Study area and stakeholders
Freshwater resources in Guanacaste, Costa Rica
This study is part of the FuturAgua Project in Guanacaste, Costa Rica, a multidisciplinary, multinational research effort supported by the G8 Belmont Forum to study climate change and freshwater security in developing nations (FuturAgua 2015). Guanacaste is a seasonally dry tropical province, with a yearly rainfall pattern that is typically comprised of a 6-month dry season from late November until May, a smaller rainy season from May to July, a mid-summer drought in July/August, and the main rainy season from August to November. This pattern is significantly affected by the status of the El Niño Southern Oscillation and the North Atlantic Oscillation climate systems. Climate change forecasts and models, such as those included in the Fourth and Fifth Assessment Report of the IPCC, predict changes to the annual cycle of precipitation and increased temperatures, both of which may additionally stress water supplies in the region (Rauscher et al. 2008, 2011; Karmalkar et al. 2011; Ryu and Hayhoe 2014; Neelin et al. 2006; Steinhoff et al. 2014).
Costa Rica guarantees a healthy environment to its citizens in the national constitution and has passed water related laws that establish that freshwater resources cannot be privately owned. The Water Directorate of MINAE, the Costa Rican Ministry of the Environment and Energy, manages concessions of groundwater and river water for use by municipalities, hydroelectric power facilities, and private entities such as farms, off-grid households, and resorts. Within the last 30 years, municipal population growth, changing agricultural activity, increased hydro-electric power production, increased tourism developments, and continuing environmental protection interests all have placed increasing demands on freshwater resources, and there has been a recent history of inter-stakeholder group conflict over water issues (Ramírez-Cover 2008). These conflicts have been shown to occur in part due to underrepresentation of local stakeholders in decision making. In addition, there is a lack of credible or available scientific measures of water quality and quantity, and without these measures the ability to distinguish between the physical lack of water resources and misallocation of such resources has proven difficult (Kuzdas 2012 and van Eeghan 2011).
Stakeholder groups
For this study we separate stakeholders into the following groups: government agencies, large farmers, small farmers, hydroelectric system managers, tourism businesses, village water committees called ASADAs, and the public. The government agencies that make decisions at a local and regional level about water resources or are impacted by such decisions include MINAE as mentioned above, the Ministry of Aqueducts (AyA), the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock (MAG), and the Ministry of Subterranean Water and Irrigation (SENARA). AyA is mandated to provide potable water to all citizens in the country for domestic use. In the larger towns and cities, AyA manages the water systems, whereas in the smaller less-connected towns the water systems are managed by local water committees or ASADAs. The executive council of each ASADA are volunteers that are voted in by the users every 2–3 years (some ASADAs also pay the administrators and technicians that work on the systems). The volunteer councils are legally responsible for maintaining the water systems and have the authority to collected water use fees, but typically have less technical expertise then the central AyA offices. Almost all municipal water systems in Guanacaste source their water from groundwater or rivers.
The Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock (MAG) is mandated to provide technical assistance to Small Farmers and this outreach includes assistance with irrigation and climate adaptation efforts. Small farmers are either tenants of Large Farms or family enterprises who either raise cattle or grow a variety of crops for local and sometimes export markets (rice and sugar, but also peppers, coffee and vegetables). Large Farms are large estates used either for cattle grazing or for the growing of cash crops such as rice, sugar, and/or melons and employ agronomic engineers as well as large numbers of laborers/tenant farmers. Large and Small farms typically use a mix of direct rainfall, groundwater, and river water depending upon their location and crop. Depending on the farm type they have a mix of irrigation methods installed on their property (this is more widespread on Large Farms, but Small Farms may also have their own systems). In special irrigation districts, SENARA is responsible for providing irrigation water to Small and Large farmers.
Hydroelectric power generation in Guanacaste comes from the ArCoSa system (3 plants in series for a total capacity of 360 MW) operated by the Costa Rican Electricity Institute or ICE, and a two plant system run by the rural electrification cooperative, COOPGUANACASTE. These systems are located in the mountainous region along the eastern border of the Province which receives a larger amount of yearly rainfall and use a mix of reservoir and river water.
Available hydro-climate information
The main source of climate forecast information in the region is the Costa Rican National Meteorological Institute (Spanish acronym, IMN). The IMN provides daily and weekly weather forecasts through its website (IMN 2016). The IMN also provides for free on this website monthly climate reports that review the past months precipitation and temperature data and project future precipitation by region typically up to three months ahead (IMN also less frequently releases predictions for the next 6–12 months). Internet coverage in Guanacaste is relatively good and many access the internet through mobile devices (this is more true of younger generations). Additionally all of this information is also transmitted through local and national public media (TV, radio, and newspapers). The IMN also provides more detailed historical data to the public and other government agencies for a fee. The other government agency that has direct access to climate measurements is ICE, though typically ICE does not share this information. ICE also has information regarding reservoir levels that is used in the management of hydroelectric power stations. Many Large Farmers have their own meteorological equipment and have access to NOAA forecast information. Streamflow and groundwater data are more difficult to come by and this lack of information about how much water exists in certain aquifers has been identified as a factor in local water conflicts (Kuzdas 2012 and van Eeghan 2011).
Interview protocol
In order to elicit stakeholder perceptions, a variation on the mental models approach (Morgan et al. 2002) was employed. This approach includes the use of a formative semi-structured interview that aims to more broadly and openly elicit perceptions from participants. The results of this interview are then used to inform the development of surveys to confirm the prevalence of interview results and test hypotheses generated from the original interview (Klima et al. 2012). Typically this approach has been used to compare risk perceptions and facilitate risk communication between experts and laypeople (Morgan et al. 2002; Hansen et al. 2004). It has also been used to compare climate and adaptation perceptions across experts (Otto-Banaszak et al. 2011). In this study, the approach is used to help compare perceptions of water systems and climate information across multiple stakeholder groups.
Drawing from previous literature and input from other FuturAgua researchers during the winter and spring of 2014, the English language interview protocol was developed. It was then translated into Spanish by the lead author and edited for language by two native Spanish speakers (a coordinator from the FuturAgua project and a member of the local advisory group located in Nicoya, one of the main towns in Guanacaste). In May 2014, the protocol was pilot tested for understanding with two different members of the Nicoya advisory group (an environmental ministry employee and a university professor) prior to the start of the field interviews. The protocol was structured into three main sections: 1) open ended questions about stakeholder perceptions of the social-ecological system (SES); 2) open ended questions about perceptions of water system information and sources and closed questions rating the accuracy of mentioned sources; 3) specific questions about forecasts and climate change (the full protocol can be found in Additional file 1).
Interview participants and process
A total of 40 participants were interviewed from 7 different stakeholder groups: Agencies (n = 10, including government employees of AyA, MAG, MINAE, and SENARA), ASADAs (n = 7), Small (n = 6) and Large (n = 4) Farmers, Hydroelectric power managers (n = 3), Tourism-centered businesses (n = 4), and members of the Public (n = 6). Participants were recruited through a variety of strategies. Members of the Nicoya advisory group, other FuturAgua researchers, or government agency contacts suggested most of the participants and named them as either knowledgeable or interested individuals. Some ASADA members were contacted based on a list of contact information provided by the Aqueduct ministry (AyA) in Nicoya. Other ASADA members were recruited using snowball sampling [34], in which ASADA group interview participants were asked to name other ASADA members to be contacted. All participants from the Tourist and Public stakeholder groups were directly recruited as a convenience sample (Berg 2001) by the lead author in the street, shops, restaurants, businesses or hotels. All potential participants contacted were interviewed with the exception of two (1 hydroelectric project manager and 1 small farmer - both due to scheduling issues). The mix of convenience and snowball sampling in these types of studies is standard practice in the field (see Kirchhoff 2012 and Orlove et al. 2004 as examples), however one possible issue with proceeding in this manner is that the results may not include the views of individuals who live farther away from others or those who have less societal connections.
Interviews were conducted in Guanacaste during June and July 2014Footnote 2. The interviews were recorded and conducted in Spanish except for one (an English-speaking hotel owner who was from the United States and did not want to be recorded). The interviews were performed one-on-one, though occasionally in some interviews there were interruptions and additional comments made by others (family members, neighbors, and in some cases one of FuturAgua’s local advisers). Interviews lasted between 25 and 90 min, with most being approximately 45 min long. Participants were not monetarily compensated. After the interview, each participant was given a FuturAgua mug as a thank you gift (participants were not informed of the gift in advance of the interview).
The median age of interview participants was 54.5 years. Overall, 55 % of the participants had at least a college degree. The percentage of stakeholders that had such a degree of education within the Large Farmer, Agency, and Hydroelectric groups was 90 % or above, whereas the percentage in the other groups was 50 % or below. Only 17 % of the participants were female, which, while very low in terms of the general public and elected government positions, is closer to the percentage that are in ASADAs (20 % based on AyA records) or that work for MINAE (25 %) in Guanacaste. Recognizing that the intent of studies employing the mental models approach with in-depth interviews is to discover concepts and suggest hypothesis (not to test them), a sample that includes participants from the targeted groups was sought, but it did not need to be representative.
Coding and analysis
All interviews were transcribed (Spanish to Spanish) either directly by the lead author or by transcribers recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk, an Internet platform for crowdsourcing short “human intelligence” tasks (Amazon Mechanical Turk 2015). All Mechanical Turk transcriptions were checked for errors and corrected by the lead author. Interview transcripts were translated into English by the lead author and then, as a quality check, several interview transcripts were back translated from English to Spanish by native Spanish speakers from the broader FuturAgua research team.
The lead author used multiple iterations of an open-coding procedure (Strauss 1987) to inductively find common and interesting themes from the interview transcripts for further analysis. For the one interview that was not recorded, the lead author’s notes from the interview were used as the transcript for coding purposes. The codes were separated into groups concerning drivers, states, and uses of the water system, actions taken to mitigate or adapt to water scarcity, and information sources and attributes (a full list of the sub-codes under these categories can be found in Additional file 2).
QDA Miner Lite software (QDA Miner Lite 2015) was used to “tag” excerpts with one or more codes, allowing the grouping of similar quotes and descriptive comparisons of pairs of codes. A second rater coded a subset of 11 of the transcripts, and there was 69 % agreement between the two raters as to whether a specific code was mentioned in a specific transcript. Literature on inter-rater reliability suggests that a percent agreement of 69 % indicates “substantial agreement” (Landis and Koch 1977). The first coder conducted the interviews and thus likely had a more nuanced perspective of the transcripts and allocated more codes than the second coder. These statements have been added to the manuscript.
Binary frequencies of mention (mentioned in transcript versus not mentioned) were determined for each participant for each single sub-code (e.g., DRIVER-ELNINO) and for select pairs of sub-codes (e.g., did the transcript mention both INFOSOURCE-FORECAST and INFOATTRIBUTE-USED?). Pairing sub-codes allowed frequency counts of interactions such as Driver/State pairings. The percentage of participants within each stakeholder group that mentioned a certain sub-code or pair of sub-codes at least once was then calculated and used for comparing across stakeholder groups.
Transcript excerpts that mentioned the numerical rating of information sources were collected and analyzed with simple descriptive statistics. No inferential statistics were performed as the participants were not randomly selected and there were only a small number of participants in each of the different stakeholder groups.