Participatory research approaches address a range of problems in water research, including the under-valuation of local knowledge, exclusion of marginalized people, preferential treatment of elite and expert perspectives, and extractive and exploitative research practices. Beyond this, a number of participatory approaches to water research are designed to empower participants, democratize knowledge production, improve decision-making, and help bring about new environmental futures. In this primer, we map participatory research approaches and explain how they have been applied to advance water research. Our review focuses on the following eight approaches: participatory action research, community-based participatory research, participatory rural appraisal, stakeholder research, participatory modeling, photovoice, citizen science, and sustainable future scenarios. We conclude by discussing a new approach, Participatory Convergence research, including how it builds from other approaches and its prospects to advance water research.

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Since the late 1970s, the term "colonias" (in English) has described low-income, peri-urban, and rural subdivisions north of the U.S.-Mexico border. These communities are in arid and semi-arid regions-now in a megadrought-and tend to have limited basic infrastructure, including community water service and sanitation. Recent scholarship has demonstrated how colonias residents experience unjust and inequitable dynamics that produce water insecurity in the Global North. In this review, we explain why U.S. colonias are an important example for theorizing water insecurity in the United States and beyond in the Global North. Tracing the history of water infrastructure development in U.S. colonias, we show how colonias are legally and socially defined by water insecurity. We draw on the published literature to discuss key factors that produce water insecurity in U.S. colonias: political exclusion, municipal underbounding, and failures in water quality monitoring. We show that water insecurity had led to negative outcomes-including poor water access, risks to physical health, and mental ill-health-in U.S. colonias. We present four possible approaches to improving water security in U.S. colonias: (1) soft paths & social infrastructure for water delivery, (2) decentralized water treatment approaches, such as pointof-use, point-of-entry, and fit-for-purpose systems; (3) informality, including infrastructural, economic, and socio-cultural innovations; and (4) political, policy, and law innovations and reforms. At the same time, we reflect seriously on how water security can be ethically achieved in partnership and aligning with the visions of U.S. colonias residents themselves.

Substantial progress has been seen in the drinking water supply as per the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), but achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), particularly SGD 6.1 regarding safely managed drinking water with much more stringent targets, is considered as a development challenge. The problem is more acute in low-income water-scarce hard-to-reach areas such as the southwest coastal region of Bangladesh, where complex hydrogeological conditions and adverse water quality contribute to a highly vulnerable and insecure water environment. Following the background, this study investigated the challenges and potential solutions to drinking water insecurity in a water-scarce area of southwest coastal Bangladesh using a mixed-methods approach. The findings revealed that water insecurity arises from unimproved, deteriorated, unaffordable, and unreliable sources that have significant time and distance burdens. High rates of technical dysfunction of the existing water infrastructure contribute to water insecurity as well. Consequently, safely managed water services are accessible to only 12% of the population, whereas 64% of the population does not have basic water. To reach the SDG 6.1 target, this underserved community needs well-functioning readily accessible water infrastructure with formal institutional arrangement rather than self-governance, which seems unsuccessful in this low-income context. This study will help the government and its development partners in implementing SDG action plans around investments to a reliable supply of safe water to the people living in water-scarce hard-to-reach coastal areas.