Development of Management Policies for an Environmental Contingency Allowance: Facilitating the Understanding of Complexity and Uncertainty

The management of environmental water resources continues to be a highly complex and uncertain field of natural resource management. As a result, there may be significant gaps in shared understanding of issues that are critical to decision-making. This article reports on a facilitation process leading to improved management guidelines for an Environmental Contingency Allowance in the Gwydir Valley, NSW, with an intentional focus on the communication of complex and uncertain management issues and on the integration of local non-specialist knowledge in analysis. The article includes a review of the methodological foundations of the facilitation process, including organisational learning, action research, applied systems theory and decision-support system modelling. The facilitation process includes development of a computer model which departs in some respects from a conventional decision-support system. In view of these differences and their epistemological foundation, the computer model and facilitation process are referred to jointly as a Learning Support System.