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"The aim of this article is to provide an informed plea for more explicitly identifying, naming and unravelling the linkages between water control and gender in irrigation. The fact that power, expertise and status in irrigation tend to have a strong masculine connotation is by now quite well established, and underlies calls for more women in water decision making, engineering education and professions. Yet, the questions of how and why water control, status and expertise are linked to masculinity, and of whether and how such links work to legitimise the exercise of power, are seldom asked. To date, associations between masculinity and professional water performance have largely been taken for granted and remained unexamined. The resulting perceived normalcy makes mechanisms of (gendered) power and politics in water appear self-evident, unchangeable, and indeed gender-neutral. The article reviews examples of the masculinity of irrigation in different domains to argue that exposing and challenging such hitherto hidden dimensions of (gendered) power is important for the identification of new avenues of gender progressive change, and for shedding a new and interesting light on the workings of power in water."

The purpose of this study was to analyze factors influencing rural people's participation in National Action Plan for Sustainable Management of Land and Water Resources (NAP-SMLWR) in Hable-Rud Basin. This study is a case study of Arou village in northern Hable-Rud basin. The statistical population includes head of households who dwelling in Arou village and participate in this project. Available participants were selected that the number of individuals has been 60. The main instrument of the survey was questionnaire that its validity was established by an experts’ panel consisting of specialists in natural resources extension. Instrument reliability was established by calculating Cronbach's alpha coefficient for measuring level of rural people's participation in NAP-SMLWR, which its extent was 0.78. The findings of research showed that household size, times of traveling to town, level of participation in previous projects, awareness of plan goals, awareness of degradation impacts of natural resources, need to social solidarity, contact with technical experts and visit of sample projects are positively and significantly (p

Rainwater harvesting presents a viable option for securing water availability in order to increase food production. The study focuses on rural youth in Luphisi and Dwaleni villages in the Mpumalanga Province and considers the relationship between youth capabilities and food security. The study uses qualitative data collected from focus group discussions and quantitative data from a baseline survey within the context of an integrated rainwater harvesting project. The indicators tapped into attributes related to trust, social cohesion, inclusion and sociability, and examined these within the context of the ‘capability approach’, to consider whether and in what ways these attributes can be linked to food security. Results show that youth have high levels of certain capabilities such as trust, social cohesion and inclusion, co-operation, self-esteem, and meaning. However, in other dimensions there are fewer opportunities, like access to networks, access to knowledge and information and sociability, which are lacking among youth and restrict opportunities for them to engage with issues around food and water security. The Chi-square test was used to investigate the relationship between youth capabilities and food security and at p

"Adaptive capacity is widely held as a key property of resilient and transformative social-ecological systems. However, current knowledge of the term does not yet address key questions of how to operationalize this system condition to address sustainability challenges through research and policy. This paper explores temporal and agency dimensions of adaptive capacity in practice to better understand how system conditions and attributes enable adaptation. An institutional dynamics lens is employed to systemically examine empirical cases of change in urban water management. Comparative analysis of two Australian cities' drought response is conducted using institutional analysis and qualitative system dynamics mapping techniques. The study finds that three forms of adaptive capacity appear critical: the ability to learn, decide, and act. The analytical approach developed provides insight into change dynamics and the agency mechanisms that generate them. The paper proposes a typology of adaptive capacity by characterizing these change dynamics and mechanisms for locked-in, crisis, reorganizing, and stabilizing systems. This set of propositions on institutional conditions and forms of adaptive capacity is offered to further advance research on the topic and help to operationalize adaptive capacity in practice."

INTRODUCTION Almost 40% of the world’s population lives in river basins that experience severe water scarcity during at least one month of the year (Hoekstra et al. 2012). Scarcity, i.e., low available water per capita, is forecast to worsen in many countries in the Middle East and North Africa as well as Mexico, Pakistan, South Africa, and large parts of China and India, which already suffer from acute water scarcity (Burchi et al. 2013). Water scarcity includes not only the physical scarcity of water but also the lack of access to safe drinking water and sanitation (Rijsberman 2006). Some of the reasons commonly cited as contributing to water scarcity include population growth, rising demand brought by increasing incomes, the rapid pace and scale of urbanization, the large share of water used in agriculture, depletion of aquifers, climate change, wasteful use of underpriced resources, pollution from agriculture, industry and human waste, and poor governance of natural resource management (Merrey et al. 2007, Molle et al. 2007, Falkenmark and Molden 2008). However, there is much debate over the relative importance of these reasons, and much debate about the most appropriate instruments and scale of solutions. In relation to developing countries, the Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations (http://www.unmillenniumproject. org/goals/) include access to safe and affordable water for populations in all urban and rural areas.

The Indus Basin Irrigation System suffers significant inequity in access to surface water across its millions of users. Information, i.e., monitoring and reporting of water availability, may be of value in improving conditions across the basin, and we investigated this via an experimental game of water distribution in Punjab, Pakistan. We found evidence that flow information allowed players to take more effective action to target overuse, and that overall activities that might bring social disapproval were reduced with information. However, we did not find any overall improvement in equity across the system, suggesting that information on its own might not be sufficient to lead to better water distribution among irrigators.

"The continued degradation of marine ecosystems, along with the ecosystem services they provide, suggest that new, innovative approaches are needed to scale up marine biodiversity protection and promote sustainable fishery practices. We synthesize information from Chile on the key processes involved in the development of alternative strategies for scaling up marine biodiversity conservation and discuss the complementarities with marine protected areas. Defined as 'ancillary' marine conservation initiatives under the Convention of Biological Diversity, we suggest that these alternative strategies have the potential to capitalize on local stakeholders’ participation and contribute to solving livelihood and governance issues while playing a significant role in scaling up marine conservation. We specifically focus on two recent ancillary initiatives being piloted in Chile. The development of business model innovations which could enable biodiversity benefits from territorial user rights fisheries policies and the creation of municipal conservation areas. We identify how these initiatives could eventually help scale up marine conservation, discuss opportunities and challenges from these pilot experiences and conclude with the need for developing policy frameworks and cross-scale governance approaches which formally acknowledge marine ancillary conservation measures as part of an integrated way to manage marine biodiversity. Exploring and supporting alternative complementary marine conservation strategies is particularly relevant in Chile and Latin America, if biodiversity conservation initiatives are to scale in coverage, contribute to livelihood improvement of local communities, replenish fisheries and play key roles in adaptation to climate change."

"We look to a particular social-ecological system, the restoration community in Rhode Island, USA and the rivers, wetlands, marshes, and estuaries they work to protect, to draw connections between communication, community involvement, and ecological restoration project success. Offering real-world examples drawn from interviews with 27 local, state, federal, and nonprofit restoration managers, we synthesize the mechanisms that managers found effective to argue that the communication employed by resource managers in each phase of the restoration process, in prioritization, implementation, and monitoring, and for garnering broad-based support, shapes the quality of public engagement in natural resources management, which, in turn, can impact the stakeholder, learning, and ecological success of restoration projects. Despite the possible trade-offs and conflicts between social and ecological outcomes, we suggest that managers need to consider their desired social-ecological outcomes and work from the outset to deliberately design mechanisms for communication and public engagement that weave community stakeholders into all phases of restoration projects in sustained and consequential ways."

Contains fulltext : 144864.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) We elaborate the necessary conceptual and strategic elements for developing an effective adaptive monitoring network to support Integrated Coastal Management (ICM) in a multiuser nature reserve in the Dutch Wadden Sea Region. We discuss quality criteria and enabling actions essential to accomplish and sustain monitoring excellence to support ICM. The Wadden Sea Long-Term Ecosystem Research project (WaLTER) was initiated to develop an adaptive monitoring network and online data portal to better understand and support ICM in the Dutch Wadden Sea Region. Our comprehensive approach integrates ecological and socioeconomic data and links research-driven and policy-driven monitoring for system analysis using indicators of pressures, state, benefits, and responses. The approach and concepts we elaborated are transferable to other coastal regions to accomplish ICM in complex social-ecological systems in which scientists, multisectoral stakeholders, resource managers, and governmental representatives seek to balance long-term ecological, economic, and social objectives within natural limits. 12 p.

"Many irrigation systems are special cases of common-pool resources (CPRs) in which some users have preferential access to the resource, which in theory aggravates collective action challenges such as the under-provision of necessary infrastructure as a result of unequal appropriation of water resources. We present experimental evidence based on an irrigation game played in communities that are dependent on one of the largest contiguous irrigation network: the Indus basin irrigation system in Punjab, Pakistan. Furthermore, we simulate two institutional mechanisms that are neglected in experimental studies, despite their importance in many CPR governance systems: traditional authorities and legal pluralism. In our experiments, Punjabi farmers (N = 160) managed to provide the CPR at a level close to the social optimum, even without communication or enforcement opportunities. The equal investment in water infrastructure seems to be a strong social norm, even though those in disadvantageous positions (tail-users) earn less than those who have preferential access (head-users). At the same time, head-users restrain themselves from maximum resource extraction, which could be interpreted either as a norm or a stationary bandit strategy. In contrast to one of the most consistent findings of previous experimental studies, the participants in our experiment increased their earnings over the experimental rounds by using the available resources in a more efficient manner. One explanation for this behavior could be the availability of social information in our game. Starting from a high level of cooperation during baseline rounds, the treatments did not change the group investment significantly. The introduction of external sanctions created additional coordination problems, which led to a decrease in the level of group welfare. More specifically, head-users reduced their water extraction in the face of possible external sanctions to a level that the remaining water could not be used completely by tail-users."

"To address increasing conflicts between surface water and groundwater users, the state of Nebraska has adopted a more localized and integrated approach in managing water resources. Integrated approaches offer promise in better managing connected water resources within the state; however, little review of the potential benefits and/or challenges of these actions has been conducted. This case study uses both qualitative and quantitative data collection efforts to take an in-depth look at how this new and innovative management system is working through the eyes of stakeholders living and working in the basin. Data collection reveals that overall the current water management system is working relatively well, even though it is still in its infancy. However, the system could be further improved by ensuring all that stakeholder interests are represented, providing increased opportunities to participate, and continuing to work toward more holistic and proactive water management."

Aquaculture, and shrimp aquaculture in particular, can have major social and environmental impacts. However, aquaculture remains an understudied area in commons research. Can aspects of commons theory be applied to solve problems of aquaculture? We examined three coastal community-based shrimp aquaculture operations in northwestern Sri Lanka using a case study approach. These shrimp farms were individually owned by small producers and managed under local-level rules designed by cooperatives (samithi). The common-pool resource of major interest was water for aquaculture ponds, obtained from an interconnected water body. We evaluated the shrimp farming social-ecological system by using Ostrom’s design principles for collective action. Key elements of the system were: clearly defined boundaries; collaboratively designed crop calendar, bottom-up approach involving community associations, multi-level governance, and farmers-and-government collaborative structures. Together, these elements resolved the excludability and subtractability problems of commons by establishing boundary and membership rules and collective choice rules. Published version

"Multiple active partnerships in the health and water sectors in Cambodia exist to address climate change adaptation, operating beyond typical sectoral and organizational divides. Decisions around national adaptation policy are made predominantly by the relevant lead ministry, contrasting with where funding originates from (i.e., major donors, multilaterals, United Nation agencies). Adaptation policy is thus the result of a process of coproduction by state and nonstate actors. The research we present sought to understand the relationships that exist between knowledge- and decision-makers with respect to climate change adaptation in the health and water sectors in Cambodia, and the factors that enabled or constrained these relationships. Forty-four interviews were conducted with representatives of 32 organizations. We found that coproductive relationships were most effective when there were clearly defined roles and responsibilities, coordination of technical and financial resources, and trust. The two key factors of coproductive capacity that enabled and supported these partnerships were scientific resources and governance capability. Ultimately, the roles and responsibilities given to various actors requires commensurate funding and greater consideration of existing relationships and power dynamics. The reliance on international scientific expertise also needs to be challenged so that local research capabilities can be developed and locally relevant, problem-specific information can be provided. The ongoing funding, codevelopment, and sharing of such knowledge would significantly enhance trust and cooperation."

"The challenge of managing water resources in England is becoming increasingly complex and uncertain, a situation reflected in many countries around the world. Cooperative and participatory forms of governance are now seen as one way of addressing this challenge. We investigated this assertion by focusing on five farmer irrigator groups in the low-lying east of England. The groups’ relationship with water resources management was interpreted through the lens of comanagement, which over the past decade has increasingly merged with the field of adaptive management and related concepts that derive from resilience thinking and complex adaptive systems theory. Working within a critical realist paradigm, our analysis was guided by the politicized institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework. Two previous studies concerned with the broader context surrounding farming and water governance in lowland England revealed low levels of trust between farmers, and between farmers and water managers, as well as a power dynamic that stands in the way of farmer cooperation and participation. Within this context, our findings pointed to a number of mechanisms and structural conditions that appear to generate or facilitate comanagement. Of these, institution building through the specific group strategy of adopting a company structure and the “stationarity” of the resource group members extract from were seen to be the most crucial. These and other key findings were used to inform a discussion of farming and water resources management in England going forward. In doing so, we also reflected on the relationship between comanagement and market-based approaches to managing water resources. Beyond this, the research serves as a practical demonstration of how the politicized IAD framework can be used to analyze potential (adaptive) comanagement situations and the related benefits. The analysis complements a previous submission to this journal, in which we discussed the relationship between the framework and (adaptive) comanagement from a theoretical and methodological perspective."

Ongoing discussions on water-energy-food nexus generally lack a historical perspective and more rigorous institutional analysis. Scrutinizing a relatively mature benefit sharing approach in the context of transboundary water management, the study shows how such analysis can be implemented to facilitate understanding in an environment of high institutional and resource complexity. Similar to system perspective within nexus, benefit sharing is viewed as a positive sum approach capable of facilitating cooperation among riparian parties by shifting the focus from the quantities of water to benefits derivable from its use and allocation. While shared benefits from use and allocation are logical corollary of the most fundamental principles of international water law, there are still many controversies as to the conditions under which benefit sharing could serve best as an approach. Recently, the approach has been receiving wider attention in the literature and is increasingly applied in various basins to enhance negotiations. However, relatively little attention has been paid to the costs associated with benefit sharing, particularly in the long run. The study provides a number of concerns that have been likely overlooked in the literature and examines the approach in the case of the Ferghana Valley shared by Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan utilizing data for the period from 1917 to 2013. Institutional analysis traces back the origins of property rights of the transboundary infrastructure, shows cooperative activities and fierce negotiations on various governance levels. The research discusses implications of the findings for the nexus debate and unveils at least four types of costs associated with benefit sharing: (1) Costs related to equity of sharing (horizontal and vertical), (2) Costs to the environment, (3) Transaction costs and risks of losing water control, and (4) Costs as a result of likely misuse of issue linkages.

The Kabu-ido system was a customary institution for groundwater management in a ring levee area of the Tokai region in Japan. It consists of three programs, a permit system for groundwater pumping, groundwater pricing, and economic compensation. The purpose of this paper is to clarify characteristics of the Kabu-ido as a groundwater management institution.

"Peri-urban floodplains located in upstream reaches of urban areas play a key role in the resilience of social-ecological systems. The need to adapt to increasing flood risks by protecting these natural assets represents a huge challenge for many cities facing rapid expansion and limited financial resources for the mitigation of environmental impacts. To understand how better governance and management can be put in place, there is a need to map the key players shaping and/or being impacted by land-use change processes and assess the barriers keeping them from playing a more constructive role in the collaborative governance of cities, the natural resources which sustain them, and the environmental risks that pose a threat. A conceptualization of power regarding natural resource governance is presented and its implications for the relationships between actors and the many scales of decision making is discussed. Drawing on existing literature, we develop a heuristic framework for analyzing policy dimensions of land-use change processes, and reflect on the possible ways for key stakeholders to become over time more committed to and involved in a collaborative approach to the development of land use policies for urban flood prevention. We apply this framework to the Brazilian city of Paraty, a case study through which the recurring problem of flooding exposes the deepening tensions between conservation and development. Empirical results demonstrate the need to acknowledge the politicization of floodplain change and the importance of trying to bridge the gap between sectors and actors with conflicting interest in urban environmental management."

Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries are among the worlds’ richest in marine biodiversity. Fish stocks in these regions are important for fishing communities, and fishing activities engage several million people. These fisheries depend on the natural services provided by a diverse range of marine social-ecological systems, but many LAC fisheries are in a degraded state, and concerns about overexploitation are widespread. With most fishery resources fully exploited or overexploited, opportunities for development lie primarily in restoring depleted stocks and using stocks more efficiently. The papers published in the Special Feature “Cooperation, Local Communities, and Marine Social-Ecological Systems: New Findings from Latin America” present a range of experiences with ecosystem stewardship in the region and highlight promising perspectives for the future. The Special Feature consists of papers that deal with new findings from case studies which show how cooperation is key for building resilience in LAC fisheries. These case studies illustrate the effects of different types of cooperation and the roles of diverse stakeholders (fishers, scientists, environmental nongovernmental organizations, and national administrations, among others) in different countries of the region. Combined, these papers describe social processes, leadership, and institutional and organizational changes of relevance for stewardship of marine social-ecological systems in Latin America. The field of resilience research is still in an explorative phase in the region, and our ambition with this Special Feature is that the new discoveries presented may stimulate additional research in this field, including increased international cooperation with LAC scientists. Los países de América Latina y El Caribe concentran una de las áreas de mayor biodiversidad marina del mundo. Las pesquerías comerciales en estas regiones aportan una elevada fuente de ingresos económicos para millones de personas. A pesar de que estas pesquerías dependen de los servicios ecosistémicos aportados por una gran variedad de sistemas marinos socio-ecológicos, gran parte de ellas continúan degradándose, y la preocupación por reducir la sobreexplotación está ampliamente extendida entre la comunidad científica. Con la mayoría de los stocks completamente explotados o sobreexplotados, las oportunidades para el desarrollo de las pesquerías dependen fundamentalmente en la recuperación de los stocks a través de su uso más racional. Los trabajos publicados en este monográfico "Cooperation, Local Communities, and Marine Social-Ecological Systems: New Findings from Latin America" presentan una variedad de experiencias e gestión pesquera en la región y resaltan perspectivas y resultados prometedores para el futuro de la región. El monográfico incluye trabajos muestran, desde diferentes disciplinas, enfoques y metodologías, que la cooperación resulta clave para la resiliencia de las pesquerías comerciales de América Latina y El Caribe. Estos casos de estudio ilustran los efectos de la cooperación entre diferentes grupos de usuarios (pescadores, científicos, organizacionales no gubernamentales, gobiernos locales, regionales y nacionales) así como los roles desempeñados por éstos en varios países de la región. Combinados, estos trabajos describen procesos sociales, el rol de líderes locales así como cambios institucionales y organizacionales de gran relevancia para la gestión de los sistemas marinos socio-ecológicos de la región. El campo de investigación de la resiliencia aun se encuentra en una fase de exploración en la región, y nuestra ambición con este monográfico consiste en estimular aun más la investigación en este campo a través de una mayor cooperación científica internacional con científicos de América Latina y El Caribe SV was funded by Pedro Barrié de La Maza Foundation, the Campus do Mar-International Campus of Excellence, and the Norwegian Research Council. HÖ was funded by Mistra, through a core grant to Stockholm Resilience Centre, the Nippon Foundation, and FORMAS SI

"Large waterworks helped to produce California's cities, agricultural bounty, and attendant discourses of progress, private property, and human control over riverine ecosystems. However, over the past two decades, water governance has been decentralized and some infrastructure diversified with rain tank retrofits, creating new local waterscapes in the interstices of California's ‘hydraulic society’. These local waterscapes emerge entangled with alternate discourses of human-ecological collaboration and water as a public trust or commons, which in turn generate new cultural practices and governance strategies. I develop a field interview approach to investigate how installing rain tanks initiates shifts in water practices and environmental imaginaries along Salmon Creek (Sonoma County). There, a collaborative citizen-agency project has to date installed rain tanks with a total capacity of two million litres, aiming to improve water security for rural residents and increase late-summer streamflow to benefit endangered salmon. Residents who participate in monitoring salmon populations, water quality, and their own springs and rain tanks report that these activities have increased their sense of interdependence with other human and nonhuman neighbours who rely on the watershed’s limited water sources. Drawing on Barad’s (2007) concepts of apparatus and intra-action, I argue that the notion of water as an interspecies commons is co-evolving with rainwater harvesting and that collective choice frameworks that embrace both management practices and environmental imaginaries represent a coherent alternative both to state and market frameworks of water governance and to traditional adaptive management methods and discourses."

"This paper sought to understand the current state of the management environment of Lake Malawi Basin, deduce a lake vision and develop indicators for assessing Integrated Lake Basin Management (ILBM) in the lake basin. The premise of the study was that targeted indicators are necessary to effectively monitor the lake basin and manage it sustainably. The study focused on the Malawian side of the lake. Interviews, field observations and review of existing lake management and indicator development approaches around the world were the methods employed. It was found that Malawi lacks focus on lakes in its strategies and the existing management of the lake is on a sector-to-sector basis with little coordination. Furthermore, the capacity of lake-related sector institutions is hampered by inadequate resources and unstable flow of funds. It was concluded that the current management of the lake basin is unsustainable and there is need to comprehensively monitor the lake basin as well as formulate and implement management plans and strategies that are based on the knowledge obtained from targeted monitoring. A set of governance indicators was developed taking into account the characteristics of the lake, the values that it offers and the threats that it is facing."

"This paper analyzes conflict and collaboration and their relation to normative structures based on a case study of the history and external interventions of the Píllaro North Canal Irrigation System in the Ecuadorian Highlands. It does so by using Ostrom’s framework for analyzing the sustainability of socio-ecological systems together with an analysis of the normative structures that define the governance systems through which the interactions in irrigation systems are mediated. I argue that the external interventions by the state and NGOs imposed a new governance system that undermined the existing normative structures and related organizations, leading to internal conflicts. The case study suggests that a reformulation of irrigation policies and state intervention methodologies in user managed supra-community irrigation systems in the Andes could lead to higher levels of cooperation."

"In this article we use insights from institutional bricolage and actor network theory to make sense of an Andean water user association (WUA) and its bricoleurs in the Region of Ayacucho, Peru. Rather than being designed and clearly defined, we see natural resource institutions as continuously performed and patched together, through heterogeneous elements and practices, by those that live, experience and enact these institutions every day and by those who make sense of them. We present three cases, three supra-community efforts to secure water livelihoods, in which the Ayacucho water user association is enacted differently. Similar actors and practices like, water law, local customs, water bodies, and ecological services are performed in alternate ways for diverse purposes. It is this range of co-existing performances or enactments and the fluidity of actors and bricoleurs which enables an institution to adapt and adjust. We hold that an Andean WUA can be a bureaucratic imposition, but in many ways the WUA is something else too: a strategic ally; a prerequisite for subsidy consideration, a marketplace for exchanging goods and services and more. In the setting of the contemporary Peruvian Andes, the durability of natural resource institutions can be understood through the fluidity and multiplicity of performances and purposes. This has normative and political implications for researchers and policymakers as to what enactment they consider and target."

"Farmers and rural advocates in New Mexico assert that traditional irrigators are better adapted to water scarcity and variability than other communities. Data to actually test this are often scarce, but such information could be useful for planning the state’s water future, especially as climate change predictions tend toward less reliable supplies. This paper reports results from a common pool resource (CPR) experiment that simulates irrigating behavior using two groups: rural irrigators and undergraduate students. Despite predictions to the opposite, there was no significant difference between mean withdrawals or predictions of other players’ behavior. On average, both groups withdrew above the social optimum but below the Nash equilibrium. This work appears to be the first example of a common pool resource experiment conducted with traditional New Mexican irrigators."

In the Andes of Peru a familiar story has unfolded in many communities around the sharing and use of water, a tragedy often attributed to an irresolvable conflict between the inherently selfish interests of the individual and the cooperative needs of the group. This article traces the history of irrigation in one highland valley based on comparative ethnographic research, examining the reasons for both success and failure in governing the commons and trying to explain why the former has given way to the latter in many, but by no means all, places. It reveals that success can be relatively unproblematic and was once widespread at the local level, and that failure has occurred where institutional arrangements have been imposed that, according to the conventional theory, should have prevented the tragedy instead of bringing it about: privatization of the resource, on the one hand, and State control of it on the other. Where selfishness and discord have prevailed they are driven by an apparent water scarcity that is socially constructed, the product of a new political ecology imposed initially by the local elite and then dominated by them with the State’s help, at the expense of the peasantry. The author argues that, far from being inevitable, the tragedy of the commons in water management can be avoided, arrested, and perhaps even reversed, in the Andes and other arid and mountainous parts of the world. Key words: Andes, tragedy of the commons, political ecology, water scarcity, water management, arid, mountain.

Participation in collective action is frequently studied through a community-based analysis, with focus on the social features of the participants and on the ecological features of the managed system. This study addresses the importance of scaling down to household level to understand different individual incentives to collaborate (or not) as well as scaling up to the landscape level to evaluate the ecological outcome of the local forms of collective action. A study of a riparian community of 33 households in the Lower Amazon located between two distinct ecosystems -a privately owned upland forest and a communally owned floodplain- reveals that household-based analysis uncovers how heterogeneity within the community leads to different incentives for participation in the communal floodplain, while systemic analysis reveals that interconnection between the managed ecosystem and adjacent ecosystem influences the decisions to participate as well as the ecological outcomes of the collective actions. A participação numa ação coletiva é estudada com freqüência por meio de uma análise baseada nas comunidades e enfocada nas características sociais dos participantes e nas características ecológicas do sistema manejado. Este estudo refere-se à importância de se limitar a análise ao nível das famílias para compreender os diferentes incentivos individuais que colaboram (ou não), assim como de se ampliar a análise ao nível da esfera territorial a fim de se avaliar o resultado ecológico das formas locais de ação coletiva. Um estudo feito numa comunidade costeira de 33 famílias na Baixa Amazonia situada entre dois ecosistemas diferentes -uma mata/floresta de propriedade privada situada em terras altas e uma planície pluvial pertencente a uma comunidade- revela que a análise baseada nas famílias mostra que a heterogeneidade dentro da comunidade conduz a diferentes incentivos para participar das atividades na planície pluvial. A análise sistêmica, no entanto, mostra que a interconexão entre o ecosistema manejado e o ecosistema adjacente influi nas decisões para participar assim como nos resultados das ações coletivas.

"Local communities and local government units are recognized as the primary stakeholders and participants in the management of coral reef resources and the primary beneficiaries of small-scale fishing activities in the nearshore areas of the coastal zone. The issues relating to the management of the coastal zone are multi-faceted and some issues are largely intertwined with national policy and development goals. Thus, national governments have jurisdiction over these nearshore coastal resources to harmonize policies, monitor resource use and provide incentives for sustainable use. However, the natural boundaries of these reef resources, the processes that support reef ecosystems, and the local or national affiliation of the people who benefit from them may transcend the boundaries of the local and national management units. Therefore, efforts to arrest the decline in fish catch and loss of biodiversity for reefs require management interventions and assessment activities to be carried out at varying scales. In Southeast Asia, some aspects of reef and reef resources management particularly in deciding the allocation of catch among competing fisheries, development of sustainable harvest strategies, use of broodstock for restocking or stock enhancement programs, protection of nursery and spawning areas, designation of systems of marine protected areas, and the identification of representative, adequate and comprehensive areas for biodiversity conservation in the region - may require the definition of larger management units. At the regional level, multi-country initiatives will need to define units for the transboundary management of resources. The use of large marine ecosystems (LMEs) to identify and manage fisheries resources may be a starting point; however, given the relatively sedentary nature of coral reef-dwelling and reef-associated organisms compared with other pelagic and demersal species, meso-scale transboundary units within the LMEs have to be defined. This paper provides suggestions for transboundary management units for coral reef and reef-associated resources in Southeast Asia based on information from genetic structures of model organisms in the region. In addition, specific reef areas are identified, which may be important beyond their national boundaries, as potential sources of recruits."

"We present a modeling framework that synthesizes social, economic, and ecological aspects of landscape change to evaluate how different agricultural policy and land tenure scenarios and land management preferences affect landscape pattern and downstream water quality. We linked a stylized agent-based model (ABM) of farmers’ conservation practice adoption decisions with a water quality model, the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT), to simulate the water quality effects of changing land tenure dynamics and different policies for crop revenue insurance in lieu of commodity payments over 41 years (1970–2010) for a predominantly agricultural watershed of Lake Erie. Results show that non-operator owner involvement in land management decisions yields the highest reduction in sediment and nutrient loads, and crop revenue insurance leads to more homogeneous farmer decisions and a slight increase in sediment and nutrient loads unless cross compliance with expanded conservation requirements is implemented."

"We aimed to contribute to the field of natural resource management (NRM) by introducing an alternative systemic context-based framework for planning, research, and decision making, which we expressed practically in the development of a decision-making 'tool' or method. This holistic framework was developed in the process of studying a specific catchment area, i.e., the Sand River Catchment, but we have proposed that it can be generalized to studying the complexities of other catchment areas. Using the lens of systemic resilience to think about dynamic and complex environments differently, we have reflected on the development of a systemic framework for understanding water and livelihood security under transformation in postapartheid South Africa. The unique aspect of this framework is that allows researchers and policy makers to reframe catchments as being recognizable as complex social-ecological systems, and by doing so, the possibility is opened to understand resiliency in the face of rapid transformation and crisis. Ultimately, this holistic approach can be used to understand the translation of policy into practice. We have emphasized our reflections on the development and use of the framework and the challenges and successes faced by collaborators in the process of adopting such an orientation. Because these are likely to characterize policy and decision-making processes in NRM in general, we have suggested that such a systemic framing can assist researchers, practitioners, and policy makers to adopt systems and resilience analyses in the process of planning and implementation."

"Wetlands in the arid western United States provide rare and critical migratory bird habitat and constitute a critical nexus within larger social-ecological systems (SES) where multiple changing land-use and water-use patterns meet. The Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge in Utah, USA, presents a case study of the ways that wetland managers have created adaptive management strategies that are responsive to the social and hydrological conditions of the agriculture-dominated SES within which they are located. Managers have acquired water rights and constructed infrastructure while cultivating collaborative relationships with other water users to increase the adaptive capacity of the region and decrease conflict. Historically, water management involved diversion and impoundment of water within wetland units timed around patterns of agricultural water needs. In the last 20 years, managers have learned from flood and drought events and developed a long-term adaptive management plan that specifies alternative management actions managers can choose each year based on habitat needs and projected water supply. Each alternative includes habitat goals and target wetland water depth. However, wetland management adapted to agricultural return-flow availability may prove insufficient as population growth and climate change alter patterns of land and water use. Future management will likely depend more on negotiation, collaboration, and learning from social developments within the SES than strictly focusing on water management within refuge boundaries. To face this problem, managers have worked to be included in negotiations with regional water users, a strategy that may prove instructive for other wetland managers in agriculture-dominated watersheds."

"We aimed to uncover the origin of ambiguity in flood infrastructure projects using Building with Nature (BwN) design principles. BwN is a new approach in flood management that simultaneously integrates societal goals, such as flood safety and recreation development, with nature development goals by actively using natural dynamics and materials in the projects design. Because BwN projects affect multiple stakeholders and several societal functions, participatory project development is of key importance to successfully implement these projects. In such a multiactor decision-making process, a diversity of actors are involved, all of whom have their own view of the project based on their interests, values, beliefs, backgrounds, and past experiences. As a consequence, BwN projects are susceptible to being hampered by the presence of ambiguity, a kind of uncertainty that results from the simultaneous presence of multiple frames. For two BwN case study projects, we identified where the ambiguities potentially affecting project development resided, derived the different actor frames, and addressed the attributes underlying these frames. Our main finding was that ambiguity in BwN projects seems to originate from a contradiction between the beliefs held by different actors. Furthermore, our results suggest that in the current practice of BwN projects the scientific knowledge of experts is perceived as more legitimate than the local knowledge and experiences of lay actors, which implies that experts have a more powerful position in multiactor decision making. Thus, our research underlines the difficulty of bringing local knowledge and past experiences of lay actors into collective decision making."

Urban activities and related infrastructure alter the natural patterns of stream physical and chemical conditions. According to the Urban Stream Syndrome, streams draining urban landscapes are characterized by high concentrations of nutrients and ions, and might have elevated water temperatures and variable oxygen concentrations. Here, we report temporal and spatial variability in stream physicochemistry in a highly urbanized watershed in Puerto Rico. The main objective of the study was to describe stream physicochemical characteristics and relate them to urban intensity, e.g., percent impervious surface cover, and watershed infrastructure, e.g., road and pipe densities. The Río Piedras Watershed in the San Juan Metropolitan Area, Puerto Rico, is one of the most urbanized regions on the island. The Río Piedras presented high solute concentrations that were related to watershed factors, such as percent impervious cover. Temporal variability in ion concentrations lacked seasonality, as did all other parameters measured except water temperature, which was lower during winter and highest during summer, as expected based on latitude. Spatially, stream physicochemistry was strongly related to watershed percent impervious cover and also to the density of urban infrastructure, e.g., roads, pipe, and building densities. Although the watershed is serviced by a sewage collection system, illegal discharges and leaky infrastructure are probably responsible for the elevated ion concentration found. Overall, the Río Piedras is an example of the response of a tropical urban watershed after major sewage inputs are removed, thus highlighting the importance of proper infrastructure maintenance and management of runoff to control ion concentrations in tropical streams.

Although several frameworks for assessing the resilience of social-ecological systems (SESs) have been developed, some practitioners may not have sufficient time and information to conduct extensive resilience assessments. We have presented a simplified approach to resilience assessment that reviews the scientific, historical, and social literature to rate the resilience of an SES with respect to nine resilience properties: ecological variability, diversity, modularity, acknowledgement of slow variables, tight feedbacks, social capital, innovation, overlap in governance, and ecosystem services. We evaluated the effects of two large-scale projects, the construction of a major dam and the implementation of an ecosystem recovery program, on the resilience of the central Platte River SES (Nebraska, United States). We used this case study to identify the strengths and weaknesses of applying a simplified approach to resilience assessment. Although social resilience has increased steadily since the predam period for the central Platte River SES, ecological resilience was greatly reduced in the postdam period as compared to the predam and ecosystem recovery program time periods.

"The call for a spatial fit between institutional arrangements and the resource they manage is reflected in such water management paradigms as river basin management and in a number of international agreements (e.g., the European Union Water Framework Directive). Consequently, a number of countries are currently introducing river basin management, which, besides management along hydrological boundaries, has recently come to include such aspects of governance as stakeholder participation and policy integration. Beginning with a discussion of the goals and limitations of river basin management, this paper describes how the concept has been implemented in South Africa???a country that has been lauded for its state-of-the-art water legislation, but whose water administration is currently struggling to implement it. The example begins by showing the limitations of focusing on the dimension of spatial fit: a perfect spatial fit in basin management is almost impossible owing to the nature of the resource and to social and economic requirements. There are trade-offs between the identification of hydrological boundaries (which sometimes proves difficult) and 'boundaries' of social organization, such as a feasible size for effective management, meaningful stakeholder participation, and financial viability. Furthermore, the improved spatial fit of the institutional arrangement and water resource boundaries causes problems of interplay by increasing the need for coordination and cooperation among water management organizations at different levels and on different scales. The example then considers the relevance of other dimensions of water management. It shows that, besides the focus on spatial fit, there is a need to recognize major defining features or boundaries to the problem other than hydrological boundaries, such as those imposed by water service infrastructure (functional fit) and impacts of climate change (dynamic fit), and a need to acknowledge the political and economic dimensions of water management."

"This paper explores the possible options for community based groundwater management in India. The main focus of the study is to understand the functioning and efficiency of groundwater management institutions by comparing and contrasting three participatory groundwater models in Andhra Pradesh. The paper assesses the operational modalities and the impact of these institutions on access, equity and sustainability of groundwater use using the qualitative and quantitative information from three sample villages representing the institutional models. Social regulation approach is observed to work better for sustainable groundwater management when compared to the knowledge-intensive approach, as the latter is not designed to address equity. Water use and sharing through regulation has benefits like increased area under protective irrigation. In the absence of any regulations, formal or informal, and in the given policy environment, the farmers do not have any incentive to follow good practices. Thus, encouraging water sharing between well owners and others would contribute to achieving the twin objectives of conservation and improved access with equity. However, community-based groundwater management is neither simple nor easily forthcoming. It requires a lot of effort, working through complex rural dynamics at various levels, since appropriate policies to support or encourage such initiatives are not in place. It is argued that there is need for developing an integrated model drawing from these three models in order to make it more generic and applicable globally. Such a model should integrate scientific, socioeconomic and policy aspects that suit the local conditions."

"The water crisis is often said to be a crisis of governance failure rather than of availability per se; yet the sources of this failure are poorly understood. This paper examines contemporary water scarcity in England and Wales as a failure of ecological modernity, in which technical and institutional innovation is promoted as a means of increasing economic efficiency in the allocation and use of water resources. The role of the state in fostering this innovation is explored through exploring a shift from 'government' to 'governance'. The paper employs Jessop's theory of meta-governance to examine governance failure. Meta-governance represents the capacity of the state to flank or support the emergence of specific forms of governance through mobilising material or symbolic resources. Three sources of governance failure are explored: (1) the nature of capitalist exchange and its resulting production of nature, (2) the political dimensions implicit in meta-governance, and (3) the nature of governance as a task of self-organisation. The model is then applied to the rise of water scarcity in England and Wales from the 1970s to the present day. The utility of the model in analysing governance failure is discussed."

Urban water scarcity is increasingly seen as a governance issue, not least in cities like Hyderabad, India, where the demand for urban water exceeds the available supply to the extent that some low priority areas in the city receive water for only a few hours on alternate days. Based on a multi-level perspective in transition studies, this study explores the major interplay between actors in the urban water regime and analyzes how that influences access to water among the urban poor. The findings show how the practices of the consolidated regime are environmentally, socially, and economically unsustainable. In investigating the driving forces behind the attributes of the urban water regime, we draw attention to the impact of landscape pressures, i.e., international donors' influence on water policy, and initiatives at the regime and niche levels. Further, and in response to that, we investigate potential niche experiments promoting water access for the urban poor. Accordingly, it is suggested that socio-technical and socio-political "niche" experiments could be combined into a citizen-based challenge against the existing urban regime practices and the dominant discourses at the landscape level. Here water harvesting techniques could be a viable niche innovation with citizen involvement to be scaled-up in an enabling institutional setting. This requires a coalition of social movement and political action, providing an arena for a new vision in the water sector that would replace the one imposed by landscape forces represented by international donors. (Less)

"The association between consumption of ecological amenities in a park setting and improved physical and mental health substantiates the need for improved accessibility to green areas in lower-income neighborhoods. We measured green area accessibility, considering income variation, and park use in a densely populated tropical urban watershed. Park use was explored with 442 in-person interviews, and U.S. Census and Puerto Rico Commonwealth data were used to measure accessibility. Nearly 20% of residents earning ? $15,000 lived within park service areas with the highest crime incidence in the region, whereas 90% of those earning > $75,000 lived within park service areas with lower crime rates. Innovative nonexclusionary activities such as growing vegetable gardens are needed to attract lower-income residents and increase their sense of safety in urban parks."

"Climate change presents new challenges for the management of social-ecological systems and the ecosystem services they provide. Although the instrument of payments for ecosystem services (PES) has emerged as a promising tool to safeguard or enhance the provision of ecosystem services (ES), little attention has been paid to the potential role of PES in climate change adaptation. As an external stressor climate change has an impact on the social-ecological system in which PES takes place, including the various actors taking part in the PES scheme. Following a short description of the conceptual link between PES and adaptation to climate change, we provide practical insights into the relationship between PES and adaptation to climate change by presenting results from a case study of a rural watershed in Kenya. Drawing upon the results of a participatory vulnerability assessment among potential ecosystem service providers in Sasumua watershed north of Nairobi, we show that PES can play a role in enhancing adaptation to climate change by influencing certain elements of adaptive capacity and incentivizing adaptation measures. In addition, trade-offs and synergies between proposed measures under PES and adaptation to climate change are identified. Results show that although it may not be possible to establish PES schemes based on water utilities as the sole source of financing, embedding PES in a wider adaptation framework creates an opportunity for the development of watershed PES schemes in Africa and ensures their sustainability. We conclude that there is a need to embed PES in a wider institutional framework and that extra financial resources are needed to foster greater integration between PES and adaptation to climate change. This can be achieved through scaling up PES by bringing in other buyers and additional ecosystem services. PES can achieve important coadaptation benefits, but for more effective adaptation outcomes it needs to be combined with vulnerability assessments and climate scenarios to ensure that these are realized and potential trade-offs between PES measures and adaptation measures minimized."

Integrated water resources management (IWRM) has been recognized by many actors as the appropriate approach to respond to challenges in water resources management in a sustainable way. The main players in developing and diffusing the IWRM concept have included expert groups, international organizations, and multistakeholder platforms, which cooperated in various activities promoting the IWRM concept, such as knowledge generation and sharing, capacity building, and monitoring. A loose network of these actors has actively shaped and engaged in a global discourse on sustainable water resources management and managed to authoritatively shape the IWRM concept. The processes behind the spread of the IWRM concept can thus be conceptualized as development and diffusion of norms through a global policy network. Although this process has changed the discourse on water resources management and established IWRM principles as a global set of norms, national policies and regulations reflect these norms only to a limited extent and new policies lack implementation. IWRM norms have been developed and spread by a network of nonstate actors, which might have contributed to its diverging influence in global discourse on the one hand and national policy implementation on the other. We present an analytical framework to assess effects of IWRM norm diffusion and network structures that support norm development and spread through global policy networks. We also provide an exploratory analysis of the main global policy network involved in development and diffusion of the IWRM concept, including its key actors, relationships across the network, and network outputs.

"This special issue explores the realities of water provision in 'informal' urban spaces located in different parts of the world through eight empirical, case-based papers. The collection of articles shows that formality and informality are fluid concepts that say more about the authority to legitimate certain practices than describe the condition of that particular practice. In this introductory article we provide a historical overview that links the academic discussion on informality to urban water supply practices. Subsequently, we propose the concepts of disaggregation and co-production to describe how informality works, and how ideas about (in)formality are mobilised to label particular practices and service modalities. Disaggregation reveals that a single service delivery mechanism may incorporate activities, varying according to the degree to which they are formal or informal. Co-production describes a process where hybrid service provision modalities are produced as a result of the articulation of socio-political, economic, biophysical and infrastructural drivers. The article concludes by identifying a series of research directions that emerged as a result of producing this special issue."

"Social-ecological systems are governed by a complex of ecology of games featuring multiple actors, policy institutions, and issues, and not just single institutions operating in isolation. We update Long's (1958) ecology of games to analyze the coordinating roles of actors and institutions in the context of the ecology of water management games in San Francisco Bay, California. The ecology of games is operationalized as a bipartite network with actors participating in institutions, and exponential random graph models are used to test hypotheses about the structural features of the network. We found that policy coordination is facilitated mostly by federal and state agencies and collaborative institutions that span geographic boundaries. Network configurations associated with closure show the most significant departures from the predicted model values, consistent with the Berardo and Scholz (2010) 'risk hypothesis' that closure is important for solving cooperation problems."

"Innovations in social-ecological research require novel approaches to conceive change in human-environment systems. The study of history constitutes an important element of this process. First, using the Chilika Lagoon small-scale fisheries in India, as a case, in this paper I reflect on the appropriateness of a social-ecological perspective for understanding economic history. Second, I examine here how changes in various components of the lagoon???s social-ecological system influenced and shaped economic history and the political processes surrounding it. I then discuss the two-way linkages between economic history and social-ecological processes to highlight that the components of a social-ecological system, including the economic aspects, follow an interactive and interdependent trajectory such that their combined impacts have important implications for human-environment connections and sustainability of the system as a whole. Social, ecological, economic, and political components of a system are interlinked and may jointly contribute to the shaping of specific histories. Based on this synthesis, I offer insights to move beyond theoretical, methodological, and disciplinary boundaries as an overarching approach, an inclusive lens, to study change in complex social-ecological systems."

"This article troubles the notion of a formal-informal dichotomy in urban water provision. Whereas expansion of a water utility typically involves the replacement of informal providers, the experience in Manila demonstrates that the rapid connection of low-income areas actually hinges, in part, on the selective inclusion and exclusion of these smaller actors. In this sense, privatisation has not eliminated small-scale water provision, but has led to the reconfiguration of its usage, blurring the boundaries between formal and informal. By examining the spatial and temporal evolution of small-scale water provision in Manila???s post-privatisation era, I show how certain spaces are seen as less serviceable than others. Critically, small providers working in partnership with the utilities are sanctioned because they supplement the utilities??? operations. The areas in which they work are considered served, factoring into aggregate coverage statistics, even though their terms of service are often less desirable than those of households directly connected to the utilities. In contrast, small providers that operate outside of the utilities??? zones of coverage are considered inferior, to be replaced. The result is a differentiation in informality -- one in which the private utilities largely determine modes of access and thus the spatialisation of informal water provision."

We explore the emergence of two contemporary mega water projects in Turkey that are designed to meet the demands of the country's major urban centers. Moreover, we analyze how policy makers in the water sector frame problems and solutions. We argue that these projects represent a tendency to depoliticize water management and steer away from controversial issues of water allocation by emphasizing large-scale, centralized, technical, and supply-oriented solutions. In doing so, urgent concerns are ignored regarding unsustainable water use, impacts on rural livelihoods, and institutional shortcomings in the water sector. These aspirations build heavily on prevailing discourses of modernity, development, and economic growth, and how urban centers are perceived as drivers of this growth. In the light of these tendencies, social and environmental implications are downplayed, even though the projects will change or already have changed the dynamics within urban-rural life and agricultural water resources practices. We develop an understanding of how such projects are presented as the only solution to problems of water scarcity in Turkey. (Less)

"Resilience deals explicitly with change and provides a middle ground between the social and the environmental sciences. However, a growing critique by social scientists questions the ability of resilience thinking to adequately examine the social dimensions of change. The question that emerges is how social scientists should engage with resilience. We addressed this question by comparing resilience with agrarian change and transitions theory, through the backdrop of the fastest growing global food sector, aquaculture. Our analysis showed that each theoretical perspective provides fundamentally different insights into social and environmental transition inherent in the aquaculture sector. Although resilience thinking is best suited to assessing the ecological aspects of production, its systems ontology limits the inclusion of dynamic social relations or innovation. In contrast, agrarian transition enables a more meaningful understanding of how social relations are reconfigured as agrarian society shifts toward more capitalist modes of production, and transitions theory provides insights into social process of innovation. Given the epistemological differences between these theoretical approaches, we argue against attempts that reify systemic thinking by naturalizing social theories and concepts into resilience thinking. Instead, we argue that social theories such as agrarian change and transition theory should be seen as complimentary and that integration should focus on bridging results and insights. Doing so enables a more robust assessment of the social aspects of social-ecological transitions in the aquaculture sector and beyond."

Appraising the social-ecological processes influencing the inflow, transformation, and storage of materials and energy in urban ecosystems requires scientific attention. This appraisal can provide an important tool for assessing the sustainability of cities. Socioeconomic activities are mostly responsible for these fluxes, which are well manifested in the household unit. Human behavior associated with cultural traditions, belief systems, knowledge, and lifestyles are important drivers controlling the transfer of materials throughout the urban environment. Within this context, we explored three aspects of household consumption and waste disposal activities along the Río Piedras Watershed in the San Juan metropolitan area of Puerto Rico. These included: the source of food consumed by residents, recycling activities, and trends in connection to the municipality's sewerage system. We randomly interviewed 440 households at 6 sites along the watershed. We also conducted analysis to estimate accessibility to commercial food services for residents in the study areas. Our surveys revealed that nearly all interviewed households (~97%) consumed products from supermarkets. In neighborhoods of the upper portion of the watershed, where residential density is low with large areas of vegetative cover, more than 60% of residents consumed food items cultivated in their yards. Less than 36% of residents in the in densely urbanized parts of the lower portion of the watershed consumed items from their yards. Accessibility to commercial stores for food consumption contrasted among study sites. Recycling activities were mostly carried out by residents in the lower portion of the watershed, with better access to recycling programs provided by the municipality. The surveys also revealed that only 4 to 17% of residences in the upper watershed are connected to the sewerage system whereas the large majority uses septic tanks for septic water disposal. For these residents wastewater from house maintenance is disposed of directly into the environment. In the lower portion of the watershed all residents were connected to the sewerage system. Our study suggests there is a need to understand human behavioral attitudes in the acquirement and processing of resources, as a tool to generate informed-based strategies promoting sustainable consumption and disposal patterns.

"Domestic rainwater tanks have become commonplace in Australia's urban landscape, and have become the physical embodiment of the changing relations between householders, water, and water authorities. The aim of our research was to understand these changing relations by examining how domestic rainwater tanks are inscribed with meanings and assumptions and thus mediate a relationship between households and government. In particular, we considered how domestic rainwater tanks are implicated in various understandings of entitlements to water collected or used in private domains. We examined how tanks can render visible the contestation over rights and obligations of state and citizen as to what is considered private and public water collection, management, and use at the scale of the household. Our exploration of these issues was conducted through a case study of changing water relations in South East Queensland, Australia, where there has been recent widespread installation of domestic rainwater tanks."

"Watershed management consists of multifunctional activities to manage and address the increasing water resource problems. Ever increasing water demand and rapidly depleting water resources, it has become necessary to develop the adaptation options to recharge groundwater resources. A watershed is a special kind of Common Pool Resources (CPRs); an area is defined by hydrological linkages where optimal management requires coordinating the use of natural resources by public participation. Watershed developments have shown significant positive impacts on water table, perennially of water in wells and water availability especially in semi-arid regions. This paper describes direct and indirect impacts of the watershed activities and benefits of hydrological services dealing with watershed management with future prediction of net irrigation water supply. In the present work, we have also discussed the multiple impacts of watershed of CPRs for improving groundwater and surface water resources."

The population of Dublin City and its suburbs currently stands at 1.3 million and is projected to reach 2.1 million by 2022. There is pressure on its water supply system (inadequate catchment sources, ageing infrastructure including treatment facilities, and distribution network) with little or no spare capacity despite Ireland's relatively high rainfall that is well distributed throughout the year; albeit the greatest rainfall occurs in the west and southwest and at some remove from Dublin. The current governance approach to addressing the projected water supply deficit relies heavily on a combination of identifying new supply sources to secure the long-term water supply needs of the city together with an intense drive toward achieving "demand-side" reduced usage and conservation targets in accordance with EU benchmarks for various individual and sectoral users. This potentially emerging crisis of water scarcity in Dublin, with drivers including population growth, greater industrial and institutional demands, migration, and climate change, has generated one of the most significant public water works projects proposed in Irish history, which is to abstract raw water from the Shannon River Basin in the midland region and, following treatment, pump it to a storage reservoir in a cut-away bog before piping to the Greater Dublin Area. The preparations for this scheme have brought to the forefront some longstanding Irish water resources governance issues and challenges. This provides a unique opportunity and imperative at this time to take a more comprehensive look at the decision-making process in this regard, one done in the context of new European and national policies requiring incorporation of integrated planning to sustain ecosystem services, water resources management, water services management, and flood defense principles, and one taking account of the current unprecedented state of flux in which water resources management institutions in Ireland, and in particular Dublin, find themselves following years of unconsolidated legislation and stand-alone institutions.