The target catchments and watershed of this project are located, in northern Thailand, northeast Thailand, and the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, at different elevations in the Mekong River Basin. An additional site located in Bhutan provides another complementary situation at higher altitude. In these watersheds, diverse stakeholders with differing perceptions of water dynamics and its use adopt various strategies to cope with water-related problems. There is a need, therefore, to understand the factors influencing different stakeholders' perceptions, how these perceptions are formed, and how they may evolve to allow greater coordination and equitability in water use at the system level, thus leading to increased water productivity.

Setting up communication platforms is a mean for ensuring that marginalized groups are not left out. Agent-based modeling (ABM) provides a way for linking biophysical and socioeconomic characteristics of a catchments system. Moreover, by using ABM in a participatory way to examine scenarios of resource sharing, it may be possible to elicit stakeholders' knowledge and perceptions of water dynamics, stimulate dialogue, and promote better coordination among users.

The project specific objectives are threefold. They deal with methodological development, capacity building, and the participatory construction of propositions for local and concrete adaptations to increase water productivity:

1. To offer tools and a methodology for their use to enhance the capacity of expression of the different stakeholders' perceptions, to facilitate their collective assessment of the problems at stake, and to improve coordination among users through the collective identification and assessment of scenarios of change leading to agreed-upon action plans.
2. To train a group of scientists and development officers engaged in the action-research process on this methodology and its tools. They belong to universities, government agencies, and non-governmental organizations. They will test and adapt the method and its related tools at the key sites. A network of users will be created and linked to an international one.
   
3. To analyze concrete water and land management issues at the catchment level, and stakeholders' interactions that are specific to the respective water-related problems identified in each context. These participatory analyses will lead to a collective assessment of potential changes to increase water productivity and suitable and feasible scenarios of (technological and organizational) adaptation to these changes and to reach the desired situation.

Following the preparation of a synthesis on the available knowledge at the start of the project, participatory workshops will be organized every year at each site to generate collective propositions for changes. Each workshop will be followed by a period of monitoring of the effects and modeling. In the third year of the project, the results will be assessed with the stakeholders and products and tools assembled for dissemination.

The main target groups of beneficiaries of this project are:

• Stakeholders at the four proposed pilot catchments: the proposed methodology and tools will be used locally to improve coordination among stakeholders engaged in conflicting uses of limited water resources.
  
• Local administration, community-based organizations, and NGOs, schools, and development as well as research-oriented government agencies who will be involved in the participatory process. Their staff will be trained on the use of the tested methodology and tools. Later on, they will be able to scale-up and adapt the method to deal with similar problems at other sites.
  
• Researchers at regional and national universities, and government agencies in charge of co-developing the method. At completion of the project, they will become nodes in the international research community on participatory water resource management.

• CIRAD
  
• IWMI
  
• Chiang Mai University
• Ministry of Agriculture of Bhutan
• Ubon Ratchathani University
• Can Tho University
• Chulalongkorn Unversity
• Cemagref