**1. Introduction**

Community empowerment in the management of river basins is getting more and more attention, as seen by the number of authors who state the importance of community participation and independence in river basin management [1]. Several researchers have developed a transdisciplinary, scientific, and explicit-scale watershed system model jointly designed by the multidisciplinary community [2]. The authors put a massive water reform program into effect, which resulted in considerable institutional, social, and economic changes. Policies must be enforced around a scientific basis, with a management focus on incorporating new knowledge [3]. Other authors proposed that for watershed management, direct community participation for conservation, and overcoming the risk of watershed damage are required [4] coordination and consultation between stakeholders for each policy [5].

Community empowerment is an effort to enable and empower the community to complete the needs and interests of their lives and improve their standard of living by utilizing the resources they have [6]. Thus, community empowerment emphasizes initiative and autonomy in decision-making by the community, therefore emphasizing the importance of the learning process in empowerment to equip the community towards sustainable change [7].

There are three important stages in the empowerment process, namely: the awareness stage, the stage of capacity building, which include increasing human, organizational, and value system capacities, and the empowerment stage, namely the granting of power, authority, or opportunity [8]. In the empowerment process, counseling and mentoring activities must be carried out. This is also stated in the articles on community empowerment in the laws and regulations relating to river basin management.

Mentoring and counseling are often seen as separate or distinct activities. In the past, counseling was only considered an effort to convey information and technology to the public. In its development, counseling is not only defined as a process of disseminating information and technology but also a non-formal education process, a capacity-building process, and a behavior change process so that people can help themselves, and improve their welfare [9], meaning that counseling is also a process of community empowerment. While mentoring means the existence of assistance from outside parties to increase public awareness and capacity to understand problems and look for alternative solutions to problems, so as to achieve sustainable development, empowerment, and community welfare. Thus, counseling and mentoring are activities that cannot be separated from the community empowerment process. Both are learning processes to increase community capacity which will continue throughout the community empowerment process. In addition, to achieve an empowered society, there are several efforts that also need attention, namely:


Apart from existing efforts, community participation is an important element in the process of community empowerment [8], because, without community participation, community empowerment efforts will not be achieved. In the community empowerment process, there are several typologies of participation as follows:


Community empowerment is essentially about enabling and self-reliant communities so that more emphasis is placed on decision-making autonomy from a community group based on the resources they have [11]. Thus, community empowerment should place more emphasis on the process of positive change that occurs as well as the improvement and sustainability of community empowerment. In practice, many community empowerment activities are not in accordance with the concept of community empowerment. Community empowerment is often trapped in a "project" logic that emphasizes results and administrative responsibilities such as the size of the budget, the number of activities carried out, and the assistance provided [10]. Assistance makes community empowerment efforts tend to be participation mobilized by material incentives. Instead of creating community independence, it actually causes community dependence on the government and other outside parties.

This chapter aims to explain the current condition of the river basin and its conservation efforts under changing climate. River basin conservation requires community participation and the implementation of its empowerment in river basin management under changing climate, both individually and institutionally.
