Land use Planning and Water Resources at Local Scale: Opportunities and Challenges towards an Integrated Management Strategy

Abstract

The relationship between land use and land cover (LULC) and water issues has beenextensively studied. However, there is still a need to develop management strategies thateffectively integrate both aspects at the local level. For this reason, this paper aims toidentify opportunities and challenges for the integrated management of LULC and waterresources in the district of Tornquist, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Using a mixed-methods ap-proach, the research combines stakeholder analysis, social perception surveys, and partici-patory workshops to provide a comprehensive assessment of socio-institutional dynamics.Our findings reveal water and LULC management fragmentation across institutional andpolitical levels. At the provincial and national levels, stakeholder connections are weakerthan at the local level, requiring improved interactions and dialogue spaces involvingall actors. Attention is predominantly on water availability rather than flooding. In bothcases, the main cause of their changes was associated with the lack of water policies andinfrastructure. The local community does not identify LULC changes as the main causeof variations in flooding and water availability but they recognize their relationship withwater problems. Identifying, interpreting, and leveraging stakeholder relationships cancontribute to the design of an integrated management strategy. By situating its analysis ina semiarid region with significant climatic and socio-environmental variability, the studyprovides actionable insights for similar contexts globally and underscores the critical needfor inclusive, place-based solutions to address the growing pressures on land and waterresources.