Identifying Core Issues for Basin Management: The Issue Generating Assessment (IGA) Methodology.

Effective stakeholder engagement is essential for basin management, requiring structured approaches to foster collaboration and consensus. This paper applies the Issue Generating Assessment (IGA) method, which identifies core issues for stakeholder discussion, to basin management. Focusing on the Israeli part of the Hadera Basin, we identify the core issues that should be discussed by stakeholders using the IGA method. To this end 39 participants across 14 sectors evaluating three generic basin management strategies were asked to qualitatively explain their evaluations. By analyzing these explanations utilizing the IGA method, four core issues emerged: (1) Managing uncertainty: addressing climate change and land use impacts on stream flow; (2) Mutual impacts management: handling interactions between the stream and its surroundings; (3) Integration of uses: balancing various stream utilization priorities; (4) Defining natural system functions: determining the role of natural systems. For each core issue, we proposed questions to guide stakeholder discussions. The IGA method is thus found to be useful, and has the potential to foster meaningful dialogue in structured stakeholder meetings, thereby focusing discussions and allowing understandings among stakeholders to be reached as a basis for basin management plans. Such early understandings may contribute to the development of strategies for sustainable basin management.