The second Vital Issues panel for the Nicaraguan Water Resources Management Initiative met on February 10, 1998, in Hotel Barceló Montelimar, Nicaragua. The panelists reviewed the results from Panel I and identified issues that they considered vital to Nicaragua’s water resource management. The issues were tested using the metacriteria listed below. The panelists followed the Vital Issues process format. (Panelists)

Necessary - elimination of the criterion from the list would allow some important aspect of the goal to go unrecognized.

Operational - the criterion can be used by the next panel to assess the relative importance of issues that are vital to the management of Nicaragua’s water resources.

Sufficient - the collection of criteria recognizes all important aspects related to the goal of managing Nicaragua’s water resources.

Vital Issues

The vital issues identified by Panel II are:

1. Inadequate Control and Planning for the Management of Water Resources (Planning). Lack of vision, an institutional frame, a strategic plan, a portfolio of policies, and an implementation strategy all contribute to inadequate control and planning for Nicaragua’s water resources management. Inadequate definition of the functions, responsibilities, and coordination between the institutions responsible for the management of water resources contribute to problems as well.
2. Shortage of Human and Financial Resources (Resources). It was agreed that the shortage of human and financial resources is pertinent to managing water resources, and that an information system may help solve or counteract these shortages.
3. Deficient Water Resources Management Because of Insufficient or Inaccurate Information (Information). It was agreed that the decision deficiencies caused by insufficient or inaccurate information are pertinent to managing water resources and that the quality of decisions about the management of water resources would be improved by an information system.
4. Inadequate Use and Pollution of Water Resources Caused by Insufficient Education in the Population (Education). It was agreed that an information system could solve the lack of education problem and that citizens’ education is pertinent to the matter of water resources management.

Vital Issues Ranking

The four issues were scored using pairwise comparisons in the context of the five evaluation criteria elected and defined by Panel I. The evaluation of the relative importance of vital issues scored by the panelists resulted in the following ordinal ranking for the composite of the five evaluation criteria.

Education ~ Information > Resources ~ Planning

Figure 1 shows the means and standard deviations of the scores (the square is the mean value, and the distance between the diamond and the triangle is two standard deviations in the scores). Education and Information were considered to have the same level of importance, and both were considered more important than Resources and Planning. Resources was considered more important than Planning. Resources had the least disagreement with respect to its relative importance. The level of agreement with respect to the four issues was nearly identical for the four vital issues.

Figure 1. Composite relative importance of the vital issues.

For more information contact Dr. Dennis Engi, (505) 845-8284.

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