DEMOs framework prototype for participatory integrated planning

Description

This prototype is the working skeleton of the NAIAD framework as it was applied across the demonstration sites: a structured sequence that takes a catchment or a city from an initial statement of its water problems through to a costed and negotiated strategy. It is called a prototype because it was designed to be adapted — each site ran the sequence with the methods that suited its own institutional context and stage of development.

The framework sets out which assessments are carried out at which point, what each of them requires as input, and how their results are brought together. The biophysical assessment establishes what the system does; the social and institutional assessment establishes who decides and how; the economic assessment establishes what the options are worth; and the participatory work establishes which of them is acceptable.

Because the sites differed in maturity — from conceptual design at the Lower Danube and Glinščica through to measures already implemented in Rotterdam — the prototype also records how the sequence is shortened or deepened depending on how far a project has already travelled.

Applications to decision making in the insurance sector

It provides the map of where a risk carrier can enter a planning process, and what will already have been decided by the time it does. That matters when the sector's contribution is being sought as a co-funder of prevention, since the entry point determines how much influence remaining over the design of the measures.

Added value of this modelling approach

It prevents the common failure in which one assessment is carried out thoroughly and the others are assembled afterwards to justify the result. The framework's order is deliberate: acceptability and institutional feasibility are tested while options are still open.

What decision can be improved with this modelling approach

Sequencing a planning process and its budget; deciding which assessment to commission first; and judging whether a strategy is ready to move from design to financing.