Community-based monitoring to facilitate water management by local institutions in Costa Rica

Abstract

Water scarcity is a global problem that can be compounded by inefficient water management, including underinvestment in infrastructure, underpricing of water use, and underenforcement of user rules. Here, we explore whether these inefficiencies can be reduced in rural Costa Rica via an externally driven community monitoring program (i.e., a program initiated by an outside organization and run by citizens). The monitoring program aimed to reduce groundwater extraction from aquifers, as well as to improve water quality and user satisfaction, by supplying additional information about field conditions and additional scrutiny of user and management authority activities and by fostering citizen engagement in water management. Using a specially designed smartphone application (app) and WhatsApp, monitors could report weekly on the conditions of the water system, including service disruptions, water quality, leaks, and source contamination. The app automatically compiled the individual reports into a summary report, which was then made available to the community water management committees and water users. The program was randomly implemented in 80 of 161 communities that expressed an interest in participating. One year after the program started, we detect modest, albeit imprecisely estimated, effects of the program in the predicted directions: less groundwater extracted, better water quality, and more satisfied users. Although the estimated effects are imprecise, the monitoring program appears to be equally or more cost effective for reducing groundwater extraction than another program in the same region that encouraged households to adopt water-efficient technologies.

Groundwater Monitoring through Citizen Science: A Review of Project Designs and Results

“…Information on the frequency of monitoring is available in 19 out of 33 cases. In most cases, data was collected on a weekly basis (Manda and Allen 2016; Haile et al 2019; Khadim et al 2020; Alther et al 2021; Bernedo Del Carpio et al 2021; Goldin et al 2021; Manda et al 2021; Rigler et al 2022). In two cases, data was collected daily (Ferede et al 2020; Gowing et al 2020), and there are examples of data collection once in 2 days (Walker et al 2016), monthly (Prajapati et al 2021a; Prajapati et al 2021b), and once in 2 months (Little et al 2016).…”

“…Examples are the validation of groundwater models (Khadim et al 2020), examining the potential extent of chloride concentrations in groundwater (Pieper et al 2018), understanding the implication of variations in rainfall and land use on groundwater level fluctuations (Prajapati et al 2021a), or assessing the extent of groundwater and marine inundation in response to future sea‐level rise scenarios (Manda and Allen 2016). The second group of cases focuses more on citizen science, thus (1) generally promotes monitoring of groundwater through citizen science (Peckenham and Peckenham 2014; Little et al 2016; Eastoe and Clark 2018; Ferede et al 2020; Bernedo Del Carpio et al 2021; Goldin et al 2021; Gómez et al 2021) or (2) aims at addressing issues of trustworthiness of citizen science data and at increasing the benefits and use of citizen‐generated groundwater data (Thornton and Leahy 2012; Peckenham and Peckenham 2014; Walker et al 2016; Khadim et al 2020; Alther et al 2021; Rigler et al 2022). Sometimes, these two goals of addressing data scarcity and citizen involvement are explicitly present.…”

“…The total number of citizens involved in these cases varies strongly and mostly depends upon the study area under consideration. However, most of the cases had up to 50 volunteers involved, with five exceptions only which are more large‐scale and, thus, also demonstrate higher participation rates (e.g., Jamieson et al 2020; Bernedo Del Carpio et al 2021). In 9 out of 20 cases, high school or university students were involved.…”

“…In 9 out of 20 cases, high school or university students were involved. Other cases involved members of the community including households (Ferede et al 2020; Bernedo Del Carpio et al 2021; Alam et al 2022), farmers (Bhatti et al 2017; Goldin et al 2021), local well managers (Alther et al 2021), and even tourists, bushwalkers, and indigenous ranger groups (Davis et al 2021) along with individually trained citizen scientists in two cases (Eastoe and Clark 2018; Dawson et al 2019). Also, the number of citizens involved dropped by the project completion time (Little et al 2016; Baalbaki et al 2019; Manda et al 2021; Prajapati et al 2021b).…”

Filling global gaps in monitoring data with local knowledge

“…Such memory information can help local people understand ‘how they got there’ and are thus useful for them to decide ‘where they can go’ (Tesfamichael, Pitcher & Pauly, 2014). Involving local people in producing monitoring information using these approaches has many advantages (Rustagi, Engel & Kosfeld, 2010; Wilson et al, 2018; Gharesifard, Wehn & van der Zaag, 2019; Christensen, Hartman & Samii, 2021; Danielsen et al, 2021; Del Carpio, Alpizar & Ferraro, 2021; Danielsen et al, 2022). Among its many benefits, involving local people in community monitoring allows the production of time‐ and place‐specific information at spatial and temporal scales relevant to resource users and management (Carlson & Cohen, 2018; Eicken et al, 2021).…”