**5. Community's role in river basin management**

It is now well recognized that the use of engineering measures with regulationbased management strategies has limited capacity to manage river basin and their water resources. Participatory approaches that engage stakeholders and the public in river basin management are promising and sustainable. Different basin users have conflicting water quantity, quality, flood risk, and ecological health demands. These demands can be managed while introducing best management practices to different land uses of the basin through a participatory approach. In addition, river basin management is data-intensive as it requires a picture of the entire socioeconomic and ecological health of the basin where stakeholders have these fragmented data in different scales [17]. Therefore, the role of the stakeholders is well understood.

Once the river basin or watershed of the river basin management plan is set, stakeholders are the entities that implement the agreed management activities. Therefore, getting their consent is highly encouraged even though sometimes agreed decision is not that quality [18]. Community participation has the power to make decisions autonomously in order to be able to solve the needs and interests of life and improve the standard of their living. Thus, one chapter of this section discusses in detail the community participation in river basin management.

Particularly, when managing the water demand and conserving the water in the basin, the stakeholder's role is highly acknowledged, and giving incentives is one way of getting users involved in conserving water in a river basin or a catchment. One chapter of this section discusses how water users use the property rights theory to conserve water. The results from the analyses indicated that property rights would be significant in curtailing water demands in a catchment by acting as incentives in water resource utilization, specifically by motivating water users to conserve water.

The catchment area becomes transboundary when it extends between two or more countries. The cooperation of the stakeholders is important for better managing the water of such river basins. Transboundary cooperation incorporating robust water diplomacy pathways for sustained water management is required rather than technical water management [19]. One of the chapters of this section discusses the impacts and sub-regional cooperation around a transboundary hydrological system.

*Introductory Chapter: Water Resources Planning, Monitoring, Conservation, and Management DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.109176*
