Lessons Learned in Developing Social Indicators for Regional Water Quality Management

This article outlines a process for developing social indicators for regional resource management programs. Insights and lessons are drawn from experience developing indicators for the social dimensions of water quality programs addressing non-point-source pollution. The project driving these insights originated with a charge from regional leaders of a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) water quality program to a project team comprised of participants from land grant universities within the region. We believe the indicator development process from that experience could be applied in other regions to address a variety of resource management issues. Key lessons learned through this process include the value of building stakeholder capacity for using social data, the importance of developing a conceptual framework to guide indicator selection, and the importance of selecting a small set of core indicators.