018), and a development pathways workshop (May 2018). The agreed participant pool consisted of four categories of actors:


For participation in the final, development pathways workshop, all attendees of the first workshop were invited. In addition, a small set of new organizations and individuals were invited, selected on the basis of their expertise on issues the team considered important (e.g., agricultural development).
