GOUVERNe: new trends in decision support for groundwater governance issues

The project GOUVERNe (Guidelines for the Organisation, Use and Validation of Information Systems for Evaluating Aquifer Resources and Needs. Funded through DG RTD, FP 5 Contract. No. EVK1-1999-00032) aims at developing a quality assured information system for the improved governance of underground water resources at the catchment and sub-catchment levels. This entails the design and implementation of a Tool to Inform Debates, Dialogues & Deliberations (TIDDD). It combines traditional features of decision support systems (such as organisation of the information and tools for exploitation of the information) with the new conception in harmony with the management and governance context in which it will be used. The project run in four different regions in Europe. For all the case studies main governance issues, as well as main actors – and therefore the types of audiences that could take part in the aquifer governance – have been identified, prior to the development of the TIDDD. The issue of audience is of foremost importance because one of the key topics addressed in this project is the ‘information divide’ issue. It arises when in decision making processes, those affected or affecting it are exposed to information that is neither useful nor appropriate for efficient involvement and fruitful debate or for tackling conflict prone situations such as those arising in water governance processes. The TIDDD features a client-server architecture, linked to a Geographical Information System. It contains outranking multi-criteria evaluation methods as tools for exploring the information available; its interface is developed based upon modern concepts of computer user interfaces. Both the information contents and the ‘exploration’ tools follow the principle of progressive disclosure of information, i.e. the TIDDD does not assume an expert use but it progressively allows exploring scientific and technical information as users become in need of those. The communication style is done in a transparent fashion and all materials are quality assured both in terms of scientific validation, as well as by the community of users; this is done through an appropriate quality assurance protocol for tools that aim at participatory decision and policy making contexts. This paper will describe the process of designing and implementing such a system, as well as its application on management contexts for one of the case studies: The Hérault valley in France.