A review of the applicability of the motivations and abilities (MOTA) framework for assessing the implementation success of water resources management plans and policies

Implementation failure is widely acknowledged as a major impediment to the success of water resource plans and policies, yet there are very few proactive approaches available for analysing potential implementation issues during the planning stage. The motivations and abilities (MOTA) framework was established to address this planning stage gap, by offering a multi-stakeholder, multilevel approach to evaluate the implementation feasibility of plans and policies. MOTA is a stepwise process focusing on the relationship between trigger, motivation and ability. Here we outline the base model of the MOTA framework and review existing MOTA applications in assorted water resource management contexts. From our review, we identify the strengths and limitations of the MOTA framework in various institutional implementation and social adoptability contexts. Our findings indicate that the existing MOTA base model framework has been successful in identifying the motivations and abilities of the stakeholders involved in a range of bottom-up water resource planning contexts and in subsequently providing insight into the types of capacity- or consent-building strategies needed for effective implementation. We propose several complementary add-in applications to complement the base model, which specific applications may benefit from. Specifically, the incorporation of formal context and stakeholder analyses during the problem definition stage (Step 1) could provide a more considered basis for designing the latter steps within the MOTA analyses. In addition, the resolution of the MOTA analyses could be enhanced by developing more nuanced scoring approaches or by adopting empirically proven ones from well-established published models. Through setting the base model application, additional add-in applications can easily be added to enhance different aspects of the analysis while still maintaining comparability with other MOTA applications. With a robust base model and a suite of add-in applications, there is great potential for the MOTA framework to become a staple tool for optimising implementation success in any water planning and policymaking context.