Ghana runs the risk of becoming water insecure. As population growth increases, so does water demand, and climate change increases uncertainties in supply. There are furthermore many inequalities at play that significantly affect how Ghanaians access water. It has been established that good water governance can alleviate both water security and water equity issues. However, many solutions of good water governance revolve around centralized governance, while the Ghana government has reformed to a decentralized system in the 1990s. Local government is now responsible for water governance, but local government often lacks the capacity to manage access to water effectively. A good governance approach that could circumvent these issues is participatory governance, an approach that focusses on the inclusion of community members in decision-making processes.

Little research has been performed on the links between participatory governance and access to water. To fill this gap, this thesis has selected two case-studies. As peri-urban areas are often overlooked in research into access to water, two peri-urban areas that have undergone the implementation of a participatory governance approach were selected. The first is the peri-urban town of Dodowa, where a Transition Management approach was implemented focused on transitions in sustainable groundwater management and the inclusion of community members. The second is the peri-urban municipality of Ejisu-Juaben where the Community Ownership and Management approach was implemented.

The objective of this research is thus to uncover how participatory water governance influences access to water in the cases of Dodowa and Ejisu-Juaben, in Ghana. To achieve this, levels of access are measured along five measures: quality, accessibility, availability, affordability, and equity of access. Next to that, governance approaches are analysed and levels of participation of community members are determined. Two communities were selected in each peri-urban area where community representatives were interviewed, and interview surveys were performed with community members. The results from these interviews and surveys were supplemented with literature research.

Most significantly, the results show the complexity of the relation between governance and access to water. Access to water in and of itself is a complicated topic and so is governance. Different complex governance modes, successful and less successful participatory approaches, and complex configurations of access to water came to the forefront. The results furthermore showed that not only governance but also the presence of natural resources can be a determinant for good access to water. Next to that, for these cases intervention of government or non-government agencies played a large role in determining the success of the participatory approaches. One of the underlying reasons for this was the lack of financial resources available to communities and community representatives to provide access to water for their community.

Considering the complexity of the relation between access to water and water governance, this research recommends for future research to include more cases for comparison as the results from cases in this research on their own cannot be extended to other cases. It is also recommended to research specific context factors that may influence the link between governance and access, and to further research why governance approaches fail. Lastly it is recommended to do more extensive research into the development of a ladder of access that takes the use of multiple sources into account.

Flood risk management is essential in water resource planning to reduce potential damages and losses in flood-prone areas. Traditional risk assessments often focus on monetary values and ignore equity, leading to unequal distribution of protective measures. The equity weighting method has been implemented in past studies, but at certain administrative levels, it may not capture the income heterogeneity within those areas. This research investigates how accounting for income heterogeneity within administrative areas affects equity-weighted risk and impact estimates and explores practical ways to implement this approach, given privacy-related data limitations.

The study focuses on Charleston County, South Carolina, using disaggregated methods at the household level to integrate detailed socioeconomic data into equity-weighted flood risk assessments. The methodology involves assuming an equal distribution of income within predefined brackets and optimizing upper and lower bounds for open income brackets. Additionally, a linear relationship is assumed between the structure value and household income, allowing for the spatial allocation of income within census block groups.

The results demonstrate that the disaggregated method identifies more vulnerable households and shows significant differences in equity-weighted damage (EWD) and equity-weighted expected annual damage (EWEAD) metrics compared to the aggregated method. These findings suggest that the disaggregated method provides useful evidence for considering the importance of taking into account income heterogeneity when assessing flood risks, particularly in areas with significant income inequality.

Sensitivity and uncertainty analyses indicate that the income distribution parameters show both low sensitivity and low uncertainty when using a fitted log-normal distribution, suggesting that this distribution is a good fit for the data and provides stable results. In contrast, in the spatial allocation of income with structural values, the analysis results show high sensitivity and significant uncertainty, which means small changes in structure values lead to substantial variations in equity weight estimates.

The study concludes with recommendations for stakeholders to adopt household-level analysis and incorporate equity weights in cost-benefit analyses. Future research should explore additional socioeconomic factors, develop dynamic risk assessment models, and apply the methodology to diverse geographic and economic contexts.

The knowledge deficit model assumes that people make more informed decisions when they are presented with more information. This model is often used in communication strategies while it has received quite some critique from science communicators and is not well supported by social science theories. One of these critiques comes from the observed Dunning-Kruger effect, where individuals unskilled in a certain area do not possess the skills to realize their incompetence. This effect has not been researched extensively yet in relation to climate change science communication and is the topic of this paper. By means of an online questionnaire (316 respondents), respondent’s knowledge and estimated knowledge on climate change is tested. The Dunning-Kruger effect has been detected for this group and suggests a critical re-evaluation of the knowledge deficit model, however additional research is necessary. An initial analysis into the influence of factors like age, gender and highest completed education level on actual and estimated scores and the discrepancy between these is also done to provide leads for further research.

Most people of Malawi are dependent on rainfed agriculture for their livelihoods. This leaves them vulnerable to drought and changing rainfall patterns due to climate change. Over time, farmers have adopted local strategies and knowledge that help reducing the overall vulnerability to climate variability shocks. One other option to increase the resilience of rainfed farmers to drought, is providing forecast information on the upcoming rainfall season. Forecast information has the potential to inform farmers in their decisions surrounding agricultural strategies. However, significant challenges remain in the provision of forecast information. Often, the forecast information is not tailored to farmers, resulting in limited uptake of forecast information into their agricultural decision-making. Therefore, this study explores whether drought forecast information can be linked to existing farmers strategies and local knowledge on predicting future rainfall patterns. During a period of three months in Malawi, participatory research approaches are used to create an understanding of what requirements drought forecast information should meet to effectively inform farmers in their decision-making. Consequently, a sequential threshold model was established that relates annually monitored meteorological indicators before the rainy season, to the occurrence of dry conditions during the season. Dry conditions were expressed in the drought indicators that farmers require for their agricultural decision-making. Additionally, using interviews among stakeholders and a visualisation of the current information flow, further insights on the current drought information system were developed. Although farmers have their own strategies and timing of decision-making, this research has generalized some of the opinions and strategies to develop the ‘requirements’ which a contextualized forecast should meet. In August farmers require a prediction of the onset of the rainy season, typically starting mid-November. In addition, an update on the timing of the onset of rains is required in beginning of November. An overall indication of the ‘dryness’ of the rainy season is required in September. Here, ‘dryness’ is characterized by the number of dry spells, a composite ‘drought index’ of associated rainfall variables by the farmers. The forecast should be on a scale that is locally relevant (EPA level). This research consequently established a forecasting model, based on meteorological variables from local knowledge which can complement the forecast variables from the DCCMS. The results of forecast verification show that meteorological indicators based on local knowledge have a predictive value for forecasting drought indicators. Subsequently, skill analysis of forecasting incorporating all the above dimensions shows that the accuracy of the forecast differs per location with an increased skill to the Southern locations. In addition, it is also location dependent whether the contribution of wind, temperature or ENSO indicators gives the most predictive value. The results show that a combination of all indicators have the best predictive value. In addition, the results show that local knowledge indicators have an increased predictive value in forecasting the locally relevant critical events in comparison to the currently used ENSO-related indicators by the DCCMS. Additional research is needed to further analyse certain aspects of this research, such as research on the robustness of the model used. Research on the risk farmers are willing to take in their respective decisions could act as another requirement the forecast skill should meet. This highlights the importance of having continuous feedback from the farmers, since farmers may experience adverse impacts from wrongly informed decisions. Despite these limitations, it is argued that the inclusion of local knowledge in the current drought information system of Malawi may improve the provision of forecast information for farmers and shows that it is possible to capture local knowledge in a technical approach. The findings have relevant implications for other stakeholders, such as humanitarian and meteorological organisations, that are implementing drought-risk reduction approaches and climate services.

In this thesis, the usage of scenarios for the participatory application of ADM is investigated in the context of the Paraná Delta, in Argentina. The focus is two-fold: (1) the research focuses on how a participatory design for ADM can be made, and (2) it focuses on which moment of the framework scenarios should be introduced in the participatory ADM