Water quality policies in the Brantas River Basin, Indonesia

Over the past 20 years, river water quality in Indonesia has deteriorated enormously. Water quality deterioration continues to increase socio-economic inequality, as it are the most poor communities who live on and along the river. Women are comparatively highly impacted by failing water resources management, but their involvement in decision making processes is limited. As such, the uneven water quality related disease burden in Brantas River Basin widens the socio-economic gap between societal groups. In the Brantas region, cooperation and intention between stakeholders to tackle these issues is growing, but is fragile as well due to overlapping institutional mandates, poor status of water quality monitoring networks, and limited commitment of industries to treat their waste water streams. Currently, an Indonesian-Dutch consortium develops a project which is built on the premise that water problems of our world do not necessarily have to be only a cause of tension, but can also be a catalyst for cooperation. Cooperation is a process that needs active input from all concerned. As such, this project seeks to support a twinned learning process in which science is used to build a trusted information system for policy and decision making in Brantas river basin management. The project focuses on the close links between research processes of data gathering and monitoring and its relevance for societal and institutional actors within river basin management organizations. This twinning between policies and science aims to facilitate learning processes of basin authorities, societal stakeholders, companies and knowledge institutions, as they can profit from each other’s achievements, knowledge and experiences. One of the important issues for this new cooperative partnership is how to develop procedures and routines to monitor water quality in the Brantas river. Participatory data monitoring is among the prime requirements for sustainable river management. An additional dimension of the already challenging issue of data gathering in river management is how to deal with transdisciplinary issues in monitoring, measurements and measures, including research procedures and institutional setup.