Introduction

This chapter outlines a recent collaborative water management project in the Upper Iskar Basin in Bulgaria, Europe, entitled ‘Living with Floods and Droughts’. Based on a participatory modelling methodology, the project aimed to build the collective capacity of the region's stakeholders to manage flood and drought risks. The chapter starts by presenting the regional water management context and how the project was designed to manage some of the key issues identified by the region's stakeholders. This is followed by a description of the implemented participatory process, including descriptions of the methods used and analyses of the content elicited and examined in the process. Lessons learnt from evaluation of the participatory process are presented and discussed, along with some considerations for future initiatives.

Regional water management context

Extreme climatic conditions such as large floods and extended drought periods have increasingly occurred over recent years in Bulgaria, including in the Upper Iskar Basin in the region of Sofia. Since the early 1990s, serious water shortages have led to rationing of water, and there were severe floods in 2005 and 2006. There is now debate on whether these ‘new’ conditions are a consequence of global climate change or merely normal climate variability (Knight et al., 2004; Kundzewicz and Schellnhuber, 2004). Water management in the Upper Iskar Basin presents many challenges, not just due to extreme flood and drought events or seemingly natural hazards, but also due to the transitory nature of the country's social and political spheres following the fall of the Communist regime in 1989 and the need to deal with its legacy of heavy industry, widespread pollution, and infrastructural system issues.