Introduction

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Community monitoring is a process by which members of a community actively observe and document the impacts of specific activities or projects within their community. The benefits of community monitoring can include:

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• Increased community involvement and empowerment: By participating in the monitoring process, community members become more engaged and invested in the activities and projects taking place in their community, which can lead to increased empowerment.

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• Improved accountability: Community monitoring can help hold project developers and implementers accountable for their actions, by providing a mechanism for community members to document and report any negative impacts or deviations from project plans.

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• Greater transparency: Community monitoring can also increase transparency around project implementation and decision-making, by providing a way for community members to access information about activities and projects in their community.

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• Enhanced decision-making: The information gathered through community monitoring can be used to inform decision-making at the community level, allowing community members to make more informed decisions about how to address issues and move forward with projects.

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• Evidence-based advocacy: The data and information collected through community monitoring can be used to advocate for policy and program changes at the local, national or international level, providing evidence of the impact of a project or intervention.

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• Improved project outcomes: Community monitoring can help ensure that projects are implemented in ways that are sensitive to the needs and concerns of the community, which can lead to more successful and sustainable project outcomes.
   

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The main difficulty one finds when assessing the benefits of community monitoring (CM) projects is measuring their gains. There have been identified, two types of benefits: i) improvement of a database of quantitative and qualitative information regarding the status of groundwater; ii) improving scientific literacy, which results eventually in more active and engaged citizens.

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The first type of benefit is easier to measure using quantitative measures, but the practical implications of such benefits for decision-making are elusive.  Hydrologic modeling and monitoring play a small but critical role in the larger context of  (ground)water management, but they should be grounded in local contexts and focused on who is responsible for decision-making and what information is needed, with what level of uncertainty. For example, in the Portuguese case study, the existing groundwater flow models are at a stage we consider sufficient to support decision-making. However, the state has been facing difficulties in implementing the necessary water use limiting measures, mainly due to the ever-demanding equilibrium between economic development and environmental sustainability. Many decisions are hard to understand by some economic agents mainly due to incomplete information about groundwater status and water budget in the region - this has been very clearly demonstrated over the several sectorial workshops with local stakeholders (tourism, agriculture, NGO).

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The second type of benefit has potentially a larger impact on the quality of the management, as seen above. However, there are no established methods for measuring the benefits. Several alternatives have been proposed nonetheless.

 

We have been preparing a set of alternative methods for discussion between the team. These include:

 

For the definition of a conceptual model:

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1. Surveys to assess Environmental Moral and Ethics, and questionnaires made to students in secondary schools (ages 10-18 years) about their understanding of groundwater hydraulics and management;

2. Survey to assess the perceived conceptual model;

3. Qualitative DPSIR model;

4. Workshops with stakeholders;

5. Serious Games;

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For the assessment of the performance of the management:

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1. Water Sustainability Indicators;

2. Quantitative DPSIR model;

3. Benefit-cost analysis using groundwater modeling.

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The links below will take you to individual pages of each one of these methods. Their applicability in the different case studies is identified in the following table.