Over the past few months, the Flanders Environment Agency who is Host Partner of the pilot area “Kleine Nete”, focussed on defining the various stakeholders and their needs within their pilot project.
The pilot involves many different groups of interest such as kayak users and rental companies, sports organisations, nature organisations as well as cities and municipalities. As an initial internal exercise, they started the project by making a list of stakeholders and contacting a few of them in order to get a better and broader overview. The result of this extensive brainstorming session was a matrix of measures, which identified the needs of each stakeholder.
The main task was to find out what the stakeholders expect from each other in order to evaluate whether there are common needs or contradictions. Nature organisations want to protect and conserve the nature interest, kayak users and rental organisation do not want to be banned or restricted in their activities, and the cities want to find a balance between recreation and nature aspects. These results will now make it possible to create the necessary tools to bring all partners together in workshops and get the pilot project off to a good start.
Collaboration with the Antwerp Management School (AMS).
The next step will be to organise a workshop in cooperation with the Antwerp Management School, for which the prepared stakeholder matrix will serve as the basis. Exploratory consultations have already taken place with some stakeholders at the request of the Municipality of Kasterlee. In the coming months, the workshops are to be further expanded and improved in order to ultimately achieve a comprehensive result.
Source: Flanders Environment Agency
