There has been sparse coverage of advances in the application of Demand-Side Management (DSM) in the academic press in recent years. At the same time a number of important DSM studies have been reported on by non-academic institutions, and there is therefore a need for a comprehensive, up to date review of the impacts of DSM tools and the factors which influence their effectiveness. This paper aims to begin to address this apparent lack of coverage with a review of residential DSM tools using recent reports of DSM campaigns in the western (developed) world collected from a range of sources.The aims are, to understand the potential for residential DSM tools to save water in different types of household under varying conditions and, identify influences on implementation effectiveness. The current review will be of interest to, among others, water company professionals, policy makers, regulators and environmental agencies.

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With multi-stakeholder issues such as climate change or population growth providing significant challenges for water managers, participatory approaches to planning and management are becoming increasingly popular. To aid water stress mitigation in Bulgaria's Iskar region, a participatory process with a broad range of stakeholders was designed and tested. Options adapted for the region such as risk management and industrial and domestic water conservation were studied. The results suggest that strong research support is needed to adapt participatory management theories into operational planning processes. Definition of appropriate working groups with clear roles and responsibilities are also needed to ensure effective implementation.drought, flood, participation, stakeholders, water stress,

This paper examines the use of influence diagrams (IDs) in water demand management (WDM) strategy planning with the specific objective of exploring how IDs can be used in developing computer-based decision support tools (DSTs) to complement and support existing WDM decision processes. We report the results of an expert consultation carried out in collaboration with water industry specialists in Sofia, Bulgaria. The elicited information is presented as influence diagrams and the discussion looks at their usefulness in WDM strategy design and the specification of suitable modelling techniques. The paper concludes that IDs themselves are useful in developing model structures for use in evidence-based reasoning models such as Bayesian Networks, and this is in keeping with the objectives set out in the introduction of integrating DSTs into existing decision processes. The paper will be of interest to modellers, decision-makers and scientists involved in designing tools to support resource conservation strategy implementation.