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LOCAL ACTION PROJECT 3

Contract Ref: 24753 (OMNICOM REF: 24753)

Working with local communities to enhance the value of natural capital in local landscapes

to improve people’s lives, the environment and economic prosperity.

Final Report v4.0 – June 2019

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This document may be reproduced with prior permission of the Westcountry Rivers Ltd.

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Waiting for a train by

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Contents

Executive Summary 7

1. Introduction 10

1.1. Policy & research context ..................................................................................................................... 10 A

Green Future: Our 25 Year Plan to Improve the Environment

......................................................... 11

Ecosystem services & natural capital approaches

..................................................................................... 12

Environmental Infrastructure: whole system approach & ‘circular economy’

................................... 16

Biodiversity Net Gains

............................................................................................................................. ...........

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1.2. The Local Action Project: work so far ............................................................................................. 20

Figure 6. The historical timeline of the LAP approach.

............................................................................ 21

1.3. LAP: further research questions ........................................................................................................ 22

1.4. Local Action Project 3: Project objectives .....................................................................................

22

2. Approach & Outputs 26

2.1. Stakeholder engagement, the concept of ‘environmental stewardship’ & the

shift towards local collaborative governance in the UK .......................................................... 26

2.2. The Catchment-Based Approach in England & Wales: A case study of local collaborative

governance in the UK ................................................................................................. 30

2.3. Developing a more ‘market-orientated’ approach to environmental strategy

development & strategic action planning ...................................................................................... 33

2.4. A robust local, collaborative & integrated natural capital approach for

application by environmental partnerships ................................................................................. 39

Mapping the assets – setting a natural capital baseline

........................................................................ 43

Benefits of adopting a natural capital approach in collaborative working

........................................ 44

Some potential pitfalls of adopting a natural capital approach in collaborative working

............ 45

2.5. Updating the toolbox of interventions ............................................................................................ 46

2.6. Demonstration areas .............................................................................................................................. 49

The Medway Catchment

................................................................................................................................ 49

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Nature of Hulme

............................................................................................................................. ...........

........ 52

2.7. Knowledge exchange & dissemination ........................................................................................... 56

3. Summary & conclusions 59

Further Information & Contacts .................................................................................................................... 62

References ............................................................................................................................................................... 62

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Adams

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Executive Summary Profound changes have and continue to occur in the policy and funding landscape (macro-context)

in which the UK environmental sector operates. As set out in this report, these changes have

coincided with the emergence of both a highly motivated and effective local collaborative

governance approach and the establishment of the natural capital approach in the ‘mainstream’ of

the sector.

As a result of this alignment, whether by design or coincidence, there is now both a real need and

significant opportunity for these local collaborative approaches to make a tangible and significant

contribution to realising the ambitions of the UK Government with respect to the environment.

This positive contribution will only be achieved, however, if these groups are able to implement a

robust evidence-led and strategic natural capital approach.

The Local Action Project (LAP) approach/ethos has been specifically designed to help meet the

objectives set out in the UK Governments 25-Year Environment Plan (25-YEP) and includes several

key elements that address the challenges laid down by the Natural Capital Committee (NCC). LAP

aims to facilitate local, collaborative adaptive environmental management by engaging, inspiring

and empowering local communities to protect and enhance the value of natural capital in their

landscapes to improve quality of life (health and wellbeing), the environment and economic

prosperity.

During this third phase of the Defra Local Action Project (LAP3), we have successfully achieved the

principal aims of the project to extend the LAP approach further by:

• Testing it in a rural setting;

• Further formalising the approach to create a suite of tools and guidance designed to facilitate

and enable the adoption of the LAP-approach by groups of stakeholders operating in landscapes

with a variety of different priorities, stakeholder interests and landscape-scales

To this end, the approach for LAP3 was developed and refined in a series of ‘demonstration’

studies: the Medway Catchment Partnership, the Nature of Hulme Project and the Greater Exeter

Strategic Plan (information not included in this report as the outputs have not yet been released

for dissemination). In these studies, we have worked collaboratively to iteratively co-create the

framework and test the integration of the participatory ESS assessment approaches already

developed for rural and (most recently during the Defra Local Action Project) urban landscapes into

a wholesystem ecosystem services/natural capital approach at a whole-catchment- or local-

community- scale. Testing the approach in both a whole-catchment/rural setting and at the level

of a single community were both key elements of the project.

In particular, we have –

1. Developed an adaptable, scalable and universally applicable natural capital-based framework

for environmental partnerships (local, regional and national) to develop consistent and robust

natural capital-based action plans that will inspire and enable the delivery of actions that

enhance natural capital and realise environmental, social, cultural and economic benefits.

2. Supported the objective of the CaBA Benefits Assessment Working Group (BAWG), the CaBA

National Support Group (NSG) and Defra to create a suite of additional guidance, resources and

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training for local partnerships (e.g. CaBA) and

other environmental groups. This work will help to

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ensure that their monitoring, evaluation and reporting of partnership-performance, output

delivery and outcomes is done in a more consistent and robust manner and, where possible,

adopting a natural capital approach. We have sought to ensure the widest possible

uptake/adoption of the approach developed by undertaking this knowledge exchange through

a wide diversity of dissemination channels to a wide array of audiences.

3. We have also supported the CaBA BAWG as it attempts to provide support and guidance to

CaBA groups hoping to secure additional/innovative funding to deliver their catchment action

plans (or ‘project pipelines’). We have helped the CaBA BAWG in its attempts to secure

additional funding to strengthen CaBA work on monitoring and evaluation of delivery and

benefits assessment by helping to build organisational capacity, by organising and

contributing to workshops, showcasing best practice, producing guidance on how to design

monitoring and evaluation methods and by publicising opportunities for capacity building.

Through the delivery of this project we have also gained several valuable insights into the

implementation of local collaborative governance approaches and how they can successfully

incorporate a ‘natural capital approach’ into their work. The lessons-learnt are as follows –

1. Recent years have seen a growing ambition among policy-makers to promote local collaborative

approaches and several innovative policy instruments have sought to engender a greater sense

of stewardship by helping stakeholders (citizens, civil society groups, local businesses,

government agencies, practitioners and policy-makers) to recognise their roles and

responsibilities in protecting and enhancing their local landscape and natural environment.

In line with this, several research projects have demonstrated that empowered local

environmental partnerships comprised of diverse stakeholders and technical specialists from in

and around a catchment, can be responsible for coordinating the planning, funding and delivery

of good ecological health for that river and its catchment. They have also shown us that, by

adopting an integrated stakeholder‐driven assessment of a catchment, we will be able to

develop a comprehensive understanding of the challenges we face. And following this, to

develop a strategic, targeted, balanced and therefore cost-effective environmental

management plan.

2. Local environmental partnerships in the UK, such as CaBA, have been successful and their

brandvalue and legitimacy is growing (locally and nationally) year-on-year. However, it is also

clear that, if they are to take full advantage of the many and varied opportunities emerging

currently in the UK environmental sector (25 Year Environment Plan, the new Environmental

Land management scheme, 3rd Cycle River Basin Management Plans and the developing Shared

Prosperity Fund) there remains an urgent need for them to adopt a more strategic and ‘business-

like’ approach.

They must now attempt to develop a compelling business case for investment in their local

environment (including being able to adopt a natural capital approach as and when required)

and seek opportunities to present this case to the right audiences, in the right spatial locations

and using the right language required to be successful.

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Furthermore, in is becoming increasingly clear that effective and robust monitoring and

evaluation holds the key to their success, as this is how the successful realisation of outcomes

is articulated and demonstrated. Partnerships need to improve their capabilities in this area if

they are to demonstrate the social, environmental, cultural and economic outcomes they have

realised and market themselves effectively to prospective investors.

3. Local environmental partnerships need to develop a more ‘market-orientated’ approach to

environmental strategy development, strategic action planning, delivery and evaluation. As the

funding and policy landscape becomes ever more orientated to outcome-focused investment,

local practitioners and partnerships need to develop a compelling narrative (a business case)

about the value (environmental, cultural, social and economic) of what they do.

A key element of this strategy development process is the SWOT (strengths, weaknesses,

opportunities & threats) analysis, an ongoing self-reflection process that informs the delivery of

the strategy. What is clear is that monitoring and evaluation holds the key to success as this is

how the successful realisation of outcomes is measured, demonstrated and articulated. Local

collaborative groups often have a capability gap when it comes to the assessment of ‘Gross

Value Added’ (GVA) – i.e. robust evaluation of the full array of benefits resulting from their

activities.

4. A spatial evidence-base should be developed (at the appropriate spatial scale) that facilitates

robust policy-making, strategic planning & action planning. It must be: 1) easy to understand &

interpret (accepting that an expert science communicator may be required); 2) consistently

applied (to support strategic planning), 3) tailored to the scale & issues of the landscape, and 4)

scrutinised by stakeholders (from the start). There are many approaches available and we have

characterised a common core in the data and evidence processes that underpin many of them

(see below), but beyond this, we recommend that partnerships choose a methodology that

works for them in their situation and refine it for their landscape of interest.

The end products and outcomes of this project are a series of agreed local natural capital-based

action plans, which are now being used to guide decision-making and activity in the local landscapes

they represent. By formalising the approach through the development of tools and guidance, we

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have created an adaptable, scalable and universally applicable natural capital-based framework for

local environmental planning. We have also developed an approach that enables practitioners to

adopt a greater level of consistency and robustness in their natural capital-based approaches and

this has allowed other areas and organisations to use the approach independently. This is essential

to ensuring a widespread take-up of the approach without the need for additional support.

1. Introduction 1.1. Policy & research context

In 2011, the UK Government’s Natural Environment White Paper (NEWP) (UK Government, 2011)

recognised the need for the benefits that a healthy natural environment can provide (and hence

the value of nature) to be given proper consideration in decision-making processes of markets,

business and Government. The NEWP set commitments to fully include the value of natural capital

(NC) into the UK Accounts by 2020 and to establish The Natural Capital Committee to ‘advise the

Government on how to ensure England’s ‘natural wealth’ is managed efficiently and

sustainably, thereby unlocking opportunities for sustained prosperity and wellbeing’.

Phase 1 of the Local Action Project (LAP – originally called the Ecosystem Services in Urban Water

Environments – ESSUWE) provided an important research element supporting key policy areas

across Defra’s Water Quality policy areas, most notably the Urban Diffuse Pollution Strategy, the

Catchment Based Approach (CaBA) and Defra 25-Year Environment Plan (25-YEP), a recommendation

of the Natural Capital Committee that was, during phase 1 of LAP, still being developed (Defra,

2017).

The objectives of this project were also aligned with provisions of the Defra Water Availability &

Quality Evidence Plan to develop research on the value of water and the wide range of products and

services it provides, to support a policy framework for water that promotes sustainable, efficient

and equitable use.

There are a great number of recent and ongoing policies, projects/initiatives and studies being

developed and delivered, which can both provide valuable learning and insight to support the

delivery of this project: Local Action Project 3 (LAP3, see sections 1.2 and 1.3 for more background

on the history and approach of Local Action Project). It is will necessary for the methodology

developed in this project to be fully integrated/aligned with these policy and statutory frameworks

if it is to become part of the ‘business as usual’ approach adopted by a wide array of organisations

planning and delivering environmental works in the future.

In this report we explore a number of these issues/approaches that need to be considered if we are

to achieve the intended outcomes of LAP3 and facilitate the locally integrated, collaborative and

multi-beneficial delivery of natural capital enhancements. These include:

• 25-Year Environment Plan (25-YEP, see more detail below) (UK Government, 2017);

• Environmental condition/risk assessment & planning (e.g. water company-funded work);

• Environmental Infrastructure and asset management (whole-system and ‘circular economy’);

• Ecosystem services & natural capital approaches;

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• Payments for Ecosystem Services & ‘Water Stewardship’ (see Rozza et al., 2013; WWF, 2013);

• Biodiversity Net Gains – the Eco-metric Approach (e.g. IUCN, 2017).

It is important to note that, despite the huge variety of strategic approaches currently being

adopted by environmental practitioners in the UK and further afield, there are several common

themes that connect many of them. Perhaps the most significant theme is the almost universal

acknowledgement of the need for the approach taken to environmental assessment, protection

and enhancement to be evidence-led, collaborative, landscape-scale and integrated (whole-

systems thinking and not ‘one-sizefits-all’).

This ethos is embodied in the Water Framework Directive (2000) and, more recently in a great many

strategic plans and publications (including most recently the Government’s 25-YEP). There has been

significant movement towards adopting this approach in the last decade. However, while there is

wide recognition of the need for this type of approach, much of the effort to date appears to have

focused on setting out the conceptual and theoretical frameworks for implementation, rather than

actually adopting the approach and moving forward to the implementation of environmental

actions.

Summary

Profound changes have and continue to occur in the policy and funding landscape

(macrocontext) in which the UK environmental sector operates. As set out in this report, these

changes have coincided with the emergence of both a highly motivated and effective local

collaborative governance approach and the establishment of the natural capital approach in

the ‘mainstream’ of the sector. As a result of this alignment, whether by design or coincidence,

there is now both a real need and significant opportunity for these local collaborative

approaches to make a tangible and significant contribution to realising the ambitions of the UK

Government with respect to the environment. This positive contribution will only be achieved,

however, if these groups are able to implement a robust evidence-led and strategic natural

capital approach.

A Green Future: Our 25 Year Plan to Improve the Environment

The Defra 25-Year Environment Plan (25-YEP) (UK Government, 2017) was a recommendation of

the Natural Capital Committee (NCC) in 2015. At that time, the recommended (and agreed)

objectives set by the NCC were that the 25-YEP included that it should:

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• Place us a world leader in using data, tools and techniques

to understand, map and monitor the condition and value of

our land, water, air, sea and wildlife, the benefits they give

us and how they are changing,

• Help individuals and organisations at local, regional,

national and international levels to understand the

economic, social and cultural value of nature, the impact

that their actions have on it, and to use this knowledge to

make better decisions and facilitate the design of

sustainable financing models,

• Look to address outstanding monitoring and data issues, so

we can make better informed decisions about where

strategic investments in natural capital are needed and what form these should take.

The NCC stated in their recommendation of the 25-YEP that “Many of the benefits we get from

nature are felt most strongly at a local level. Local businesses, land owners, and people all

shape their landscapes, and this influences what local people get from their environment.

We will equip local decision makers with the tools they need to assess the benefits that

come from their land and water assets so they can use them most effectively, be it to

support livelihoods, their local communities, the economy, the provision of public goods, or

personal enjoyment.”

At its core, the Defra 25-YEP (now published) is based on several key challenges that will require

environmental practitioners and policy-makers to: 1) consider the value of nature in decision-

making; 2) develop innovative tools and finance methods that use the latest science, data and

technology; 3) plan and deliver action at the most effective scale and in a collaborative, inclusive

and integrated way that breaks down silos; and 4) re-connect stakeholders with their local the

environment and empower them to take action to protect and enhance it.

The Local Action Project (LAP) approach/ethos has been specifically designed to help meet the

objectives set out in the 25-YEP and includes a number of key elements that address the challenges

laid down by the NCC. LAP facilitates local, collaborative adaptive management of the environment

by working to engage, inspire and empower local communities to protect and enhance the value of

natural capital in their landscapes to improve quality of life (health and wellbeing), the

environment and economic prosperity (Figure 1 shows the original concept for Local Action Project

in 2015).

Figure 1. Summary of original LAP concept as set out in 2015

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Ecosystem services & natural capital approaches

First adopted by the Convention on Biological Diversity (Rio Earth Summit, 2000), the ‘ecosystem

approach’ is a clearly defined strategy for the integrated management of land, water and living

resources that promotes conservation and sustainable use in an equitable way. Humans have

developed many and varied geographic units to manage society, such as parish, borough and

county boundaries. However, while these units may be appropriate for managing society, there is

an increasing recognition that we could more effectively manage society within the context of the

environment.

River catchments offer a natural management unit (a hydrological ecosystem) in which water

moves over and through the landscape to the sea via streams and rivers. The ecosystem approach

therefore provides an excellent framework for the catchment partnership approach to landscape-

scale integrated catchment management planning. The ecosystem services framework sits within

the ecosystems approach. It seeks to identify the mechanisms via which the natural environment

provides benefits to society and requires that the beneficiaries of these services are engaged in

making decisions about the objectives and priorities for their environment (see Figure 2 below).

Figure 2. The provision of ecosystem services from different sections of a catchment landscape. Efforts

have focused on identifying and quantifying the sources of these services, identifying the beneficiaries

and quantifying the benefits experienced to inform and target actions designed to enhance provision.

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A number of studies have demonstrated the significant additional benefits to be gained by adopting

a participatory ecosystem services approach to environmental planning (especially for water

environments) (Pahl-Wostl, 2002; Pahl-Wostl, 2007; Chan et al., 2012; Braken et al., 2014; Kenter

et al., 2014). In particular, it has been demonstrated that stakeholders (including the public) are

generally supportive of the holistic ambitions and interconnected perspective of the ecosystems

approach (Fish & Saratsi, 2015). In their guidance on the assessment of ecosystem services, the

Environment Agency recognises that an ecosystem services assessment can support the

identification and selection of management options and help ensure the delivery of optimal

outcomes for people affected by proposed interventions (Environment Agency, 2014). The

Environment Agency also identify that stakeholder involvement throughout the process is

important and that the systematic, iterative and transparent nature of a participatory ecosystem

services assessment can provide a means to reach a consensus on the chosen course of action.

Furthermore, the ecosystem services concept has been shown to support: 1) the development of a

common language for describing the benefits provided; 2) stakeholders seeking to gain a better

sense of the likely synergies and trade-offs resulting from the interventions delivered; 3)

communication to stakeholders about the benefits of policy and project goals in a way that

inspires engagement and the development of a shared vision/ambition; 4) the acquisition of

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funding from a diversity of sources for delivery of interventions and 5) robust and evidence-led

decision-making (Rall et al., 2015; Braken et al., 2014; Kenter et al., 2014).

The BiodivERsA Handbook (2014) states that stakeholder engagement can provide a number of

benefits for researchers, stakeholders and wider society, including: increased empowerment;

improved links and partnerships; access to additional resources or information; endorsement for

an approach or decision; better communication, awareness, trust and support, and improved

learning through sharing of experiences. In addition, they state that engagement can assist in

managing risks and reducing conflict by identifying barriers, limitations and potential negative

outcomes before they occur.

Figure 2 shows the elements of a participatory data and evidence-based ecosystem services

approach.

Figure 2. Schematic illustrating the interacting elements requiring consideration during a participatory

data and evidence-based ecosystem services approach

As stated previously, the 2011 NEWP recognised the need for decision-making by markets, business

and Government to include proper consideration of the benefits that a healthy natural

environment can provide. Further to this, the NEWP also set commitments to fully include the value

of natural capital into the UK Accounts by 2020 and to establish The Natural Capital Committee to

“advise the Government on how to ensure England’s ‘natural wealth’ is managed efficiently and

sustainably, thereby unlocking opportunities for sustained prosperity and wellbeing”.

More recently, there has now been a wholesale shift towards the adoption of a ‘NC approach’ to

environmental decision-making by Defra (and its agencies), local government and the water

industry (to name but a few) and in early 2017 the NCC published its guidance document, ‘How to

do it: a natural capital workbook’. This publication aims to be a practical guide to adopt a natural

capital approach in making decisions about the natural environment. It provides a five-step model

intended to support decision makers, including planners, communities and landowners, in

protecting and improving their local environment and natural capital. The guide aims to provide a

method to:

• Measure the natural capital in a particular area and the benefits it can provide;

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• Identify threats and opportunities to natural capital;

• Weigh up the available options and opportunities to make improvements;

• Develop practical plans.

By developing this approach, the NCC does not aim to be prescriptive, as each situation will have

its own priorities and opportunities, but to provide a structured way of making informed choices.

The diagram in Figure 3 (below) shows a summary of the approach, which is based on ‘5-steps’. The

approach loops back from step 5 to step 1 to demonstrate the importance of undertaking

evaluation and potentially to agree shifts in goals or objectives on the basis of experience (often

referred to as an adaptive or iterative management/strategic approach). The dotted lines indicate

that as the plan develops, earlier stages may need to be revisited.

Figure 3. The Natural Capital Committee’s ‘5-step’ approach to natural capital assessment.

Environmental Infrastructure: whole system approach & ‘circular economy’

The concept of environmental infrastructure (EI) is closely aligned with the concepts of the natural

capital and ecosystem services approaches and has proved useful for those involved in whole

systems management, sustainable development, climate adaptation/resilience and landscape

management.

Like the natural capital approach, river basin management planning (WFD) and the closely related

circular economy-approach, it also has a core tenet of environmental ‘SWOT analysis’ and facilitates

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decision-making and action planning by providing evidence that supports robust environmental risk

assessment.

“Environmental Infrastructure (EI) is the network of environmental assets needed for

communities and societies to function in our cities, towns and countryside. Though not

frequently identified under the traditional realm of ‘infrastructure’, the importance of EI and its

value both intrinsically and for local people are increasingly being recognised. EI includes the

equipment, facilities and services necessary for managing water supply, waste water, waste and

flood risk.”

Hidden Infrastructure Report, Environment Agency, 2007

Similar to the NC- and ESS-approaches, EI is considered under 5 headings – water resources, water

quality, waste, green infrastructure and flood risk management (although food production and

other ecosystem services can be added to this as well). The evaluation of these assets or features

in the landscape involves the assessment of three key characteristics that allow the ‘need’ for

protection, enhancement or creation of new assets to be determined (see Figure 4).

Figure 4. The 3-stages of an environmental infrastructure approach: demand & pressure, capacity to

provide benefits and cost to increase capacity under growth or increasing pressure scenarios.

This approach has been applied effectively to inform the planning and development process in

urban landscapes as diverse as Greater London and small rural communities in Devon. It also forms

the basis for the natural capital approach, now being applied more widely, and is proving to be a

useful framework for performing EI planning and management in the water industry (e.g. the South

West Water Upstream Thinking Initiative) and in food and drink supply chains, where various

programmes are now working to develop novel Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) schemes, or

implement a Water Stewardship approach to environmental management (see Rozza et al., 2013;

WWF, 2013).

In recent years, numerous research projects (e.g. Defra, 2013; RELU, 2009; Smith et al., 2015) have

worked with stakeholders and practitioners, to demonstrate that the development and practical

implementation of strategic plans for environmental, landscape or estate management require a

broader consideration of data and evidence than some of the newly emerging approaches, such as

the natural capital approach, provide.

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The ‘environmental infrastructure’ concept represents a useful supplementary or even alternative

way of working that does include a broader consideration of the data and evidence available – for

example data and information relating to the condition and performance of assets in the built

environment that have a direct impact on the health of natural assets and their ability to perform

their ecosystem functions.

Further to this, some have stated (various pers. comms.) that they consider the natural capital

approach to be overly academic, theoretical or conceptual and that it needs to be better connected

to the practical realities of ‘the planning process’ (in the broadest sense) and landscape

management if it is to be implemented effectively in ‘real world’ situations.

As an illustration of this perception, the EI approach differs from the now widely adopted natural

capital approach in that it includes consideration and assessment of infrastructure assets and

processes that interact closely with natural capital assets and regulate their ability to provide

functions/benefits, but which are not typically included in the natural capital assessment. The EI

approach examines ecosystem services (supply and demand) and assesses the natural assets in the

landscape and their functions.

Critically, it does this as part of a ‘whole-system’ analysis that considers the contributions that the

built environment, farmed environment and other infrastructure elements make to regulating the

performance of natural assets in the landscape (and vice versa of course). Hence, ‘…EI includes

natural capital such as soil and floodplains and aqueducts, reservoirs, water distribution pipes,

sewer pipes, and pumping stations; treatment systems such as sedimentation tanks and

aeration tanks, filters, septic tanks, desalination plants, and incinerators; and waste disposal

facilities such as sanitary landfills and secure hazardous-waste storage impoundments…’.

In summary, while the EI approach is similar to the natural capital-approach, in that it looks at

‘demand, capacity and cost’, it does this in a way (and using a language) that, for many audiences,

is better aligned with an asset or infrastructure management and whole-system approach.

Furthermore, as evidenced my its original application to provide responses to regional spatial

strategies and housing plans (e.g. Environment Agency, 2009; Environment Agency, 2011), the EI

approach integrates well with the ‘business-as-usual’ approaches that many businesses,

practitioners, estate/asset managers, water companies, local government bodies, etc currently

undertake (i.e. including consideration of natural, farmed and built environment in one ‘whole

system’).

The concept of EI and its evaluation is also closer (than the natural capital approach) to the

asset/resilience management and environmental risk-assessment methodologies that water

companies and other businesses (especially in food and drink supply chains) adopt in their work to

manage their assets and the way they interact with the environment.

Biodiversity Net Gains

The concepts of ‘offsetting’ and making reparation for environmental degradation or destruction

resulting from human activities, have been the subject of considerable focus in the fields of ecology

and conservation for many years. Indeed, the philosophies of ‘no deterioration’, ‘no net loss’ and,

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more recently, the ‘maintenance of natural capital value at a landscape-scale’, remain core tenets

in the approaches adopted for the delivery of a wide array of plans and strategies throughout the

UK’s environmental movement (e.g. the Defra Pioneers, Natura 2000 Management Plans, River

Basin Management Plans, Water Company Business Plans, Local Plans and Strategic Masterplans,

such as the Greater Exeter Strategic Plan).

In the planning process, the ‘mitigation hierarchy’ tool is applied to balance development priorities

with biodiversity conservation needs to ensure that development achieves a ‘net biodiversity gain’.

The mitigation hierarchy is a 4-step process which aims to alleviate environmental harm as far as

possible through avoidance, minimisation, restoration and then offsetting. It requires that efforts

be made to first avoid and then minimise impacts on biodiversity. Offsetting should only be

considered as a last resort after all other options to mitigate impacts have been considered. This is

because offsetting results are uncertain and there is often a time lag between habitats being lost

and new habitats becoming established. If compensating for losses within the development

footprint is not possible or does not generate the most benefits for nature conservation, then

biodiversity losses can be offset by gains elsewhere, usually through some form of habitat

restoration or creation. Where a development cannot satisfy the requirements of the ‘mitigation

hierarchy’, planning permission should be refused. The mitigation hierarchy is implemented

through a mixture of planning policy, legislation and best practice guidance.

Where controversies have arisen over biodiversity offsetting, it has most often been the

methodologies adopted for the strategic targeting (spatial scale and evidence-base), intervention

design (robust toolbox of interventions) and implementation (quality and location of interventions)

of these offsetting approaches that has drawn criticism, rather than the underlying objectives and

ethos of the approaches (Walker et al, 2009; McKenney & Kiesecker, 2010; Defra, 2014).

Furthermore, demonstrating the successful realisation of biodiversity-offsetting outcomes is

extremely challenging and the careful intervention design and detailed monitoring and evaluation

are both essential and have been reported to be missing from schemes of this type.

In many cases, the quality, multi-functionality and value of the features being degraded or

destroyed has not been considered (Walker et al, 2009; McKenney & Kiesecker, 2010; Defra, 2014).

As a result, the approach has also failed to recognise the challenge faced in reinstating or even

exceeding the previously present ecosystem functions and the resulting value of the natural capital

has not been recognised. It appears that too many schemes, with an over simplistic approach, built

on an insufficient evidence-base and applied at inappropriate spatial-scales, have ultimately failed

to demonstrate the successful maintenance of ‘overall’ ecosystem function and therefore benefit-

provision and natural capital value.

Having taken this evaluation into account, it is also important to acknowledge the potential benefits

of these so-called ‘net-gains’ approaches being implemented in a rigorous manner. These benefits

could include: 1) improved clarity and conservation awareness for developers; 2) placing value on

nature, introducing incentives for conservation; 3) increased reliability and funding of long-term

conservation projects; 4) flexibility to ‘trade up’ and create larger conservation networks; 5)

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diversified income streams for landowners and land managers; 6) strengthened conservation

partnerships, and 7) enhanced public support for conservation and developers.

Thus, for a biodiversity or natural capital ‘net-gains’ approach to be widely and consistently applied,

a comprehensive natural capital evidence-base needs to be in place first. In line with his objective,

Defra and Natural England are currently working with a consortium led by the University of Oxford

to develop the ‘eco-metric’ (net-gains) approach to measure the ability of habitats to deliver

ecosystem services (see EKN, 2019; Defra, 2019).

The aim is for it to be used to measure the net changes in natural capital and the ecosystem services

it provides as a result of land-use change or development. Critically it is biodiversity-led, with

biodiversity net gain a pre-requisite of applying the tool. The resulting framework is intended to

help practitioners target the most appropriate environmental

protection/enhancement/restoration interventions (current stocks) and improvement measures

(new assets/flows) into locations with the potential to produce: 1) the highest possible cost-benefit

return-on-investment; 2) the highest possible diversity of realisable benefits, and 3) the greatest

number of beneficiaries (while ensuring that trade-offs are clearly explored and understood by all

stakeholders).

The ‘net-gain’ or ‘eco-metric’ concepts have the potential to connect the natural capital-approach

into the planning process and align it with other related disciplines, such as landscape character

assessments and infrastructure management. In so doing, this could be one mechanism via which

we may see the natural capital approach better implemented to effect change in ‘real world’

situations.

While the early interpretations have mainly been focused on biodiversity outcomes, the concept

can be widened out to integrate with a whole-system-approach. Once a comprehensive natural

capital and environmental infrastructure baseline has been established and a conceptual

understanding of how the assets in the natural, farmed and built environments in the landscape

interact/conflict/support each other, then enablers are in place for the net-gains concept to predict

the potential benefits that will result from the delivery of future plans and scenarios (and perform

risk assessments).

1.2. The Local Action Project: work so far The Local Action Project (LAP) aims to work with local communities to enhance the value of natural

capital in our landscapes to improve people’s lives, the environment and economic prosperity. LAP

takes an integrated, collaborative approach designed to enable local communities and civil society

groups to discover their vision for where they live and to help them form effective

stakeholderpartnerships through which to realise that vision.

The project was originally designed to help meet the delivery requirements of the Defra 25-YEP

(then in development) by helping individuals and organisations to understand the economic, social

23

and cultural value of nature, the impact that their actions have on it, and to use this knowledge to

make better decisions and facilitate the design of sustainable financing models.

The LAP provided research and development outputs that presented robust data, evidence and

information on the benefits of green infrastructure and natural capital (in an engaging and

accessible manner) along with a method that helps communities build consensus, facilitate local

decision-making and secure funding for natural capital improvements. The operating context and

concept of LAP is shown in Figure 5 and the historical timeline of LAP is shown in Figure 6 (over

page).

Figure 5. The concept and operating context of the Defra Local Action Project.

Figure 6. The historical timeline of the LAP approach.

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1.3. LAP: further research questions

In addition to providing an adaptable and applicable framework for operationalising the policies in

the 25-YEP, LAP is also attempting to investigate several key research areas that remain to be fully

understood. For example, collaborative, adaptive governance based on integration and stakeholder

participation is rapidly becoming the new paradigm for managing environmental problems around

25

the world (Lemos and Agrawal, 2006; Folke et al., 2005). However, the enabling conditions and

success factors underpinning effective collaborative governance and participatory adaptive

management remain poorly understood.

Furthermore, examples of these approaches being applied with the inclusion or full participation of

local primary stakeholders (residents, land-owners, civil society groups, etc) remain few in number.

A great deal more work needs to be undertaken before we can develop truly robust guidance to

support the more universal application of the approach across the UK environmental sector in a

manner that leads to tangible and sustainable outcomes being realised.

The role of the ‘knowledge-broker’ or provider in participatory adaptive management, who acts to

facilitate a shared learning or knowledge generation process, and the development of a shared

language between the actors that breaks down disciplinary or cultural barriers remains poorly

understood. This role requires quite specialised capabilities and experience, but whether this

therefore represents a block to the effective application of collaborative adaptive management and

how this role can most effectively be enacted requires further examination.

…[In effective collaboration] the narratives and perspectives of different stakeholders

are not reconciled and integrated just through the creation and use of a master frame.

It is in the conversation, translation and exchange of different knowledges, i.e. the

dialectic juxtaposition of concepts, that ‘‘magic occurs’’, not in the mere combination of

the knowledge stored by each camp…” Lejano and Ingram, 2009

Finally, there is still a need for experimentation to be undertaken into how the natural capital

approach is best implemented in an integrated way within the UK environmental policy context. In

particular, several questions remain about the application of this approach at different spatial

scales or in landscapes that cut across urban-rural gradients (with the necessarily different, but

overlapping, stakeholder groups that these situations involve). In addition, robust and effective

approaches also need to be developed for situations (which are all too common) where

sectoral/thematic/ organisational divisions (silos) and competitive (non-collaborative) mindsets

remain firmly entrenched as the predominant paradigm – see Newman et al, 2004.

1.4. Local Action Project 3: Project objectives

This research project has built on a series of previous Defra- (WT1580 Local Action Project) and EA-

funded research projects (e.g. EA LAP2 Urban Demonstrator Project) that have developed and

piloted a collaborative, practically applicable and consistent natural capital-based approach to local

environmental planning in a number of urban landscapes (as described previously).

The principal aims of the project were to extend the approach further by testing it in a rural setting

and by further formalising the approach to create a suite of tools and guidance designed to facilitate

and enable the adoption of the approach by groups of stakeholders operating in landscapes of

different priorities, stakeholder interests and of different spatial scales.

26

As with earlier phases of LAP, the most important outcomes from this work were obtained through

the ‘action research’ or ‘learning-through-doing’ approach adopted. This iterative and collaborative

method allowed us to identify necessary adjustments/refinements rapidly and help implement

changes to increase the likelihood of success.

To this end, the approach for LAP3 was developed and refined in a series of 3x ‘demonstration’

studies (the Medway Catchment Partnership, the Nature of Hulme Project and the Greater Exeter

Strategic Plan). We have worked collaboratively to iteratively co-create the framework and test the

integration of the participatory ESS assessment approaches already developed for rural and (most

recently during the Defra Local Action Project) urban landscapes into a wholesystem ESS/NC

approach at a whole-catchment- or local-community- scale.

Testing the approach in both a whole catchment/rural setting and at the level of a single community

was a key element of the project. It complemented the previous project, which was delivered in

urban areas exclusively and which tended to be undertaken with a majority of professional

stakeholders at a more strategic scale.

The end products of the project are a series of agreed local natural capital-based action plans to

guide decision-making and activity in the local landscapes they represent. Formalising the approach

by developing tools and guidance is intended to create an adaptable, scalable and universally

applicable natural capital-based framework for local environmental planning. The aim is to

encourage consistency and robustness in natural capital-based approaches and allow other areas

and organisations to use the approach independently. This is essential to ensuring a widespread

take-up of the approach without the need for additional support. The project will deliver a range

of communication and capacity building activities to support this strand of the project.

The objectives of this project were to -

1. Develop an adaptable, scalable and universally applicable NC-based framework for

environmental partnerships (local, regional and national) to develop consistent and robust

natural capital-based action plans that will –

• incorporate all of the latest research and lessons learnt case studies relating to the ESS, NC

and collaborative/partnership approaches being applied around the UK and the world;

• ensure that a common connection is forged between the action/business plans in a location

and to ensure that local action plans are integrated/aligned with the plans of businesses

(water stewardship; corporate social responsibility, CSR; payments for ecosystem services,

PES), the water industry (Periodic Review 2019, PR19, business plans; Water Resources

Management Plans, WRMPs), local planning authorities (local plans, strategic masterplans,

Surface Water

Management Plans, SWMPs) and the Defra organisations (Pioneers; 3rd Cycle River Basin

Management Plans, RBMP3; Natural Capital Committee; Flood Risk Management Plans, FRMPs) –

the local variability and utility of these outputs was examined in the demonstration studies to

determine how the policy and statutory context changes between different landscape types (e.g.

urban and rural) and at different spatial scales.

27

• remain consistent with the ethos and approach of the Defra Local Action Project to develop

clear and engaging outputs in a variety of formats, style and 'languages' tailored to a wide

array of audiences - this will include the participatory/deliberative exploration and

evaluation of the most locally important/relevant natural capital typologies and ecosystem

services benefits (all four capitals - natural, produced, human and social) – this was also

tested and refined in the demonstration studies;

• evaluate the impact of urban and rural areas on ecosystem resilience and natural capital

value in the wider landscape;

• encourage the development of a fully integrated, whole systems and multi-sectoral

approach to water management

• develop an understanding of how ecosystem services benefits flow through different

landscapes, how they interact with beneficiaries and how they can be ‘budgeted’ or

partitioned between rural and urban sources – the demonstration studies were designed

to include consideration of this question;

• be aligned with the Natural Capital Committee Guidance on the natural capital approach

and other guidance from projects such as the University of Exeter’s SWEEP Programme;

• take account of and provide clear representation of the trade-offs in ecosystem

services/natural capital benefits associated with different management options;

• promote transparency in decision making especially around costs and benefits – fully

empowering and enabling the local partnerships to present a credible, robust and

evidencebased Local Action Plan;

• explore issues around ease/consistency of data collection, valuation of benefits and

usability of tools/approaches/resources by non-economists/specialists – the

demonstration studies were designed to include consideration of this question.

2. Support the objective of the Catchment Based Approach (CaBA) Benefits Assessment Working

Group (BAWG), the CaBA National Support Group (NSG) and Defra to create a suite of additional

guidance, resources and training for local partnerships (e.g. CaBA) and other environmental

groups to ensure that their monitoring, evaluation and reporting of partnershipperformance,

output delivery and outcomes is done in a more consistent and robust manner and, where

possible, adopting a natural capital approach. We will seek to ensure the widest possible

uptake/adoption of the approach developed by disseminating the case studies developed in

the LAP3 Demonstration Studies to a wide audience and undertaking knowledge exchange

through a wide diversity of channels -

• Promote the benefits of the natural capital and partnership approaches, targeting key

stakeholders and undertaking a programme of engagement and awareness raising, to

include:

• Collating and disseminating best practice case studies through workshops, presentations,

websites, flyers, videos etc;

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• Encouraging dialogue about benefits of partnership working both with and between key

stakeholders including planners, flood authorities and water companies;

• Gather evidence to showcase the work of CaBA partnerships, other practitioners and the

research community nationwide by helping them to build capacity and expertise in

monitoring and evaluation and benefits assessment and enhance collaborative project

delivery on the ground.

• Support local partnerships and other environmental groups in demonstrating the

costeffectiveness and the potential return on investment that can be achieved through

robust collaborative/partnership working.

• Work with the CaBA NSG and its other Working Groups to jointly develop and deliver on

recommendations for benefits assessment by CaBA partnerships, highlighting key barriers

and opportunities.

3. This project will also aim to support the CaBA BAWG in is objective of both in helping CaBA

groups secure additional/innovative funding to deliver their Action Plan project pipelines and

in seeking additional funding to strengthen CaBA work on monitoring and evaluation of delivery

and benefits assessment by helping to build organisational capacity - organising workshops,

showcasing best practice, producing guidance on how to design monitoring & evaluation of

delivery and benefits assessment programmes and by publicising opportunities.

2. Approach & Outputs The overarching aim of LAP3 was to develop an adaptable, scalable and universally applicable

natural capital-based framework that would facilitate the adoption of a consistent and robust

natural capital approach by environmental partnerships (local, regional and national) across the

UK and beyond.

In order to deliver this, we first undertook a comprehensive review of the primary and grey

literature pertaining to local collaborative governance approaches currently being implemented in

the UK and gain a comprehensive understanding of the policy and governance landscape in which

local partnerships are trying to operate. This review was supplemented with un-published

knowledge/information gleaned from a wide array of NGOs, practitioners and companies

specialising in local collaborative governance, co-creation, stakeholder engagement and

participatory approaches in both the environmental sector and further afield.

Having characterised these elements of the process, we then took the learnings forward and

attempted to operationalise and refine the approach via trials in three demonstration areas (only

two of these are presented in this report as the Greater Exeter Strategic Plan Ecosystem Services

Evidence Review remains unpublished at the time of writing).

29

2.1. Stakeholder engagement, the concept of ‘environmental

stewardship’ & the shift towards local collaborative governance in the

UK

“…The policy reforms [in the UK Government since 1997] are oriented towards fostering

active citizenship, overcoming social exclusion and promoting public participation in

decision making. They also suggest a new form of collaborative contract between state

and citizen based on concepts of responsible and active citizenship…” Newman et al. 2004

The ways in which governments – in the UK, the USA and across much of Western Europe – have

attempted to shift the focus towards various forms of co-production with other agencies and with

citizens themselves through partnerships, community involvement and strategies of

‘responsibilisation’ are widely documented in the ‘public administration’ and ‘social policy’

literatures (Newman et al., 2004; Balloch and Taylor, 2001; Barnes and Prior, 2000; Dwyer, 1998;

Glendinning, Powell and Rummery, 2002; Rouban, 1999).

This emerging policy context has provided a strong incentive for government agencies and local

organisations to develop new ways of engaging, deliberating, motivating and empowering citizens.

In particular, there is growing body of evidence that collaborative working that engages a wide

array of stakeholders (including citizens) can create additional benefits, over and above those that

can be achieved through more traditional hierarchical (top-down) governance and delivery

mechanisms (Reed, 2008; Rault and Jeffrey, 2008; UNESCO-WWAP, 2006; Muro and Jeffrey, 2008;

Pahl-Wostl et al., 2007; Mysiak et al., 2005).

These studies show that additional benefits can include: 1) social benefits (social capital), such as

increased community cohesion, mutual social learning and/or attitudinal or behavioural change; 2)

increases in local political capital and true stakeholder/community/civil society empowerment that

results in tangible actions or policy changes being effected; 3) increased protection and/or

improvements in natural capital value (over and above what might otherwise be achieved) and the

engendering of stewardship for local environments; 4) cultural benefits that wouldn’t otherwise be

realised, and 5) increased local economic benefits.

Of particular note is the increased desire/need for citizen, businesses and other non-professional

stakeholders to recognise their potential role in the protection or enhancement of their own local

environment. It is now widely accepted that if a sense of shared ownership and shared-

responsibility can be engendered, then it is increasingly likely that stakeholders will be inspired and

empowered to change their behaviour or to take positive action as a contribution to support it – to

become ‘stewards’ of their local environment (e.g. Evans et al., 2008; Lynn et al., 2018; KPMG,

2016).

‘Stewardship’ is an ethic that embodies the responsible planning and management of resources and

has been defined (mainly in business literature, e.g. Pajarillo, 2017) as an aspiration or attempt ‘to

leave the [assets] in better shape for your successor than it was handed over to you by your

predecessor’.

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This ethic is a key aspiration of the 25-YEP and has been a key emerging theme in environmental

policy in the UK and in many other countries for over a decade. It is an increasingly wide-held belief

that, if we can revive a (re)connection with nature and work together in a truly collaborative

manner to develop a shared vision for the future of a place or landscape, then we should be able

to empower people, communities, business and civil society groups to take action that will see that

vision and the associated natural capital value benefits realised (e.g. Ives et al., 2018).

In line with this ethos, recent years have correspondingly seen a growing ambition among a number

of policy-makers. Policy instruments have sought to engender a greater sense of stewardship by

helping stakeholders (citizens, civil society groups, local businesses, government agencies,

practitioners and policy-makers) to recognise their roles and responsibilities in protecting and

enhancing their local landscape and natural environment.

An indication of this shift towards local stewardship among policy-makers was seen at the 2016

State of Nature Report Launch, where Secretary of State Andrea Leadsom said, “…We can work

together to make a genuine difference…We must protect our iconic landscapes, but also

encourage people to appreciate and care about their environment. To help communities

connect with their local environment, we must give people more responsibility and a bigger

role in decision making. We want to put local communities at the heart of environmental

decisions, making sure we take account of natural systems such as river catchments and

landscapes, as well as strong local partnerships.”

Perhaps the best example of this approach appearing in the statutory or regulatory framework is

Article 14 of the EU Water Framework Directive, which states that, “To ensure the participation

of the general public, including users of water, in the establishment and updating of

catchment management plans, it is necessary to provide proper information of planned

measures and to report on progress with their implementation with a view to the

involvement of the general public before final decisions on the necessary measures are

adopted.”

It is also a the core of more recent policy document, such as the Catchment Based Approach Policy

Framework, which states that, “We believe that more locally focussed decision making and

action should sit at the heart of the debate about the future direction of improvements to

the water environment…We firmly believe that better coordinated action is desirable at the

catchment level by all those who use water or influence land management and that this

requires greater engagement and delivery by stakeholders at the catchment as well as local

level...”

Furthermore, the ethos of local stewardship has not just been confined to ‘top-down’ approaches

– there has also been a huge increase in the establishment of ‘bottom-up’ approaches where local

collaborative governance or local stewardship movements have been established by civil society

groups within local communities. Perhaps one of the best examples of this is the Community

Chartering Movement, which is well illustrated by the 2016 St. Ives Community Charter

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(tinyurl.com/yckxjy8j), which states that, “We have produced this Charter to set out our ‘Cultural

Heritage’ to declare our basic rights and responsibilities for improving and safeguarding it into

the future. We declare our Cultural Heritage to be the sum total of the local tangible and

intangible assets we have collectively agreed to be fundamental to the health and well-being of

our present and future generations. These constitute a social and ecological fabric that sustains

life and which provides us with the solid foundations for building and celebrating our homes,

families, community and legacy within a healthy, diverse, beautiful and safe natural

environment. This is the basis of a true economy, one which returns to its root meaning (oikos

– home, nomia – management).”

To achieve these ambitions and realise the additional benefits that can come from this approach,

environmental professionals need to engage with stakeholders in a more robust and evidence-led

manner. This is done with the aim to encourage stakeholders of all types to recognise that we all

benefit from the natural world around us and that we all have a stake in its future. We may be part

of the problem, but we can be part of the solution – i.e. any stakeholders, whether they are a

citizen, NGO, business or government body, can become stewards of their own local environment.

In line with these observations, it is increasingly being recognised that enhancing the delivery of

ecosystem services through better environmental management should not only be the

responsibility of the public sector, but also the private sector, the third sector and civil

society/citizens.

Furthermore, there is also a growing recognition, due to the high levels of complexity, uncertainty

and conflicting interests in the environmental movement, that a shift from the current fragmented

and traditional ‘top-down’ approach to more decentralised, holistic, and integrated approach to

environmental management is required (Smith et al., 2015a). Thus, there is a growing awareness

of the need to promote stakeholder participation to address a wide range of issues related to

resources management (Global Water Partnership, 2000).

Alongside this movement towards shared responsibility, there is also now a growing body of

evidence that far greater environmental improvements can be achieved if all the groups actively

involved in regulation, land management, scientific research or wildlife conservation in a catchment

area are drawn together with landowners and other interest groups to form landscape-scale or

catchment area environmental partnerships (Ananda & Proctor, 2013; Stojanovic & Barker, 2008;

Patterson et al., 2013; WWF, 2016; Smith et al., 2015).

An inclusive and participatory approach to environmental management, allowing concerned

individuals or their representatives to take an active role in the decisions that affect them, has been

identified as both a democratic right and key to identifying successful management decisions (Reed,

2008; Rault and Jeffrey, 2008; UNESCO-WWAP, 2006).

Proponents of partnership or collaborative governance approaches argue that they offer multiple

social, economic and environmental benefits over traditional ‘top-down’ approaches. First,

stakeholder participation in collaborative approaches promotes the development of a common

understanding and reaching consensus amongst stakeholders with different interests, perspectives

and values (Muro and Jeffrey, 2008; Pahl-Wostl et al., 2007). This can be important, as fully

32

understanding and defining the problem is often very useful for achieving optimal solutions to

‘wicked problems’ (Mysiak et al., 2005).

Second, decisions made through a transparent and collaborative process that includes different

stakeholders’ perspectives and knowledge are likely to be perceived as more legitimate by other

stakeholders, policy-makers, decision-makers and investors/funders and may be expected to be of

higher quality (Carr, 2015).

Third, partnerships help bring together different types of knowledge (i.e. scientific and local) which

can generate innovative solutions to adequately address local environmental issues. This is

important as considering the human dimension of decisions is also critical if management decisions

are to be successful (Pahl-Wostl and Hare, 2004).

From an economic perspective, partnerships can promote more flexible and cost-effective

strategies to the management of natural resources (Carr, 2015; Lubell et al., 2002).

Key Learning

Recent years have seen a growing ambition among policy-makers to promote local

collaborative approaches and several innovative policy instruments have sought to engender a

greater sense of stewardship by helping stakeholders (citizens, civil society groups, local

businesses, government agencies, practitioners and policy-makers) to recognise their roles and

responsibilities in protecting and enhancing their local landscape and natural environment.

In line with this, several research projects have demonstrated that empowered local

environmental partnerships, comprised of diverse stakeholders and technical specialists from

in and around a catchment, can be responsible for coordinating the planning, funding and

delivery of good ecological health for that river and its catchment.

They have also shown that, by adopting an integrated stakeholder‐driven assessment of a

catchment, we are able to develop a comprehensive understanding of the challenges we face.

Consequently, we can develop a strategic, targeted, balanced and therefore cost-effective

environmental management plan.

These findings are well aligned with the objectives of this project. There is a clear need for local

environmental partnerships to be encouraged and empowered to adopt a robust collaborative

(co-creation), evidence-based and integrated natural capital approach – this is what the Local

Action Project Framework has been designed to facilitate.

2.2. The Catchment-Based Approach in England & Wales: A case study of

local collaborative governance in the UK

Established following the publication of the first cycle of River Basin Management Plans in 2009 and

the UK Government’s 2011 Natural Environment White Paper, the Catchment Based Approach

(CaBA) embeds collaborative working at a river catchment scale to deliver cross-cutting

improvements to our water environments. Community partnerships, bringing together local

knowledge and expertise, are active in each of the 100+ Water Framework Directive management

catchments across England, including those cross-border with Wales.

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CaBA is increasingly recognised as an exemplar programme demonstrating the benefits that can

result from taking an integrated and collaborative ‘ecosystem approach’ to environmental

management of this kind. As a result, CaBA represents an excellent testbed for this study and hence

why this work is so closely aligned with this particular subset of local collaborative governance in

the UK. It is worth noting that there are a great many other forms of local environmental

partnership in the UK and that this research has therefore been undertaken in a way that ensures

the findings are both relevant to and applicable by any of these groups.

Early in its development and implementation, CaBA adopted the USEPA’s Adaptive Watershed

Management Cycle (USEPA, 2005) as both its emblem and as it’s common, underlying workflow for

the establishment and delivery of a ‘catchment-based approach’ to environmental planning,

delivery and monitoring (see below).

In the formative years of CaBA (see Figure 7), the National CaBA Support Team (including a national

mentoring programme delivered under the auspices of a number of working groups) focused its

work on building capability and capacity in the local partnerships (Defra, 2012, Defra, 2015; CaBA,

2019). This especially focused on partnership building and governance (‘social capital’) and the use

of data and evidence to facilitate planning and collaborative working (building consensus about the

challenges and choices being made by the partnerships – ‘knowledge capital’).

Figure 7. The adaptive water management cycle adapted for CaBA, showing how this local collaborative

approach process delivers several key outputs and outcomes and informs and empowers local action.

This approach was successful in engaging, mobilising and empowering environmental practitioners

and other key stakeholders to become part of the CaBA community and engage in local

collaborative working (Defra, 2015; CaBA, 2017; CaBA, 2018). An independent evaluation of CaBA

undertaken in 2014 (Defra, 2015) revealed that, in the first 2 years of CaBA, partnerships generated

£4 of benefit in-kind for every £1 of central funding from Defra and more recent evaluations of

CaBA Partnerships (based on a logical model – shown in Figure 8 below) have shown that this rose

to 8:1 return on investment between 2011 and 2017 and was 6.5:1 in 2017/18 (Figure 9).

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Figure 8. The logic model developed by Dr Alex Collins and the CaBA Benefits Working Group for CaBA

Monitoring & Evaluation process now undertaken three times (CaBA, 2017; CaBA, 2018).

Figure 9. Summaries of the CaBA outputs and outcomes realised from 2011 to 2017 (left) and in

2017/18.

These recent assessments show that CaBA Partnerships often act as an effective single-point of

coordination in a catchment, integrating an otherwise piecemeal approach to land and water

management. As a movement, it has forged a holistic, integrated and evidence-led approach, which

promotes the identification of synergies and generates projects that deliver multiple benefits – e.g.

flood risk management, improved habitats, connectivity for wildlife, cleaner raw water for water

companies, improved angling and recreational opportunities, better soil management and

improved water supply for agriculture.

35

The evaluations also show that CaBA has been a catalyst for actions that would not have happened

without partnerships’ involvement. Pursuing multiple objectives through integrated action makes

solutions affordable that would have otherwise been unaffordable if pursued in isolation. CaBA

also has huge value to the Defra family as an exemplar of an integrated approach to catchment

management and an advocate and driver for integration. It provides a forum at catchment scale

that helps statutory bodies engage with stakeholders and in turn helps find smart ways to deliver

environmental objectives.

In contrast to these positive findings, the monitoring and evaluation of CaBA has also revealed

several areas where improvements could be made. CaBA as a collective activity across the country

remains rather un-strategic (erring a little too much towards opportunism on occasion) and the

unique value proposition of CaBA (and local collaborative approaches in general) remains poorly

defined and communicated (CaBA, 2017; CaBA, 2018; Environment Agency, 2018).

Through discussion of these findings with experts in the CaBA BAWG, NSG and other researchers

(pers. comm.), we have deduced that there is now a genuine need for local environmental

partnerships to identify their market-orientated value proposition and create a compelling business

case for investment in their work. In addition, we believe that there is a significant opportunity for

this change in approach to encompass the adoption of a natural capital approach.

In addition, there is also a need for the CaBA National Support Group to implement a

complementary strategic marketing and communications programme for the ‘movement’ as a

whole. The CaBA monitoring process (Collins et al., 2017; CaBA, 2017; CaBA, 2018) has revealed

that many of the local partnerships and CaBA collectively at a regional- or national-scale, are not

especially proficient in strategic marketing (business/market development), monitoring and

evaluation, and communication/dissemination (a key ‘pathway to impact’ for activities of this

nature).

Key Learning

Local environmental partnerships in the UK, such as CaBA, have been successful and their

brandvalue and legitimacy is growing (locally and nationally) year-on-year. However, it is also

clear that, if they are to take full advantage of the many and varied opportunities emerging

currently in the UK environmental sector (25 Year Environment Plan, the new Environmental

Land management scheme, 3rd Cycle River Basin Management Plans and the developing Shared

Prosperity Fund) there remains an urgent need for them to adopt a more strategic and

‘business-like’ approach. They must now attempt to develop a compelling business case for

investment in their local environment (including being able to adopt a natural capital approach

as and when required) and seek opportunities to present this case to the right audiences, in the

right spatial locations and using the right language required to be successful.

Furthermore, in is becoming increasingly clear that effective and robust monitoring and

evaluation holds the key to their success, as this is how the successful realisation of outcomes

is articulated and demonstrated, and partnerships need to improve their capabilities in this

area if they are to demonstrate the social, environmental, cultural and economic outcomes

they have realised and market themselves effectively to prospective investors.

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These findings were critical to the work undertaken for this study and it was vital that they

were fed into the development of the local collaborative natural capital approach developed.

The natural capital approach is, at its core, an evidence-based approach and the vital

importance of monitoring and evaluation had to become a key theme in the approach

developed here.

2.3. Developing a more ‘market-orientated’ approach to environmental

strategy development & strategic action planning

As highlighted above, it is possible that increased environmental, social, cultural and economic

outcomes might be realised in the UK if environmental practitioners were able to adopt a more

strategic and ‘business-like’ approach to their collaborative working.

In support of this suggestion, our research has shown that many of the innovative approaches to

planning and delivering environmental works discussed here (such as adaptive integrated

catchment management, the ecosystem services and natural capital approaches) are well aligned

with some of the key elements required to create a business strategy and a subsequent strategic

(action) plan.

Figure 10 sets out how a business strategy development and strategic planning process could be

translated into an environmental strategy development, planning and evaluation process.

Figure 10. Schematic showing the key stages of the business strategy and strategic planning process

(adapted from FT Guide to Developing a Business Strategy, 2013).

The key elements of this process include: 1) the setting of long-term goals (and developing a vision

for the future); 2) gaining a clear understanding of the economic and policy context in which you

are trying to effect change and deliver your long-term goals; 3) conducting a comprehensive review

your resources (funds, people and assets), capabilities, expertise and experience at your disposal

for implementation of actions; 4) the undertaking of an environmental (market and competition

analysis) and a governance/organisational SWOT analysis to determine your ability to effect change

37

(competitiveness) both now and in the future; 5) the development of SMART objectives that you

will need to achieve in order to successfully realise your long-term goals, and 6) the implementation

of effective and robust monitoring and evaluation (and risk assessment) to record and report on

the delivery of outputs and the realisation of outcomes through the activities undertaken.

As described above, a key element of strategy development process is the SWOT (strengths,

weaknesses, opportunities & threats) analysis. It is important to note that the SWOT analysis

technique can be effectively applied to inform the strategic marketing of an organisation or

partnership. It can also be used as part of a natural capital approach to inform strategic targeting,

design and delivery of interventions (this latter application is discussed later in this report).

Our research has found that very few environmental partnerships or organisations currently

undertake a thorough or truly robust inclusive/collaborative strategy-development and strategic

planning process when developing their policies, objectives and plans to improve the environment

at a landscape (strategic) scale (CaBA, 2017; CaBA, 2018). It is possible that, because of this

capability gap among local environmental partnerships and practitioners (i.e. not have high levels

of expertise or experience in strategic planning), local collaborative groups tend to look for clearly

defined and well-structured frameworks, processes and/or methods that support them through

this process.

This is perhaps why natural capital, ecosystem services, adaptive catchment management and

other approaches/concepts/toolboxes are available in such profusion in the UK environmental

sector and why they catch-on so quickly. They give practitioners a well-characterised, ‘off-the-shelf’

and easy to apply strategic framework in which to operate that is cost-efficient and potentially

quite effective in providing the strategic evidence-base to develop action plans.

Market development in the environmental sector

As described above, the process of ‘market development’ requires several key elements to be in

place before an environmental group or partnership can successfully create a compelling case for

investment in the ‘products and services’ they are offering to the market. These elements (which

include a long-term objectives/vision, market analysis, competition analysis, operating context,

capabilities assessment, and network analysis), need to be well characterised for the SWOT analysis

to be performed and the business case developed. As these elements are developed to support the

creation of a business case for investment, several key questions emerge that need to be answered:

• What are you trying to achieve - what are your long-term objectives or goals?

• What is the product or service (value proposition) that you provide and who is the supplier or

those benefits? Does the product provided manifest as improvements in natural capital or is it

comprised of a broader suite of benefits (i.e. in other ‘capitals’ or environmental ‘goods and

services’)?

• Who are the potential buyers of these products and services and what do they want to get from

the investment: increased profit, reputational benefits, cost-savings, risk mitigation, increased

resilience, economic growth…? Are they beneficiaries themselves (stakeholders) or intending to

invest as philanthropists?

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• What are the factors that determine their willingness to invest? Do they have a clear need that

aligns with your value proposition or a mandate to engage in this kind of activity (e.g. a statutory

requirement)? Alternately, are there other issues/factors that compete for their attention or

investment?

• Do you have a compelling business case that sets out why they should invest in these benefits

via you and builds confidence that the proposed return on investment will be realised? What is

your value proposition and how do you differentiate your value proposition from those of your

competitors in the market?

• By what mechanism will the return on the investment be obtained – what doe success look like

to the investor and what guarantees can be provided on the security and sustainability of those

return being provided (securitisation of benefits for what duration)?

It is clear that, for any strategic market-development process to be successfully established (new

investment sources or investment mechanisms), there are a number of key roles (summarised in

Figure 11) that need to be fulfilled and activities that need to be undertaken (Defra, 2013;

Westcountry Rivers Trust, 2012). Pivotal to this market-development work is the role of the

‘integrated broker’ (see Figure 11, lower panel).

The broker, who may be an independent individual, represent an organisation or be a civil society

group (such as a local environmental partnership) has the remit to facilitate the establishment of

the scheme by liaising with both the ‘buyers’ (or investors) to understand their ‘wants’ and ‘needs’

(the market), and the sellers to characterise with them the products and services they are able to

provide (based on the identification of opportunities for action and the feasibility/suitability for

the delivery of benefits).

There is also a need for the broker to understand the wants and needs of so-called subsidiary (or

connected) buyers, who may be other stakeholders or beneficiaries who are not able to invest

themselves and who need to have investments made on their behalf – this may be society at large,

community groups or other primary stakeholders.

In addition, the broker, working with ‘knowledge providers’ and regulators, needs to have (or be

able to draw upon resources with) a comprehensive knowledge of the interventions ‘toolbox’ that

can be implemented to create the benefits required. This knowledge allows them to ensure that

actions undertaken are strategic, targeted, integrated and multi-beneficial wherever possible.

The broker also works, through negotiation and facilitation, to ensure that the wants and needs of

all the actors in the scheme remain balanced and proportionate – and in doing this, they effectively

become the unofficial regulator of the scheme.

Figure 11. The adaptive water management cycle adapted for CaBA, showing how this local collaborative

approach Key roles in environmental market-development (top) and a schematic (bottom) showing how

the broker or ‘systems operator’ (SO) role can act as ‘hub’ that integrates the ‘wants’ and ‘needs’ of the

buyers/investors, the opportunities and suitability presented by the sellers and strategically targets the

deployment of the toolbox of interventions into areas of greatest need (headroom for improvement)

and suitability to ensure the greatest likelihood of successful realisation of both the primary objective

and multiple additional benefits.

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Another key element of market-development is to characterise the value proposition of the

proposed activity and combine this with the SWOT analysis to inform the development of a

compelling narrative (a business case) about the value (environmental, cultural, social and

economic) of that activity.

In the schematic shown below in Figure 12 (see page 38), we have attempted to illustrate the

marketorientated value proposition of local collaborative approaches – the ‘collaborative capitals

cascade’. In simple terms, this is the value chain of local environmental partnerships and it

identifies that they facilitate the delivery of natural capital improvements through their ability to

create and integrate social and knowledge capital, and to then use that to build legitimacy, garner

a mandate for action among their stakeholders, secure investment and then efficiently and

effectively deliver a multibeneficial programme of measures.

To complete the process and turn it into an adaptive and ‘benefit-amplifying’ cycle, there is also a

clear need for robust monitoring and evaluation to be undertaken to enable the ‘Gross Value

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Added’ to be assessed and be combined with the additional knowledge capital, social capital and

investor value case history to feedback into the process via the communication/dissemination,

knowledge exchange and marketing activities that can then be undertaken.

This approach is evidently compatible with the implementation of a natural capital approach and,

in terms of market-orientation, well aligned to meet the challenges set out in the UK Government’s

25-Year Plan for the Environment.

Key Learning

Local environmental partnerships need to develop a more ‘market-orientated’ approach to

environmental strategy development, strategic action planning, delivery and evaluation. As the

funding and policy landscape becomes ever more orientated to outcome-focused investment,

local practitioners and partnerships need to develop a compelling narrative (a business case)

about the value (environmental, cultural, social and economic) of what they do.

A key element of this strategy development process is the SWOT (strengths, weaknesses,

opportunities & threats) analysis, an ongoing self-reflection process that informs the delivery

of the strategy.

What is clear is that monitoring and evaluation holds the key to success as this is how the

successful realisation of outcomes is measured, demonstrated and articulated. Local

collaborative groups often have a capability gap when it comes to the assessment of GVA – i.e.

robust evaluation of the full array of benefits resulting from their activities.

These findings were of great significance as we attempted to develop a local collaborative

natural capital approach. It is clear that such an approach must be strategic, targeted and cost-

effective if it is to be applied successfully to generate investment and effective action in the

environment. Developing a narrative about environmental value in a language that investors

and policy-makers understand is vital to the successful adoption and implementation of a

natural capital approach and the language of strategic marketing (or business strategy) is a key

complement of this.

Figure 12. Identifying the market-orientated value proposition of local collaborative approaches – the ‘collaborative

capitals cascade’.

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2.4. A robust local, collaborative & integrated natural capital approach

for application by environmental partnerships

In response to the emergence of the natural capital approach following the Natural Environment

White Paper and the subsequent formation of the Natural Capital Committee, in 2016 the CaBA

National Support Group (NSG) identified that there was an urgent need for additional guidance,

resources and training for CaBA (and other local environmental) partnerships to ensure that their

monitoring, evaluation and reporting of partnership performance, output delivery and outcomes

was done in a more consistent and robust manner and, where possible, adopting a NC approach.

A clear need was also identified for an adaptable, scalable and universally applicable NC-based

framework for local environmental partnerships to develop consistent and robust action plans that

could be easily integrated/aligned with the plans of businesses (water stewardship, CSR, PES), the

water industry (PR19 business plans, WRMPs), local planning authorities (local plans, strategic

masterplans, SWMPs) and the Defra organisations (Pioneers, RBMP3, NCC, FRMPs).

To meet this challenge, the CaBA NSG formed the CaBA Benefits Assessment Working Group. The

Group has been working with the LAP3 Team to design this nationally agreed NC action-planning,

monitoring and evaluation guidance/framework to support the work of local environmental

partnerships in the UK.

The over-arching aim of this collaborative adaptive management natural capital approach is to

enable local environmental practitioners and civil society groups/citizens to target the most

appropriate environmental protection/enhancement/restoration interventions and improvement

measures to be targeted into the locations with the greatest potential to produce: 1) the highest

possible cost-benefit return-on-investment; 2) the highest possible diversity of realisable benefits,

and 3) the greatest number of beneficiaries (while ensuring that trade-offs are clearly explored and

understood by all stakeholders).

In their 2017 Natural Capital Guidance, the NCC sets out five steps to follow in developing a plan

for natural capital – the natural capital approach (shown in Section 1.1). We have undertaken a

detailed review of this guidance and compared it to the other similar approaches already being

applied in the UK environmental sector (as described in Section 1.1).

As the previous sections of this report show, our examination of the substantial literature and case

history (emerging in the UK and from further afield) relating to the application of local collaborative

governance, adaptive management, participatory ecosystem services, etc reveals that there are

several consistent concepts and methodological themes that underpin many, if not all, of these

approaches.

We have also determined that the natural capital approach, as defined by the NCC, is not a new

process, but rather is an attempt to consolidate and re-frame/articulate a number of these other

approaches (drawing out these consistent themes), which have so-far been adopted and applied in

a rather spatially (scale and location) and methodologically inconsistent manner.

The diversity of methods being used to inform strategic planning for the environment in the UK is

not necessarily a problem – it provides both significant strength and weakness to our

environmental sector. At a local scale, if the evidence is used to develop a clear strategy and plan

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for environmental protection and restoration/improvement and to deliver cost-effective actions in

the best possible location for the realisation of the intended outcomes, then this can be highly

successful. There are very many examples and case studies that illustrate this varied and diverse

‘toolbox’ – for an excellent review of these tools and techniques refer to the Ecosystem Knowledge

Network Tool Assessor website (EKN, 2019). The problem of this inconsistent and non-uniform

approach to strategic environmental planning arises for those wishing to undertake a strategic

approach at a wider spatial scale (i.e. regional or national). Whether this is Defra itself, the Defra

agencies or NGOs with national coverage (Rivers Trusts, Wildlife Trusts, RSPB, WWF, etc), this

diversity of approaches results in strategic assessment and planning becoming far more

challenging. There is therefore a constant need/demand for the adoption of a more standardised

and consistently applied framework. This is not always popular due to the perception that this is

too directive and ‘top-down’ and that this can have a significant deleterious impact on the

establishment and maintenance of robust and independent local collaborative governance (various

pers. comms.).

On many occasions in recent years, we have explained the key concepts of the natural capital

approach to local practitioners and partnerships, only for them to respond by saying that this is the

approach that they are already taking, but that they don’t describe it using that particular language.

On further discussion, we have gone on to learn that this is often the result of a conscious decision

they have made, because they consider the language of natural capital unhelpful for their

audiences. Or, they have made the decision unconsciously because they have chosen to adopt the

language from another conceptual approach (e.g. ecosystem services, conservation biology,

environmental infrastructure, nature-based solution, working with natural processes, etc).

To illustrate this, in Figure 13 (below) we have shown the schematic of the NCC’s 5-stages of the

natural capital approach alongside the already widely adopted Adaptive Environmental

Management Cycle diagram (based on the US EPA Adaptive Watershed Management Cycle, 2007).

It is clear, when compared in this way, that these two processes share a number of key

characteristics. This might explain why practitioners who have already adopted the Adaptive

Management Cycle-approach to integrated landscape management are quick to recognise the

concepts of the natural capital approach.

Figure 13. The NCC 5-stages of the natural capital approach (left) and the, by comparison, reasonably

well-established

Adaptive Management Cycle adapted from the US EPA Adaptive Watershed Management Cycle(right)

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It is our belief that the collaborative adaptive environmental management cycle, when built upon

a solid foundation of participatory scrutiny of ecosystem services and natural capital evidence,

represents a robust framework for informed, integrated and collaborative environmental decision

making that is entirely consistent with the 5 stages of the NC approach, the ambitions of the 25-

YEP and the strategic marketing approach described previously in this report (see Figure 14).

This framework will also allow local environmental partnerships to: 1) develop robust, consistent

and credible action plans (tailored for presentation to a variety of audiences) that are more

effective tools for supporting fundraising for environmental schemes (especially from innovative

sources); 2) will be more easily understood/adopted by strategy/policy-makers, and 3) that are

easier to monitor and evaluate to support reporting of the outputs and outcomes realised.

Figure 14. An enhanced framework for a collaborative adaptive management and natural capital

approach

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Having characterised this overarching framework for a local collaborative NC approach, it was next

important to examine the data and evidence components of this framework in greater detail (see

stages 1-4 set out in Figures 13 and 14). The NC-approach is fundamentally a data-driven process

built on the theory and concepts of the ecosystem services approach. A comprehensive review

undertaken for this project revealed that many of the currently applied participatory ecosystem

services, natural capital or community collaborative mapping (such as community charters or

bioregional planning) evidence review processes share a common methodological ‘core’.

This common approach is also similar to the basic conceptual model of many previously developed

approaches, such as the ‘environmental infrastructure’ approach - goo.gl/1woxzV, and is

fundamentally the same process that underpins the WRT Participatory ESS Visualisation

Framework (described in WRT, 2013 and in Section 1.1) and the LAP data and evidence review

methodology.

We conceive that this core or common process is a nested approach that sits within stages 1-4 of

both the natural capital approach (as set out in the NCC guidance) and the ‘Collaborative Adaptive

Management Cycle’ described previously, is illustrated in Figure 15.

Figure 15. A common data and evidence review process or ‘core’ methodology for a collaborative

ecosystem services, natural capital or community chartering approach.

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In simple terms this process involves (these are explored in more detail on the following pages):

1) conducting a collaborative audit/mapping review of natural (and sometime heritage/cultural)

assets in the study landscape;

2) determining the functions or ecosystem services regulated by these assets or features (as a

function of their typologies, level of provision and condition/performance);

3) inferring, estimating and/or measuring of the benefits being provided by these asset-function

combinations (as a function of the number of beneficiaries and presence/level of other

performance regulating factors);

4) determining the net-benefits ultimately experienced by people due to negative

pressures/impacts/disbenefits being exerted in the environment (i.e. what are the problems,

how bad are they and where are they derived from – this is also a function of the number of

people impacted and can be taken as an assessment of the prior level of ‘need’);

5) building a location- and sector-specific mandate for action;

6) assessing the potential for nature-based solutions to improve net-benefits experienced

(includes an assessment of the capacity for the landscape to receive new assets and potential

benefits realised though removing negative performance regulating factors or enhancing asset

condition/performance), and

7) identifying opportunities for intervention/delivery or measures.

Key Learning

A clear need was identified for an adaptable, scalable and universally applicable NC-based

framework for local environmental partnerships to develop consistent and robust action plans

that could be easily integrated/aligned with the plans of businesses (water stewardship, CSR,

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PES), the water industry (PR19 business plans, WRMPs), local planning authorities (local plans,

strategic masterplans, SWMPs) and the Defra organisations (Pioneers, RBMP3, NCC, FRMPs).

The over-arching aim of this collaborative adaptive management natural capital approach is to

enable local environmental practitioners and civil society groups/citizens to target the most

appropriate environmental protection/enhancement/restoration interventions and

improvement measures to be targeted into the locations with the greatest potential to

produce: 1) the highest possible cost-benefit return-on-investment; 2) the highest possible

diversity of realisable benefits, and 3) the greatest number of beneficiaries (while ensuring that

trade-offs are clearly explored and understood by all stakeholders).

The collaborative adaptive environmental management cycle, when built upon a solid

foundation of participatory scrutiny of ecosystem services and natural capital evidence,

represents a robust framework for informed, integrated and collaborative environmental

decision making that is entirely consistent with the 5 stages of the NC approach, the ambitions

of the 25-YEP and the strategic marketing approach described previously in this report.

A spatial evidence-base should be developed (at the appropriate spatial scale) that facilitates

robust policy-making, strategic planning & action planning. It must be: 1) easy to understand &

interpret (accepting that an expert science communicator may be required); 2) consistently

applied (to support strategic planning), 3) tailored to the scale & issues of the landscape, and

4) scrutinised by stakeholders (from the start). We conceive that this core or common process

is a nested approach that sits within stages 1-4 of both the natural capital approach (as set out

in the NCC guidance) and the ‘Collaborative Adaptive Management Cycle’ described. There are

many approaches out there…local groups need to choose one that works for them and refine

it for their stakeholders, policy context and landscape of interest.

Mapping the assets – setting a natural capital baseline

A strategic plan is defined as ‘a statement of where we are now, an agreed vision of where we want

to get to and a description of what we are going to invest our resources in to get there’. Therefore,

perhaps the most critical stage in developing a natural capital evidence-base is to map the current

extent and condition (quality or performance) of the natural capital assets in the study landscape.

Without this ‘asset register’ and condition assessment it is not possible to establish a baseline for

the current provision of ecosystem benefits being provided and it is not possible to develop a

strategy for their enhancement.

In recent years, we have worked with practitioners, stakeholder, community groups and citizens in

a wide array of study areas (WRT, 2019) to collaboratively review and map the natural (and cultural)

assets in the landscapes being studied – a number of examples of this work are shown in Figure 16.

It is worth noting that, while this asset mapping process clearly needs to be undertaken at whatever

scale the landscape is being studied, it is significantly constrained by the lack of data availability at

larger spatial-scales. In contrast to this, the contribution of high quality and detailed data by local

stakeholders makes this process both simpler to implement successfully and increasingly

powerful/valuable at finer more localised spatial scales.

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Figure 16. Examples showing the results of our collaborative natural capital asset mapping approach.

Benefits of adopting a natural capital approach in collaborative working

The natural capital approach is well aligned with a strategic marketing process designed to facilitate

and promote investment in the environment. It enables the assessment of ‘gross value added’

rather than just the environmental outcomes resulting from an activity in isolation. Additionally,

the language of natural capital can be persuasive for several potential buyers/investors in the

market. It provides an excellent opportunity to develop a narrative with stakeholders about ‘value’

in their local environment and thereby helps to build a strong case for investment.

Following a series of meetings with key technical experts in local collaborative approaches, the

natural capital approach and integrated adaptive environmental management, a series of notes

were prepared that set out a convincing argument for the adoption of a natural capital approach

by local environmental partnerships (these are presented below as received, but remain

unattributed at the request of the authors) –

• The Government’s 25 Year Environment Plan identifies a natural capital approach as key to

delivering a more sustainable approach to environmental management. It is supported by

Ministers, and government bodies (e.g. Environment Agency and Natural England) have been

asked to adopt it into their operations. So, a natural capital approach is likely to become

increasingly important to help prioritise resources and target future funding. Engaging with it

will provide opportunities to help inform government priorities and policies.

• A natural capital approach is different to how we have managed the environment in the past.

It focuses on “the stock” of natural resources and ALL the associated ecosystem service it

provides, rather than just focusing on one or two individual services (e.g. drinking water). This

means the emphasis is on protecting and improving the whole natural capital asset in a more

integrated, multiple benefits approach, rather than just particular parts of it. It therefore

promotes, and is underpinned by a whole system approach. This helps widen the involvement

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to include all potential beneficiaries of a healthy natural environment, and therefore additional

funding opportunities.

• A natural capital approach should allow us to deliver more for people and places as it seeks to

drive investment in the environment and to measure how successful that investment is in

delivering improvements to our stocks and natural processes. It identifies the risks of not taking

the environment into account and looks at the long-term impacts of our decisions, encouraging

more sustainable approaches and interventions.

• A natural capital approach provides a common language to describe and evaluate the health of

natural capital, helping integrate contributions from the multitude of partners that have a role

in how the environment is managed.

• A natural capital approach uses concepts and language (e.g. assets, capital and accounts) that

many partners are familiar with, providing an opportunity to secure the participation of many

partners that are often hard to reach through traditional environmental language (e.g.

businesses). This will help clarify the beneficiaries of a healthy environment and therefore

potential new investors in action.

• We need to remember a natural capital approach is a tool to aid decision making. It is important

we tailor and use it to complement our existing approaches, particularly to support

collaborative partnership working. The desired outcome is to reverse the decline in natural

capital to deliver a healthier environment for the benefit of people and wildlife.

• The process used should be proportionate to the proposed work, so there is not a one-size-

fitsall method. It is a fast-moving area of work where innovation is driving improvements to our

thinking and understanding of how to explicitly bring the natural environment and the benefits

it brings into our decision-making.

Some potential pitfalls of adopting a natural capital approach in

collaborative working

When attempting to persuade local collaborative groups of the merits of adopting a natural capital

approach in their work, it is important to be mindful of and communicate that there are a number

of pitfalls and potential limitations to this approach.

First, our research found that many local environmental partnerships in the UK have already

implemented a ‘natural capital’ approach, but have done this unwittingly and have not yet adopted

the language of natural capital to describe their work. By working with them to identify the

characteristics of their approach that are well aligned with the NC-approach, the common response

has been for them to state that ‘[they] are already doing that’. Perhaps all that remains is for them

to recognise that there is value in adopting the language of NC when setting out their approach and

value proposition to certain specific audiences.

A further potential risk in adopting the NC-approach relates to this latter point. There are some

audiences for whom the language of natural capital (especially elements that involve the

quantification of value in monetary terms) is not appropriate – for example, primary stakeholders

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such as citizens and civil society groups can be alienated by this often complicated and economic

concept of value.

Finally, there is also considerable risk to collaborative approaches of allowing ‘top-down’ natural

capital evidence, ‘models’ or simulators to determine the optimal blend of natural capital assets

and therefore ecosystem services benefits produced from a landscape. This may be particularly

problematic if this does not give equal weighting to services already being provided in the

landscape, such as food production, or consideration of the wants and needs of the stakeholders

present. To mitigate this risk, we believe that the natural capital-approach can achieve its greatest

impact in informing policy-making and facilitating the design and delivery of environmental

management programmes when it is delivered in an inclusive and collaborative way from the start.

2.5. Updating the toolbox of interventions A key element in the empowerment of local communities and in enabling them to take action to

protect and/or improve their local environment is the clear communication of the actions that can

be undertaken and the likely outcomes that can be realised (the costs and benefits of delivering

those actions).

In recognition of this, one of the most important outputs from LAP1 was the collation and

presentation of the urban toolbox of interventions. This compilation of interventions/measures/

actions was based on a comprehensive review of evidence relating to the characteristics, costs and

benefits of implementation and design/feasibility criteria for their delivery. The LAP1 toolbox can

be viewed here - www.urbanwater-eco.services/project/urban-practitioners-toolbox.

Over and above the presentation of this technical review, it was also identified that the information

relating to these measures should be presented in a manner that was visually engaging, informative

to a variety of different audiences (with differing levels of prior knowledge) and which could also

serve to inspire and empower stakeholders (building ambition, supporting local decision-making

and facilitating co-creation).

The urban toolbox of interventions developed through LAP adopted the LAP ‘benefits wheel’ to

show how a particular measure might make a positive contribution towards meeting the needs of

people by providing environmental (or natural capital) benefits and value in the landscape. An

example of a toolbox summary card is shown in Figure 17.

It is important to note that, due to the focus of LAP1 on urban landscapes, the toolbox created was

restricted to urban-specific interventions and the natural assets that occur in urban landscapes. As

a result, the opportunity mapping approach developed to target and tailor the delivery of these

interventions into urban landscapes was also limited in its applicability to rural landscapes and for

targeting a more rural toolbox of interventions (this was tested during the LAP1 and LAP2 projects).

Figure 17. An example of an original urban practitioners ‘toolbox’ factsheet developed during LAP1

presented in an accessible, engaging and informative format.

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To further refine the natural capital foundation upon which the LAP Toolbox was developed and to

broaden it to encompass a wider range of urban and rural measures/interventions, we have now

created detailed conceptual models that illustrate how natural capital assets of different typologies

and a suite of ‘nature-based solutions’ can provide benefits to people.

As with the natural capital approach already described previously in this report, the types and

magnitude of the benefits provided by an asset or feature in the landscape (and hence its value) is

an integrated signal determined by the functions (or ecosystem services) that an asset of that type

regulates. It is also vital to characterise the presence/level of additional factors that regulate

(unlock) the ability of those functions to be translated into benefits (e.g. access, condition, quality,

connectivity, context, etc). From this simple model of natural capital assessment (or valuation)

shown in Figure 18, we then moved on to develop detailed conceptual models for each asset

typology and intervention in urban and rural landscapes.

Figure 18. A simple illustration of the natural capital approach.

These models were designed to encompass all the potential function-benefit-performance

regulator combinations that each feature or asset type had the potential to regulate and therefore,

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we believe represents a comprehensive framework within which quantifiable metrics or indicators

of natural capital value could be worked-up.

A partial example of one such conceptual model is illustrated in Figure 19, along with a

semiquantitative assessment of value presented in an engaging and informative graphic

representation of this information for the same asset typology (this is still based on the literature

review undertaken for LAP1, now further developed in LAP3) (shown in Figure 20).

Figure 19. Example of a detailed conceptual model developed for each asset typology and intervention

in urban and rural landscapes – example shown is for trees in urban landscapes.

Figure 20. Semiquantitative assessment of value presented in an engaging and informative graphical

format.

The various outputs from this development work can be seen in the LAP3 Project outputs – for

example the Nature of Hulme Summary report (see below in Section 2.6).

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2.6. Demonstration areas As in the two previous phases of LAP, it is vital that the further development of the approach be

tested in a series of demonstration or pilot areas. For LAP3 the two ‘test-beds’ selected were the

Medway Catchment (as a whole catchment, large rural-urban landscape) and the ward of Hulme in

Manchester (as a single community/neighbourhood in hugely environmentally and socially

complex and challenging landscape).

For this project, we have adopted an ‘action research’ or ‘learning-through-doing’ approach. Having

examined the theory and concepts of local collaborative governance and the natural capital

approach, we then attempted to advance our understanding of this approach through ‘real-life’

implementation in the demonstration areas. In this way we have been able to gain a better

understanding of the challenges and opportuinties of the approach and have refined and improved

the various components of the framework following testing them with real stakeholders.

The LAP3 demonstration area case studies are presented below. These short case studies give an

overview of the processes undertaken and some of the key lessons learnt, but the majority of the

findings/outputs are in the separate reports created for each demonstration area (links provided

below).

The Medway Catchment Piloting a collaborative natural capital approach with the Medway Catchment

Partnership

Step 1 of the Natural Capital Approach is ‘Setting out the vision’, which is about developing the broad

aims of the process. It is also about understanding who is engaged in the process and what is

motivating them to engage. Exploring issues, such as: locally important species or habitats;

environmental problems requiring planning or management, and potential conflicts between

stakeholders of differing interests, at an early stage will allow all the relevant stakeholders to be

brought on board. It will also enable the gathering of all the necessary data and information.

In late 2017, the LAP Team engaged with several other key stakeholders from the Medway Catchment

Partnership – this included the co-hosts (South East Rivers Trust and Kent County Council) and a

number of other organisations (Southern Water, South East Water and the Defra Agencies). An initial

meeting was held where the LAP approach was proposed as a method that could make a useful

contribution to the work of the Catchment Partnership and where the development and testing of a

local collaborative natural capital approach could be undertaken.

There then followed a period of stakeholder mapping and engagement and the LAP Team attended

the Medway Flood Partnership’s NFM Working Group to disseminate the proposed LAP approach. A

further meeting and correspondence was also undertaken with key actors in the catchment including

Natural England and the Kent Local Nature Partnership. The co-hosts then convened a Catchment

Partnership meeting in March 2018 at which the idea of the Medway becoming an exemplar for the

natural capital approach was discussed.

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In April 2018, the LAP team and the Catchment Partnership co-hosts convened a natural capital

workshop with the Medway CP (largely comprised of secondary or professional stakeholders to begin

The Medway natural Capital Workshop was designed to introduce the participants from the Catchment

A summary of the structure, outputs captured and the M&E performed during the Local Action Project

Medway Catchment Partnership Natural Capital Workshop can be viewed here –

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One of the main elements of the workshop was to perform an environmental SWOT analysis that

would be the foundation for the setting of the natural capital baseline for the Medway. The outputs

captured are shown below

This initial workshop has now been followed by further meetings. A series of workshops with local

community groups and more primary stakeholders in much smaller sub-areas of the catchment are

now being planned. This will demonstrate how the LAP approach must be adjusted and translated into

different languages for application at different spatial scales and in different contexts (of

benefit/disbenefit profiles and against different back-drops of need and capacity for intervention).

Following the stakeholder engagement work undertaken in the Medway Catchment for LAP3, we have

now produced a Medway Catchment Natural Capital Evidence Review, which can be viewed here –

www.issuu.com/westcountryriverstrust/docs/lap3-medway-nc-evidence-review-v2-0. In addition,

the Catchment Partnership host organisation, South East Rivers Trust, who have subsequently adopted

the process we initiated and the evidence-base developed, have now recruited a NC specialist who is

driving the NC agenda forwards in the Medway and several other catchments. This is a clear

demonstration that the approach developed in this project has inspired, empowered and enabled a

local environmental partnership to adopt a local collaborative NC approach, which was the objective

of LAP3.

The work in the Medway has now gained further impetus following the successful funding of a €7m

4year Interreg 2-Seas Project focused on water company-delivered environmental management

(especially focused on PR19/AMP7 delivery) and taking a payments for ecosystem services/natural

capital approach to water resources management. This project was, at least in part, shaped and

developed in line with the work undertaken for the LAP3 project in the Medway and with South East

Rivers Trust.

More information about this flagship project, which is called PROWATER, can be found on the project

website - https://www.pro-water.eu/. This project includes South East Rivers Trust, South East Water

and Westcountry Rivers Trust as partners, and also includes Southern Water (a key contributor to the

LAP3 demonstration study) as Observer Partners.

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Nature of Hulme Community-led action to improve access to nature and green spaces in Hulme

In 2017, Manchester City Council (MCC) commissioned the Westcountry Rivers Trust (WRT) to

undertake a community-based environmental appraisal and visioning exercise in the Ward of Hulme

in Manchester. The ‘Nature of Hulme’ Project (run between November 2017 and September 2018) was

delivered through a partnership formed between Manchester City Council, the Westcountry Rivers

Trust and the local community of Hulme. The project was also run as a pilot application of the

Defrafunded Local Action Project 3 in Manchester: a local collaborative natural capital approach

designed to work with local communities to enhance the value of nature in their local landscape, build

community resilience, improve people’s quality of life and increase local economic prosperity.

Nature of Hulme was designed to include a comprehensive, local and collaborative ‘natural capital’

benefits assessment and needs/opportunity mapping exercise for the Ward. This incorporated refined

and improved Green Infrastructure and SuDS opportunity mapping methods. This evidence-led

approach also built on the work already being done by the MCC Policy and Neighbourhood Team to

deliver environmental improvements in the City Centre Wards and to take advantage of the

comprehensive and detailed pre-existing Green Infrastructure data created by MCC and their partners.

This work was integrated with additional local information collected through stakeholder dialogue

with citizens, local civil society groups, businesses and members of the wider community.

To meet the requirements of this project, we undertook the following specific activities:

Phase One – Refined natural capital benefits assessment and needs mapping

o Develop a methodology for the assessment of ecosystem services benefit provision (supply and

demand) to people, businesses, civil society groups and local authorities in Hulme. This is

considering ecosystem services benefits/dis-benefits imported from the surrounding landscape.

The suite of ecosystem services/natural capital indicators are being developed through dialogue

with key stakeholders and practitioners in Hulme and from surrounding areas of Manchester

(where appropriate).

o Compilation and review all available data relating to natural capital benefits, green infrastructure

(GI) and sustainable drainage solutions (SuDS) in Hulme before preparing detailed maps of these

assets for the ward. Once the indicators have been developed for Hulme (through dialogue), we

will then use this agreed methodology to undertake the analysis and data visualisation for the

ward to create the LAP ‘waggon wheels’ of benefits.

Phase Two – Delivery and engagement

o Once the assessment of ecosystem services benefits provision (natural capital) has been

undertaken for Hulme, we will use this to identify areas of need/deficiency and use this strategic

information to inform the detailed GI/SuDS opportunity mapping process (specifically tailored to

meet the needs identified in in Hulme).

o Detailed GI/SuDS opportunity mapping will then be undertaken using the refined/enhanced

method developed in the LAP2 Urban Demonstrator. These maps will be used to create a list of

potential sites that could be assessed further for their suitability/feasibility for interventions going

forward. Delivery scenarios (incorporating a suite of interventions tailored and targeted to meet

specific identified needs/deficiencies/problems) could be identified to estimate the likely cost-to-

benefits

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return that might be realised – these can then be scrutinised and/or subjected to ‘optioneering’ in

community/stakeholder workshops or meetings.

o All of the outputs/information/evidence developed for the Hulme Case Study will be presented in

a series of engaging and easy to interpret graphical representations and presentations (maps,

infographics and/or ‘report cards’) that can be used to engage local stakeholders and practitioners,

promote buy-in, help develop ambition/vision and facilitate co-design and co-creation of

communitybased interventions. We are exploring the potential for presenting the final outputs in

a community workshop/meeting in Hulme and via an online interactive resource designed to make

it accessible and informative to a wide array of audiences.

o The outputs and all the lessons-learnt from the Hulme Case Study will be disseminated through a

wide array of communications channels both in Manchester (Natural Capital Group, Defra Urban

Pioneer, Catchment Partnerships, Natural Course, etc) and nationally (Defra, Environment Agency,

NERC Knowledge Exchange Network, local government, Catchment Based Approach Community,

etc).

During the project several community workshops, drop-in sessions and an online survey were held and

promoted across Hulme to understand who uses green spaces, who is unable to use them, what these

spaces are like, and how they could be improved, and what the community’s priorities are for the

future. Below is a combined map of the natural assets in Hulme – this was created using data and

evidence from various local sources, combined with information provided by local stakeholders during

the project.

During the project (and since it ended, because we are continuing to work with the Hulme community

and the City Council), we engaged over 130 stakeholders from the community of Hulme, including:

60

older people, schools and colleges (staff and students), local residents, housing cooperative members,

local environmental groups, local businesses, and environmental professionals. We have convened

three public open meetings and have undertaken several further engagement activities with the

Manchester Metropolitan University, University of Manchester, several additional business and

community groups, and a number of local civil society groups.

This exhaustive collaborative (co-creation) approach, which was implemented in line with the

collaborative NC framework developed for LAP3, combined with a comprehensive evidence review of

the urban landscape of Hulme, was then used to create a series of presentations that were given to

the local community group we helped to create, the Nature of Hulme Natural Capital Evidence Review

and the Hulme Ward Plan (an action plan for nature across the neighbourhood).

The final Nature of Hulme Presentation given to ~40-50 key MCC staff, other stakeholders and

community members in July 2018 summarising the project can be viewed here –

http://urbanwatereco.services/resources/Nature-of-Hulme-The-Story-So-Far-July-2018.pdf.

The final Nature of Hulme Review produced through a collaborative approach between Manchester

City Council, the community of Hulme and LAP3 can now be viewed here –

http://science.wrt.org.uk/docs/Nature-of-Hulme-2018-Summary-Web.pdf or here –

https://issuu.com/westcountryriverstrust/docs/nature-of-hulme-2018-summary-draft-?e=0.

The Review which has subsequently been used by Manchester City Council to initiate a programme of

‘nature champions’ across the community and to facilitate several further stakeholder/community

engagement events, will also be used to create an online interactive resource that presents the Nature

of Hulme story to the community. Throughout the document there are quotes, thoughts and ideas

from the people of Hulme – the local community have shaped the Nature of Hulme vision and the

Hulme Nature Action Plan.

“I think [the report] is fantastic and thank you to everyone who was involved… This is one

of our Ward Plan priorities. It also creates a framework for us to collaborate on activity

that's both short, medium and long term. We are now progressing work such as the

Nature Trail, Recycling Champions, air quality work with schools, activity under the

Hulme Winter Festival and supporting leaders in this field, such as the Litter Mum in

Britannia Basin. We will continue to work with residents, organisations, businesses across

Hulme to help build Nature of Hulme activity…”

Patrick Hanfling, Neighbourhood Lead for Hulme, Central Neighbourhood Team, Manchester City Council

In addition to the huge success of the LAP approach being implemented in Hulme, the approach has

also now gained recognition in other sections of Manchester City Council, Salford City Council and in

the Tees Catchment Partnership (focused on Middlesbrough) and we have now been commissioned by

the MCC Neighbourhood Team to run community workshops in the Northern Quarter (1 already

completed) of Manchester and in the ward of Ardwick.

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Key Learning

Through the work undertaken in the two main LAP3 demonstration areas we have been able

to demonstrate that it is possible to implement a robust and highly effective local collaborative

NC approach at both a whole catchment (including urban and rural) and at a neighbourhood

(or community) scale.

We have learnt that this approach is time-consuming, resource intensive and that it requires

highly specialised skills and experience to implement it successfully. However, we have also

demonstrated that significant positive impacts (social, knowledge and natural capital) can be

realised if stakeholders are inspired and empowered to play an active role in the design and

delivery of environmental protection and restoration measures.

We have also demonstrated that this active engagement of stakeholders in research,

innovation, design and delivery, which is often referred to as ‘co-creation’ and originates from

the concepts of ‘participatory action design’ and ‘local collaborative governance’, can be a

highly effective way to create social, cultural, economic and environmental (natural capital)

benefits for communities at a variety of spatial scales. This local collaborative approach is also

perfectly aligned with the concepts and theories and can be highly complementary to the NC

approach.

Through our demonstration studies (in LAP3 and in other closely related projects) we have

confirmed that, if we can engender a greater sense of stewardship for the environment, by

helping local stakeholders recognise their potential role in protecting and enhancing the local

environment, this can help:

• build a mandate for action;

• facilitate the development of a shared vision;

• broker consensus about what actions are needed;

• get ‘buy-in’ and instil a sense of ownership; and

• empower, inspire and enable action/behaviour-change.

One of the key challenges for this study has been to explore how a local collaborative NC

approach could become a key delivery mechanism for meeting the challenges set out in the

25Year Environment Plan – i.e. to plan and deliver action at the most effective scale and in a

collaborative, inclusive and integrated way; and re-connect stakeholders with their local the

environment and empower them to take action to protect and enhance it.

The LAP3 Framework developed, our ‘co-creation toolkit’ for the delivery of collaborative

localgovernance, participatory strategic environmental planning and nature-based solutions

cocreation, is an evidence-based, social-capital-creation approach that integrates the theories

of design research, action research and participatory design. We have demonstrated that this

integrated and adaptable approach has the potential to be a highly effective approach that can

deliver robust and replicable knowledge-, social- and natural-capital outcomes in an array of

contexts.

In addition, we have also learnt several key lessons about where the pitfalls and potential

limitations of the approach lie and how these can be avoided.

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2.7. Knowledge exchange & dissemination

A key element of LAP3 has been to raise awareness of the LAP approach and to undertake

knowledge exchange activities to promote and facilitate the adoption of the approach by more

groups. It is vital that LAP identifies its correct position in the congested landscape of NC

approaches being developed by doing careful assessment of both its strengths and weaknesses and

the opportunities and threats for/to its uptake and application.

To achieve this integration of LAP into the natural capital ‘toolbox’ available to the environmental

movement for the delivery/realisation of the 25-YEP objectives, it will be necessary for the

approach to be clearly understood, accessible, open-source and readily applicable by a wide array

of practitioners with variable levels of expertise. Where LAP demands technical expertise of the

user, it is vital that guidance resources and/or mentoring support are provided to ensure that the

potential benefits of applying the approach are realised.

During LAP3, the team have undertaken a wide array of promotion, dissemination and knowledge

exchange activities, including - o CaBA Benefits Assessment Working Group – the BAWG met on four

occasions during LAP3 – it has been important to align the work of the group with the LAP3

objectives. In particular, this allowed the LAP Team to integrate/align their work with the various

natural capital and collaborative approaches being trialled by Defra and its agencies.

o Meeting with Manchester City Council Education/Youth Council Team – this was an opportunity

to explain our approach to several key practitioners in the council and it helped us to develop

contacts in the Manchester Youth Council and Loreto College in Hulme – a 6th Form College

with over 3,000 staff and students.

o Flood Expo 2017 – presentation on LAP given at an international event in London.

o Somerset Water Management Partnership – Presentation of the LAP approach to a mixed

audience of practitioners, professional stakeholders and elected members from across

Somerset.

o EnRoute European Commission NBS Workshop in Tallinn, Estonia – presented a poster of the

LAP Manchester City-Lab to representatives from >20 cities across Europe. Elements of the LAP

approach were also presented by Joachim Maes from the European Commission Joint

Technical Secretariat (JTS) at the Conference, which generated interest in the approach.

o EA Natural Capital Approach Knowledge Exchange Workshop – presented the LAP approach at

a workshop involving around 20 participants, including representatives from Defra, the

Environment Agency, Natural England, the Marine Management Organisation, the Greater

Manchester Combined Authority, Cumbria University and Eunomia.

o Business in the Community (BITC) Data Deep Dive Workshop – attended and promoted the LAP

approach. This has led to further engagement with BITC (Katie Spooner) and a desire to

integrate LAP with some of their ongoing and upcoming initiatives.

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o Medway Natural Flood Management (NFM) Steering Group Workshop – gave a presentation

of the LAP approach to ~20 members of the Medway Flood Partnership to promote the

upcoming stakeholder-led approach to be undertaken in the Medway for LAP3.

o Natural England NFM Tools Workshop – attended this workshop to attempt to integrate the

LAP Toolbox with the emerging ‘Working with Natural Processes’ and NFM toolboxes.

o 3x CaBA Monitoring & Evaluation / Natural Capital Approach Workshops – presented at these

mentoring/ support workshops with the intention of providing CaBA groups with guidance and

support on how to do better monitoring and evaluation of their work (especially with respect

to the CaBA M&E process, the EA’s Strategic Monitoring Review and the emerging local NFM

approach being launched). We also aimed to encourage them to adopt a natural capital

approach in response to the 25-YEP and the water industries wholescale adoption of natural

capital in their PR19 Business Plans.

o CaBA Evaluation Workshop, Eunomia and the EA – the EA commissioned Eunomia to develop

a CaBA evaluation approach and we have been on the steering group for the project. NP has

been consulted as a ‘national expert’ on the evaluation of the collaborative adaptive

management cycle/approach. The CaBA evaluation has been a key testing ground for LAP3 as

we seek to develop a collaborative natural capital approach that will be applied by end users

such as CaBA partnerships.

o SWEEP SuDS Initiation Workshop, University of Exeter – We are a project partner in this project

and we have promoted the LAP approach at the inception meeting for this project and

separately to the Centre for Water Systems at the University of Exeter in a workshop

specifically designed to promote collaboration with them.

o Meeting with Manchester City Council Policy Team Managers – an opportunity to showcase

the LAP approach to senior managers in the Council. The approach has also been presented to

elected members by MCC staff members and there is an ambition to present it to both the

leader of MCC and to the Metropolitan Mayor later in the year.

o EnRoute European Commission Green Infrastructure Conference in Sofia, Bulgaria – presented

a poster and presentation of the LAP Manchester City-Lab and Nature of Hulme to

representatives from >20 cities across Europe.

o EU Greenweek: Green Cities Summit Conference – 2018. Presentation given on LAP work in the

‘Nature in the City’ Session designed to showcase different ways in which nature can thrive in

our cities providing solutions to urban challenges and increasing citizens' quality of life and

presents how access to biodiversity-rich green areas and Natura 2000 sites deliver a wide range

of health & social benefits. Watch the talk from 51m 16s – https://youtu.be/MwACNeMMbsA

o CaBA Urban Water Group Conference in Manchester – presented the LAP3 approach to

stakeholders from across greater Manchester – Salford City Council interested in adopting the

approach in communities in Salford.

o Defra Showcase – invited to give a 3-hour showcase of the LAP3 Project to several Defra and

Defra-family staff, including members of the 25-YEP Team.

64

o Environment Agency Natural Capital Team – invited to give a 2-hour webinar to the EA Natural

Capital Team, Innovative Finance Team and representatives from EA Operations. This LAP3

showcase has generated several new opportunities to refine and operationalise the

lessonslearnt, and the resources developed during the project.

o EnRoute Conference in Brussels – presented the LAP2 and LAP3 work in Manchester to the

European Commission-hosted conference held at the Committee of the Regions in Brussels in

January 2019.

o CaBA Urban Workshop in Durham – Feb 2019 – presented the LAP2 and LAP3 work in

Manchester to ~100 planners, developers, water company technical specialist and CaBA

representatives. A number of new urban groups are interested in the approach now, including:

Middlesbrough, Hartlepool and Gateshead Councils.

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3. Summary & conclusions During this third phase of the Defra Local Action Project (LAP3), we have successfully achieved the

principal aims of the project to extend the LAP approach further by:

• testing it in a rural setting

• further formalising the approach to create a suite of tools and guidance designed to facilitate

and enable the adoption of the LAP-approach by groups of stakeholders operating in

landscapes with a variety of different priorities, stakeholder interests and landscape-scales

To this end, the approach for LAP3 was developed and refined in a series of ‘demonstration’ studies:

the Medway Catchment Partnership, the Nature of Hulme Project and the Greater Exeter Strategic

Plan (information not included in this report as the outputs have not yet been released for

dissemination). In these studies, we have worked collaboratively to iteratively co-create the

framework and test the integration of the participatory ESS assessment approaches already

developed for rural and (most recently during the Defra Local Action Project) urban landscapes into

a wholesystem ESS/NC approach at a whole-catchment- or local-community- scale. Testing the

approach in both a whole-catchment/rural setting and at the level of a single community were both

key elements of the project.

In particular, we have –

4. Developed an adaptable, scalable and universally applicable NC-based framework for

environmental partnerships (local, regional and national) to develop consistent and robust

natural capital-based action plans that will inspire and enable the delivery of actions that

enhance natural capital and realise environmental, social, cultural and economic benefits.

5. Supported the objective of the CaBA Benefits Assessment Working Group (BAWG), the CaBA

National Support Group (NSG) and Defra to create a suite of additional guidance, resources and

training for local partnerships (e.g. CaBA) and other environmental groups. This work will help

to ensure that their monitoring, evaluation and reporting of partnership-performance, output

delivery and outcomes is done in a more consistent and robust manner and, where possible,

adopting a NC approach. We have sought to ensure the widest possible uptake/adoption of the

approach developed by undertaking this knowledge exchange through a wide diversity of

dissemination channels to a wide array of audiences.

6. We have also supported the CaBA BAWG as it attempts to provide support and guidance to CaBA

groups hoping to secure additional/innovative funding to deliver their catchment action plans

(or ‘project pipelines’). We have helped the CaBA BAWG in its attempts to secure additional

funding to strengthen CaBA work on monitoring and evaluation of delivery and benefits

assessment by helping to build organisational capacity, by organising and contributing to

workshops, showcasing best practice, producing guidance on how to design monitoring and

evaluation methods and by publicising opportunities for capacity building.

66

Through the delivery of this project we have also gained several valuable insights into the

implementation of local collaborative governance approaches and how they can successfully

incorporate a ‘natural capital approach’ into their work. The lessons-learnt are as follows –

5. Recent years have seen a growing ambition among policy-makers to promote local collaborative

approaches and several innovative policy instruments have sought to engender a greater sense

of stewardship by helping stakeholders (citizens, civil society groups, local businesses,

government agencies, practitioners and policy-makers) to recognise their roles and

responsibilities in protecting and enhancing their local landscape and natural environment.

In line with this, several research projects have demonstrated that empowered local

environmental partnerships comprised of diverse stakeholders and technical specialists from in

and around a catchment, can be responsible for coordinating the planning, funding and delivery

of good ecological health for that river and its catchment. They have also shown us that, by

adopting an integrated stakeholder‐driven assessment of a catchment, we will be able to

develop a comprehensive understanding of the challenges we face. And following this, to

develop a strategic, targeted, balanced and therefore cost-effective environmental

management plan.

6. Local environmental partnerships in the UK, such as CaBA, have been successful and their

brandvalue and legitimacy is growing (locally and nationally) year-on-year. However, it is also

clear that, if they are to take full advantage of the many and varied opportunities emerging

currently in the UK environmental sector (25 Year Environment Plan, the new Environmental

Land management scheme, 3rd Cycle River Basin Management Plans and the developing Shared

Prosperity Fund) there remains an urgent need for them to adopt a more strategic and ‘business-

like’ approach.

They must now attempt to develop a compelling business case for investment in their local

environment (including being able to adopt a natural capital approach as and when required)

and seek opportunities to present this case to the right audiences, in the right spatial locations

and using the right language required to be successful.

Furthermore, in is becoming increasingly clear that effective and robust monitoring and

evaluation holds the key to their success, as this is how the successful realisation of outcomes

is articulated and demonstrated. Partnerships need to improve their capabilities in this area if

they are to demonstrate the social, environmental, cultural and economic outcomes they have

realised and market themselves effectively to prospective investors.

7. Local environmental partnerships need to develop a more ‘market-orientated’ approach to

environmental strategy development, strategic action planning, delivery and evaluation. As the

funding and policy landscape becomes ever more orientated to outcome-focused investment,

local practitioners and partnerships need to develop a compelling narrative (a business case)

about the value (environmental, cultural, social and economic) of what they do.

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A key element of this strategy development process is the SWOT (strengths, weaknesses,

opportunities & threats) analysis, an ongoing self-reflection process that informs the delivery of

the strategy.

What is clear is that monitoring and evaluation holds the key to success as this is how the

successful realisation of outcomes is measured, demonstrated and articulated. Local

collaborative groups often have a capability gap when it comes to the assessment of GVA – i.e.

robust evaluation of the full array of benefits resulting from their activities.

8. A spatial evidence-base should be developed (at the appropriate spatial scale) that facilitates

robust policy-making, strategic planning & action planning. It must be: 1) easy to understand &

interpret (accepting that an expert science communicator may be required); 2) consistently

applied (to support strategic planning), 3) tailored to the scale & issues of the landscape, and 4)

scrutinised by stakeholders (from the start). There are many approaches out there…we

recommend that partnerships choose one that works for them in their situation and refine it for

their landscape of interest.

The end products and outcomes of this project are a series of agreed local natural capital-based

action plans, which are now being used to guide decision-making and activity in the local landscapes

they represent.

By formalising the approach through the development of tools and guidance, we have created an

adaptable, scalable and universally applicable natural capital-based framework for local

environmental planning.

We have also developed an approach that enables practitioners to adopt a greater level of

consistency and robustness in their natural capital-based approaches and this has allowed other

areas and organisations to use the approach independently. This is essential to ensuring a

widespread take-up of the approach without the need for additional support.

Further Information & Contacts More information and all of the principal project outputs can be found at the project website

(http://urbanwater-eco.services).

Please contact Nick Paling, Westcountry Rivers Ltd (nick@wrt.org.uk) or Ashley Holt, Defra

(ashley.holt@defra.gsi.gov.uk) to find out more about the Local Action Project 3 or any of the

associated projects and initiatives.

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