Community-Led Groundwater Stewardship Under Seasonal Scarcity

Leanne Morgan

Community-Led Groundwater Stewardship Under Seasonal Scarcity

Author(s)	Leanne Morgan
Country	United States
Abstract	Seasonal groundwater scarcity presents a distinctive governance challenge because groundwater is physically concealed, hydrologically interconnected, and frequently accessed through individually controlled wells despite being dependent on shared aquifer storage. During periods of limited recharge, unrestricted abstraction can intensify competition among users, deepen water levels, increase pumping costs, reduce access for shallow-well users, and weaken the reliability of groundwater for domestic and agricultural needs. This study develops a simulation-based framework for examining community-led groundwater stewardship under recurring seasonal scarcity. The framework evaluates five governance dimensions: shared aquifer knowledge and monitoring, seasonal demand management, equitable allocation, recharge protection, and institutional trust and rule compliance. Five hypothetical governance scenarios are compared, ranging from individualistic abstraction to integrated community stewardship combining monitoring, negotiated seasonal abstraction rules, recharge protection, and transparent allocation mechanisms. The simulated dry-season groundwater resilience index increases from 42 under predominantly individual abstraction to 88 under integrated stewardship and recharge management. Community monitoring alone produces meaningful improvement, but the simulation indicates that information becomes substantially more effective when it is connected to collectively agreed extraction limits, priority-use rules, drought-stage responses, and mechanisms for protecting users with weaker access to groundwater. The analysis further suggests that recharge interventions cannot substitute for demand management when abstraction remains unconstrained. Sustainable stewardship therefore requires communities to understand the aquifer as a shared resource whose seasonal condition must influence individual pumping decisions. The study concludes that locally led groundwater governance is most credible when hydrogeological knowledge, social regulation, equity safeguards, and public institutional support operate together. The proposed framework offers a transparent foundation for designing and empirically testing community groundwater institutions in seasonally water-stressed regions.
Keywords	groundwater stewardship, seasonal water scarcity, participatory groundwater management, aquifer governance, common-pool resources, groundwater resilience, community monitoring, water security.
Field	Engineering
Published In	Volume 6, Issue 6, November-December 2025
Published On	2025-12-15

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American Journal of Advanced Multidisciplinary Innovation and Research

A Widely Indexed Open Access Peer Reviewed Multidisciplinary Bi-monthly Scholarly International Journal

Community-Led Groundwater Stewardship Under Seasonal Scarcity

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