Exploring community preferences for managing Blueskin estuary in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Public participation in environmental management is increasingly recognised as crucial for the success of management practices. Multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) has been demonstrated to be a convenient approach to achieve stakeholder participation in environmental management practices. However, stakeholder selection and categorisation for participatory management frameworks can be difficult. There are often underlying assumptions that stakeholders will primarily focus on goals directly pertaining to their particular business or background. An MCDA process is currently underway for Blueskin estuary and catchment. The present study aimed to use cluster analysis to determine whether stakeholders in the Blueskin area could be clustered based on their preference for certain management goals. Stakeholder interviews using the reverse swing method gave weights for each management goal for each stakeholder. These weights were used to perform an agglomerative hierarchical cluster analysis for the first and second-level goals identified earlier in the MCDA process. Results showed that stakeholders were divided into two clusters for both the first and second-level goals, with the majority of stakeholders clustered together in one large cluster. Unlike previous studies, our results showed that those with certain economic interests were not primarily concerned with goals directly relating to their industry, and this particular group of stakeholders shared similar management preferences for the Blueskin catchment and estuary.