Pervasive and rapid land-use and water-use changes are being compounded by changes in global and regional climates to fundamentally alter the dimensions of water insecurity in river basins across the Asia-Pacific. Development in some instances is reducing vulnerabilities to some social groups, whereas in other instances it is exacerbating the burdens and risks from large-scale environmental changes to the others.

This project is a comparative and synthetic study with new data gathering and analysis of water insecurities and responses by multiple stakeholders to reduce them within river basins of the Asia-Pacific. It deals with responses to risks that are high at the current science and policy agenda, and are associated with changes in both water quantity and quality: floods, water shortages, the disruption in food production systems and changes in access to water of good quality for growing and vulnerable urbanized areas. Combinations of policies and tools, including science and engineering, institutional, financial, socio-economic will be needed to reduce water insecurities. Furthermore, mitigation and adaptation efforts will be needed by not only the governments of Asia-Pacific, but also by many other stakeholders working individually and collectively.

The focus of this project is on the benefits, opportunities and limitations of multi-stakeholder participation in river basin management. It explores the proposition that deliberation, negotiation and coordination among stakeholders is crucial to good water governance and sustainable river basin development. In practice, however, it is likely that different stakeholders have benefited more or less from engagement in initiatives labelled as “participatory”. In this study research findings will be generalized across major stakeholder groups for a variety of water insecurities in five basin case studies. Findings will be compared to each other and results elsewhere.

Regional collaboration

Coordinator: Elena Nikitina (EcoPolicy Research and Consulting, ussian Federation) Partners: Dushmanta Dutta ( Monash University, Australia) +  Xu Jianchu (World Agroforestry Centre, ICRAF, China) + Louis Lebel (Unit for Social and Environmental Research, Thailand) +  Bach Tan Sinh (National Institute for Science and Technology Policy and Strategy Studies., Vietnam).

Sponsorship

This project is funded by APN: ARCP2008-15NMY-Nikitina