Recent environmental policies introduced to safeguard the quality of water resources have focussed on encouraging pro-environmental behaviours (PEB). This has resulted in a considerable volume of research output that seeks to investigate the determinants of PEB in the context of water resources management. However, there is a paucity of literature exploring the topic within the developing country context, though evidence suggests that these regions record the highest rates of water resource pollution. This limits our understanding of the determinants of PEB and thus constrains our ability to develop and implement effective policies to encourage uptake of PEB. Following this, we apply the Theory of Planned Behaviour to explore the determinants of PEB, using structural equation modelling to analyse survey data from rural Ghana. The evidence supports the hypothesis that attitudes and perceived behavioural control affects intentions, and this translates into pro-environmental behaviour. Results further indicate that attitude and perceived behavioural control have a strong explanatory power in people’s intentions, and intentions are influential drivers of pro-environmental behaviour. An explicit recognition of the role of situational factors could offer a profound understanding of the determinants of behaviours that promote water resources management and support the development and implementation of policies aimed at safeguarding the quality of water resources.

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Despite increasing evidence that understanding and integrating local people's perceptions of water quality and governance helps improve water governance processes, only a limited volume of research addresses this topic in developing countries. Therefore, using in-depth interviews and content analysis, the goal of this paper is to explore stakeholders' perceptions of the quality and governance of water resources in Wenchi, Ghana. Results show that stakeholders perceive river water quality to be deteriorating. Stakeholders' judgement of river quality is influenced by water use value, pollution sources, organoleptic properties and sanitary conditions of the riverbank. Stakeholders highlighted key areas that require authorities' efforts: formulation and enforcement of bye-laws, awareness raising, provision of financial, logistic and technical support, conducting research and community mobilisation. These findings need to be carefully reviewed and systematically integrated into expert views to advance our understanding of the problem, how best to address it and who to target during interventions.

There is evidence that stakeholders' willingness and motivations to support sustainable river management strategies plays a crucial role in the success of water management policies. Earlier works have highlighted some of the drivers of stakeholders' willingness, however, the generalizability of much published research on this issue is problematic given that much of the research focuses on the Global North. By conducting in‐depth interviews and applying content analysis, this paper aimed at exploring stakeholders' willingness and motivations to support sustainable water resource management as well as what stakeholders would do to support sustainable management of water resources. Results show that stakeholders appear to be willing to support water protection measures due to a wide range of motivations. Therefore, policymakers may need to emphasize those motivations when encouraging the public and/or segments of the society to engage in sustainable water resource management practices.

The need to integrate stakeholders' views into environmental policy is increasingly gaining attention because this offers the opportunity to design sustainable and synergistic environmental strategies.Understanding and integrating the views of resource users into policy design and implementation could help address the most important challenges, gain community support, enhance project ownership, and avoid policies being rejected by local people. As a result, research in environmental management has focused on stakeholders' perceptions of river water quality and how to integrate such views into policy.While existing studies offer insights into the different ways in which stakeholders evaluate river water quality and potential factors influencing judgements, they appear to be limited in a number of ways. First, most of these studies focus on developed countries and may have limited contextual relevance to the developing world. Moreover, past studies focus on segments of society such as farmers and mainly on wastewater for agriculture. These shortcomings may limit our understanding of the topic and our ability to design effective policies to address water quality problems. Drawing on survey data from the Wenchi municipality in Ghana, we examine public perceptions of what constitute important measures of river water quality as well as factors influencing such judgements. Results suggest that while variables such as taste, colour, smell and litter are important, the presence of faecal matter in and/or around the river was rated the most important measure of river water quality while depth of river was the least important. Results further suggest that education, age, number of years a person had lived in a community, depth of river and the presence of aquatic vegetation influence water quality judgements.The findings of this research provide insights into what policymakers and regulators need to consider when attempting to influence behaviours in relation to water resources. We note, however, that while public perceptions of river water quality could guide water management policies, scientific measurements of water quality must not be replaced with stakeholder perceptions. This is because aspects such as ecological integrity may not be important to segments of the public but are an important aspect of water management. This is reinforced in the present study as there seems to be a lack of concern among the participants regarding river depthan important factor for habitat provision and pollution dilution.