CHAPTER FOUR

PROBLEM DEFINITION AND SCOPING

Contents
• Issues and problems in a watershed
• Watershed assessment methods
• Problem analysis
• Scoping the plan
Objective
• At the end of the chapter, students will be able to :
• List different issues and problems in a watershed,
• Describe different watershed assessment methods,
• Understand the meaning and process of scoping
Issues and problems in a watershed
• Issue is something to consider, a possible future problem
• Problem is a present negative situation
• Issues and problems in a watershed context are:
• Site-specific,
• Complex,
• Often interlinked and
• May be related to ecological, socio-economic, technical and institutional issues.
• Awareness of issues and problems in a watershed may come from:
• Agency representatives,
• Interested professionals such as consulting engineers or planners,
• From the Government's regulatory directives.
• However such awareness will quite often come from the community itself, whose members
are directly affected by the conditions and changes of natural resources prevailing in a given
watershed.
Issues and problems in Watershed
• Once issues and problems are identified following participatory approach and analyzed
thoroughly,
• Scoping can prioritize the key issues and problems that need to be addressed most
urgently, and
• Objectives can be defined that reflect a vision of what the future conditions within the
watershed should look like,
• Appropriate strategies can be defined to successfully address these issues and problems.
• As preparatory step for problem analysis and scoping, reconnaissance and baseline survey
activities are required to establish necessary information about the economic, social and
environmental settings within the watershed.
• Significant gaps in information during problem analysis or scoping process can only be
filled through the sourcing of additional in-depth information which an be obtained from
watershed inventory studies.
Issues and problems in Watershed
• Once problem identification and analysis have been conducted, there still remains the
challenge of agreeing on the priorities among these issues and problems.
• The stakeholders need to determine which uses of water resources and which watershed
areas urgently require interventions, and which of them do not. This process is
called scoping.
• The first step in watershed planning is to define the scope of the watershed management
plan.
• A watershed management plan must have:
• A clearly defined geographic area within which the management plan will be
implemented.
• Clearly defined environmental impairments so that management efforts can be
effectively targeted.
Watershed assessment methods
• Watershed assessment is a necessary component of a monitoring program in order to
determine what degraded areas may exist in the watershed and why.
• A reconnaissance and assessment of watershed character is necessary to:
• Assess watershed conditions to determine the causes and nature of impairment
• Determine feasibility of using restoration or other management options to meet
objectives
• The following steps are basic process for conducting a watershed assessment, planning and
evaluation
• Organize the assessment team
• Define the purpose and develop a plan for the assessment
• Collect data and information
• Analyze the data
• Integrate and report the data to inform decision-making
Watershed assessment steps
Step 1: Organize the assessment
team
• Goal of the assessment team
• Develop a plan for the assessment
• Identify consultants to help carry out
work
• Who should be on the assessment team:
• Any stakeholder with an interest in
the watershed
• Concerned citizens
• Representatives from local/regional
government
• Business, development community
Importance of the assessment team
• Those that develop the plan will have an
interest in implementing it.
• Two types of actions typically result from an
assessment:
• Restoration goals and activities
• Changes in land use and business
practices
• Land use decisions are made by
local/regional government and land owners
• Without their cooperation and engagement,
unlikely any relevant recommendations in
management plan will be implemented.
Watershed assessment steps
Step 2: Define the purpose and develop a plan for the assessment
• The first formal phase of a watershed assessment consists of:
• Clearly identifying the issues of concern,
• Identifying the purpose of the assessment,
• Developing a conceptual diagram of the key components of the watershed, and
• Developing a plan for carrying out the assessment.
Step 3: Collect data and information
• Determine the kind of data you need to collect
• Identify sources and collect existing watershed data and information
• Identify sources and collect existing spatial data about the watershed
• Develop a system for archiving and managing your data
• Identify data gaps and collect new data, when needed
Watershed assessment steps
Step 4: Analyze the data
• Summarize and explore the data
• Perform/decide if statistical analyses are needed or possible with the data available
• Compare your data to standards, historical, and/or reference conditions
Step 5: Integrate and report the data to inform decision-making
• What does the data mean?
• How can it be used to guide the development of a management plan?
• Data integration usually involves some type of risk analysis……
• Key concept: those factors that pose the greatest risk are likely targets for future actions
• Limiting factors analysis
• Watershed risk assessment
Watershed assessment steps
Step 6: Preparing an assessment report
• A critical component of watershed assessment is:
• Describing how you conducted the assessment,
• What you found out, and
• How people can use the information to help them with decision-making.
Problem analysis
• The planning process typically begins with an identification and analysis of the issues and
problems.
• Problem analysis is a partly subjective assessment of reality, in a watershed context, of the
current and expected future state of water and related resources.
Problems in watersheds
• The problems that affect watersheds are complex and long-term in nature.
• Watersheds provide essential livelihoods for their inhabitants, but their natural resources
are finite, often under pressure and at risk of degradation. 
• Degradation caused by unsustainable exploitation of natural resources is usually the
key problem.
Process of problem analysis
• The process of problem analysis can be split into three separate steps, namely:
• Stakeholder analysis
• Problem identification
• Problem structuring
Process of problem analysis
Stakeholder analysis
• Stakeholders can provide valuable information about the watershed which will help you
focus your efforts to identify the issues of concern and solutions.
• Problem analysis requires the consideration of the views of all important stakeholders,
thereby making stakeholder analysis an essential part of the process.
• Stakeholder analysis can be conducted prior to the problem analysis as part of a watershed
inventory, or as a parallel procedure.
• A basic principle behind stakeholder analysis is that different groups have different
concerns, capacities and interests, and that these therefore need to be explicitly understood
and recognized in the process of problem analysis.
• In a watershed context, the state of natural resources may be a serious problem for one
individual, group or organization, which another does not consider to be a problem at all or
perhaps not one of high priority.
Process of problem analysis
Stakeholder analysis
• Only those individuals, groups or organizations who perceive the state of natural resources
to be a problem of high priority will be actively engaged in, and supportive of the planning
process.
• The main steps involved in stakeholder analysis are:
• Identify the general development problem or opportunity being addressed / considered
• Identify all those groups who have a significant interest
• Investigate their respective roles, different interests, relative power and capacity to
participate (strengths and weaknesses)
• Identify the extent of cooperation or conflict in the relationships between stakeholders
• Interpret the findings of the analysis and incorporate relevant information into project
design and into intervention measures
Process of problem analysis
Stakeholder analysis
• Tools that can be used to support stakeholder analysis are:
• Tools to analyze the stakeholder landscape, such as the stakeholder analysis matrix and
Venn diagrams
• Tools to analyze the situation of individual stakeholders, such as the SWOT analysis
and spider diagrams.
• In using any of these tools, the quality of information obtained will be significantly
influenced by the process of information gathering.
Process of problem analysis
Stakeholder analysis _ Stakeholder analysis matrix
• Examines the subject of how different stakeholders are affected by issues such as different problems or opportunities.

Table 1: Example of a Stakeholder Analysis Matrix Format

Stakeholder and basic Interests and manner in Capacity and motivation to bring about Possible actions to address
characteristics which they are affected by change stakeholder interests
the problem(s)
Fishing families: c.20,000 • Maintain and improve their • Keen interest in pollution control • Support capacity to organize and
families, low income earners, means of Livelihood measures lobby
small scale family businesses, • Pollution is affecting • Limited political influence given weak • Implement industry pollution
organized into informal volume and quality of catch organizational structure control measures
cooperatives, women actively • Family health is suffering, • Identify / develop alternative
involved in fish processing particularly that of children income sources for women and men
and marketing and mothers

Households: c.150,000 • Aware of industrial • Limited understanding of the health • Raise awareness of households as to
households discharge waste pollution and impact on impact of their own waste / waste water the implications of their own waste
and waste water into river, water quality disposal disposal practices
also source some drinking • Want to dispose of own • Potential to lobby government bodies • Work with communities and local
water and eat fish from the waste away from the more effectively government on addressing water
river household • Appear willing to pay for improved and sanitation issues
• Want access to clean water waste management services
Process of problem analysis
Stakeholder analysis _Venn diagrams
• Are created to analyze and illustrate the nature of relationships between key stakeholder
groups.
• Are commonly used as a participatory planning tool with target groups, to help them profile
their concept of such relationships.
• Used to analyze and highlight potential conflicts between different stakeholder groups.
• In the diagram, we see that there are three groups or sets called ‘A’ ,’B’, and ‘C’. These
three sets could represent any given collection of people. For example, say set A contains all
the people that says water scarcity is the main problem. Set B represents all the people that
says erosion is the main problem and set C represents all the people that says pollution is the
main problem. Then the region marked as AB represents all the people who say both water
scarcity and erosion are main problems in the watershed. The region marked BC represents
all the people who say both erosion and pollution are main problem. Similarly, the region AC
represents all the people who say water scarcity and pollution are the main problem.
• The region ABC is known as the intersection of the sets. The people in this region belong to
Fig. 1: Venn Diagram all the groups
Process of problem analysis
Stakeholder analysis _Spider diagrams
• Can be used to help analyze and provide a visual summary of institutional capacity.
• The collection of relevant information can be undertaken using a variety of tools, including:
• Inspection of administrative records and management reports,
• Interviews with staff and clients and • The figure indicates that:
• Observation of ‘on the ground’ operations / activities. • The agency has relatively strong technical and
financial management skills / capacity, and that its
policy and planning systems are satisfactory.
• However, the agency has some critical shortcomings
in terms of transparency and accountability, its
relationship with other agencies and with its clients.
• Critical constraints of this agency’s capacity to
address the poor quality of the river water are related
more to organizational culture and management
priorities than to either technical skills or basic
Fig. 2: Spider Diagram of Organizational Capacity – management competencies.
Environmental Protection Agency
Process of problem analysis
Problem identification
• Problem identification involves the compilation of an overview of basic, existing issues and
problems that characterize a given situation.
• In the process of establishing watershed management guidelines, one will need to consider
the issues and problems both on-site and off-site affecting the beneficial economic, social,
and ecological uses of water resources as well as their interaction with related resources
such as land.
• Use impairment describes a given situation where a beneficial use is constrained by the
inadequate quality or quantity of water.
• The approach of identifying issues and problems means stating them in terms of
impairments of beneficial uses of water resources, paying specific attention to the timing
and spatial extent of those impairments.
• In order to begin identifying use impairments, one needs an overview of the beneficial uses
that are relevant in the watershed.
Process of problem analysis
Problem identification
• The use is constrained in cases A and C
• The use is not constrained in cases B, D
and E.

Figure 3: Identification of use impairments

Process of problem analysis
Problem structuring
• Problem structuring is a simple technique for breaking down complex, ‘messy’ questions
into manageable subsets of issues.
Why is problem structuring useful?
• The benefits, if the process is carried out to its full potential, are:
• Comprehensive identification of issues within a specified problem, Clarity about inter-
relationships between those issues,
• Identification of dominant issues (i.e., those which should receive most focus, as a
resolution would render other issues irrelevant, or easier to manage),
• A plan for analysis or issue resolution,
• Consensus on relative priority of issues, and
• A structure for communication of both the issue, and the resolution.
Process of problem analysis
Problem structuring
How do you structure a problem?
• The basic steps are as follows:
• Define the problem you are working on, in the form of a question. Brainstorm all the
possible questions relating to the problem.
• Look for themes among the questions.
• Look carefully at the relationships between questions within a theme.
• Then look for ‘killer questions’
• Put your effort into resolving those killer questions.
• Now you are at a cross roads – and the next step depends on the objective of the
exercise.
Process of problem analysis
Problem tree approach • The problem tree approach is a very
common tool used in problem structuring.
• The implementation of a problem tree
analysis requires an individual to complete
the following process:
• Identify the major existing problems /
issues based on available information
(e.g. by brainstorming)
• Select one focal problem for the
analysis
• Develop the problem tree beginning
with the most substantial and direct
Figure 4: Problem tree
causes of the focal problem.
Scoping
• Scoping is a stakeholder consultation and negotiation process that establishes broad agreed
priorities and targets, and gives the subsequent detailed planning process.
• Scoping addresses the following fundamental issues:
• The setting of priorities must take place through appropriate consultation and
negotiation processes that involve all important stakeholders.
• Any setting of standards or design of interventions have transaction costs.
The scoping process
• Two important components of the scoping process are:
• Focusing (what?): identification of issues and problems that have an overriding importance
in the watershed and which should therefore be considered in depth as intervention areas,
during the subsequent detailed planning process.
• Boundary setting (where? when?): limitation of the plan to a specific geographical area and
also to a particular time period.
Scoping
The output of the scoping process
• In a watershed context, the outputs of successful scoping are:
• A clear prioritization of existing problems (use impairments) to be solved and
anticipated problems to be avoided.
• Targets for maintenance and / or restoration of watershed functions, formulated as broad
targets for the restoration of currently impaired uses of water resources, or broad targets
to prevent future impairment of those uses, both specified in terms of content, location
and timing.
• Broad strategic directions for the management of related resources,
• Focus, contents, methodologies and organization to be applied during the subsequent
more detailed planning exercise,
• Consensus among stakeholders.