The Process
Ideally, multistakeholder processes are established from the ‘bottom up’. That is, the community directly affected by change launches its own initiatives to ensure that all those with an interest (or stake) in the community’s well being are involved in both identifying the important issues and in developing solutions to ensure the community’s long term health. The Waipaoa Catchment project did not follow the bottom up model completely. It was initiated by the Ministry of Agriculture (as it was then) as a consequence of discussions with local groups including the Federated Farmers and Women’s Division Federated Farmers. There was always, however, a clear intent to shift the locus of decision making onto a representative local multistakeholder group, if one could be established.
The community is the building block upon which multistakeholder activities are based. There are three interlinked sets of activities: identification of the community; identification of stakeholders within the community; and community participation.
Identification of community is the most important task. It encompasses the district or region experiencing the impact of change. But that identification is not necessarily simple. There are different definitions of "community". It may be simply a geographical area determined by political boundaries, it may be the geographical area defined by natural (physical) boundaries within which service delivery can easily be effected and access to services, family and friends, and recreational activities easily achieved, or it may be a wider community of interests in which a range of stakeholders (who may not all live in the same location) affect and are affected by local community decisions and activities.
In a multistakeholder process the preferred definition is of community of interests. This community embraces individuals and interest groups, land owners and land users, providers and consumers, and people from different ethnic groups. Community, then, may refer to any (or any combination) of physical, economic, cultural or emotional relationships between and within these different groupings. Sometimes the community will be readily identifiable, at others it will be less obvious. But how the community is identified is important. It will have a direct impact in terms of the issues to be addressed. Proper identification of community should ensure that community issues can be identified by a representative group and solutions researched and implemented.
Secondly, stakeholders must be identified. Broadly, these are all those who can affect or will be affected by change within the community. At one level that is everyone. At a more workable level it is those specific groups within the community with a stake in its continued effectiveness andsustainability. In this project, stakeholders were identified through preliminary discussions with ‘obvious’ key community opinion leaders and agencies, through community meetings and through the identification of volunteers prepared to meet in continuing working groups. Some potential stakeholders were not identified early in the process. Others were uncertain whether they would gain any benefit from participation. At this preliminary stage the enthusiasm of particular individuals to motivate others is crucial if the process is to continue effectively. The organisations and interests represented at initial meetings are shown at Appendix 1.
Finally, there must be full participation by the community, and specifically by representatives of the stakeholders. Small community meetings proved to be an effective means of bringing the issues to wider attention and to gain a broader perspective on them. Community meetings involved specific meetings with women’s groups, iwi, farmers and other special issues groups as well as with general community groups. In different meetings in the Waipaoa area, the issues covered included impacts associated with the conversion of farms to plantation forestry, how to make farm operations more profitable and why the benefits of forestry were passing parts of the community by. At a greater level of detail the issues raised included:
- the lack of communication between agricultural producers and their forestry neighbours;
- the decline in farm incomes;
- the decline in rural farm-based employment;
- the decline in rural population;
- the future of rural schools;
- funding for rural roads;
- increases in public liability insurance when large-scale forestry concerns come into the area;
- the risk of new regulations imposed on farmers to meet new higher environmental standards;
- reduced representation of rural interests on the local council; and
- the lack of useable information to allow informed decisions.
Most of these cover the social and economic effects of change. Other discussions focused on the concept of sustainable land management and the potential role of agriculture and forestry in this.
As identified in community meetings, information is one of the keys to wise decisions. To this end, two surveys were conducted as integral parts of this project. The first assessed the attitudes of hill country farmers to sustainable land use and changes in land use; the second examined the attitudes of land managers and farmers on the flats to flood risk management in these areas and to forestry development in the hill country.
Public information meetings were held to provide information and receive wider public ideas. An expanded range of community issues was identified. These are presented diagrammatically as Figures 2, 3 and 4.
Figure 2: Community Percenption of Environmental Issues
ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES
Most members of the community see the issues raised as barriers to the community’s sustainability. These issues in turn are translated back through a sequence of links to stresses within the existing community structure, rapid land use change and adverse economic conditions. They identify a rural society caught at the cross-currents of change and bound by contradictory value systems.
But identification and clarification of the issues also gives the community a greater opportunity to deal with them. A representative Working Group, established as part of the process, identified, from these sets of issues, the ideal community of the future as one which:
- is a vibrant, vital ‘people-place’; with
- a diverse supportive and sustainable economy; and
- a clean, green and pest-free environment.
Figure 3: Community Perception of Social Issues 
Figure 4: Community Perception of Economic Issues
SOCIAL ISSUES
ECONOMIC ISSUES
Obstacles to achieving the vision (fear of change, inertia, negativity, isolation) were also identified and some solutions suggested.
Contact for Enquiries
Rural Affairs Coordinator
Sector Performance Policy
MAF Policy
Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry
PO Box 2526
Wellington
NEW ZEALAND
Phone: +64 4 894 0675
Fax: +64 4 4 894 0745
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