Bedok Reservoir Park: Objectives

Objective Setting

I realized recently that I haven’t really laid out or looked into the goals or objectives of Fort Canning or Bedok Reservoir. Without such goals, all the methods discussed earlier seem aimless because they are not geared towards a specific outcome. One article I felt was rather enlightening was this study of the Australian Great Barrier Reef conducted in 2015 which focused mainly on the objectives for management to work towards in the Great Barrier Reef (Putten, et al., 2015).

The study derived the objectives based on local stakeholder views of the perceived gap between their expectations and the outcomes of management actions. This approach creates objectives which accurately cover stakeholder concerns and at the same time encourages stakeholder’s buy-in for plans to achieve these objectives.

The Great Barrier Reef goals were split in three main categories with smaller sub-goals for each.

a.       Environment: Protecting, maintaining and renewing local environments. Specific sub goals in include increasing biodiversity and improving the water quality.

b.      Social & Economic: Growing regional economic and social well-being with sub goals being encouraging equity and sustainable growth.

c.       Governance: Improving management ability to ensure sustainable use of the locale’s resources and environment; sub goals are increasing community involvement and support whilst at the same time enhancing the management plans for the area to greater effect.

Interestingly, the study also found that participants place more emphasis on environmental issues before governance and social-economic topics, that the environment protection must precede any achievement of governance or social-economic goals. The study attributed this to the fact that most of the participants directly earn their livelihood off the natural environment of the Great Barrier Reef. Thus, protecting the environment comes first to them as it it’s a pre-condition to social economic growth or governance. For Singapore however, most people do not directly live off the complex social ecological systems present thus there might be a different weightage of importance between the three major objective groups.

Another thing I felt was missing was the lack of descriptive measures in the study. Most of the study revolved around high level goals but lacked the measures by which to measure these goals. Such measures are next on the to look into list for improving on our general framework for governance of complex Social-Ecological Systems.

Bedok Reservoir Park Objectives

In the two earlier posts on Bedok Reservoir Park (BRP), we saw that it has a large amount of stakeholders due to the myriad uses the park has. Therefore we need to identify some of these objectives of stakeholder groups and determine what category they fall in to better understand the balancing of stakeholder needs. Below is a table of objectives.

Goal	Sub Goal	Stakeholders
Environment
Ensure environment conditions and assets remain suitable for the usage of future generations	Improve water quality so as to be usable for water activities	Water Sports enthusiasts, Recreational Fishing
	Ensure park environment remains in good condition	Park goers in general
Social-Economic
Improve local well being	Ensure BRP remains a source of renewable water.	Bedok Residents
	Improve social cohesion by providing a place for different parts of society to interact.	Bedok Residents
Governance
Improve governance systems	Increase management support for park improvement initiatives	Stakeholders in general
	Ensure access to park facilities remain within reach	People looking to book park facilities
	Sustainable Financial Costs	Park Goers, Tax payers.

Bibliography

Putten, I. E., Dichmont, C. M., Dutra, L. X., Thebaud, O., Deng, R. A., Jebreen, E., . . . Thompson, C. (2015). Objectives for management of socio-ecological systems in the Great Barrier Reef Region, Australia. Regional Environmental Change, 1417-1431.