Three essays on participatory processes and integrated water resource management in developing countries

The dissertation is a collection of three essays. The first essay is a literature review of participative and IWRM practices in the specific context of the Federal Republic of Brazil, chosen as case study for its modern water management legislation, embracing IWRM paradigms. The essay presents the Brazilian institutional and legislative system, and reviews how different participative approaches have been applied in some states of this country, underlining the criticalities that obstacle an effective development of participatory practices in water management. The second essay presents a methodological proposal aimed at improving the effectiveness of interactions between the scientific community and local actors for decision-making processes in water management, in two case studies, in Europe and Asia: the Upper Danube and the Upper Brahmaputra River Basins. The study explores the utilization of Decision Support System tools and Multi Criteria Decision Analysis to facilitate transparent and robust management of information, and to prioritize problems and solutions in an integrated perspective. The third one focuses on the participatory process to support scientific multidisciplinary research; it explores the utilization of a semi quantitative method to structuralize the cognitive maps of a group of experts. The research utilises the tool of Fuzzy Cognitive Maps to guide the construction of system understanding and to improve the effectiveness of the Building Block methodology for the environmental flow assessment of a river. The application is tested to the Lower Paraguaçu River Basin and Iguape Bay (Bahia, Brazil).