ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Community-based monitoring to facilitate water management by local institutions in Costa Rica.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 34 citations in OpenAlex.
- Adoption of community monitoring improves common pool resource management across contexts.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Pooled it
- A reliable model to strengthen community-based water quality monitoring and surveillance via field test kits.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- From self-interest to collective action: The role of defaults in governing common resources.PloS one · 2025Article
- Article
- Unraveling complex causal processes that affect sustainability requires more integration between empirical and modeling approaches.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Synthesizing evidence in sustainability science through harmonized experiments: Community monitoring in common pool resources.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- On design-based empirical research and its interpretation and ethics in sustainability science.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Community-based monitoring to facilitate water management by local institutions in Costa Rica.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
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.
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Registered trials
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