Digital management of irrigation water and agriculture: Transparency and accountability towards resilience and sustainable development

This research reflects the outcomes from an ongoing project based on continuous collaboration (stakeholder engagement) and scientific support towards sustainable and resilient water management. A multi-disciplinary platform is used to bring together all relevant stakeholders of Thessaly, a Greek rural region facing multiple water management problems, historically. The problems, causes and potential solutions are analysed in a series of virtual meetings (March 2021 - June 2022) in order to develop business plan(s) for the improvement of the situation in multiple levels. A basic result from the project so far, a commonly acceptable measure, refers to the digital agriculture-irrigation water management, which has multiple benefits and enhances resilience to different future challenges. Such measures are supported by the international practice, research, and policy agendas: Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and interactive maps have been used successfully for agricultural monitoring and management in the context of informed decision-making (Jhariya 2019) and guidance for targeted measures (Mockler et al. 2016), while they support the use (and adaptation) of new technologies by multiple users (Mustafi et al. 2021). The main objective of this work is to analyse the multiple benefits of such digital management tools from a new perspective: as a means for transparency and accountability to speed up progress and support informed decisions, as resulted from a multi-disciplinary stakeholder group. The methodology developed and followed for this project, the way of reaching to common visions, and the proposed actions for the specific study area are the novel elements of this work.