**3. Stakeholder Engagement: Encouraging and Scaling Participation in the Basin Planning Process**

Water-related developments or changes require collaboration between a wide range of stakeholder groups from landholders to scientists to policymakers. Depending on the complexity, scale and impacts of the project, the level of stakeholder engagement can range from merely providing information to active partnerships and collaboration. For stakeholders to fully engage, an enabling environment for effective, fit-for-purpose and outcome-oriented stakeholder engagement should be provided [27]. Digital platforms can be used as a common platform between stakeholders to contribute data, knowledge and understanding and visualisation of an issue [7,10].

Digital platforms can be used to reach a wider stakeholder audience to encourage participation in water-related planning and development. Digital platforms can be used to invite the entire population of a basin to participate in consultations on a specific and well-defined issue or in events or actions which have an indirect impact on the basin's water resources management [27]. The use of digital platforms can increase access, integration and exploitation of environmental data and knowledge by scientific and end-user communities [15–17,19]. This is particularly relevant for cloud-based approaches where services (i.e., computing power and data storage) are also available to users which provide greater accessibility, efficiency and transparency to stakeholders.

The Basin Futures platform can be used to make scaling assessment areas and stakeholder engagement easier through user-friendly interfaces, intuitive workflow and the ability to move between multiple scales of observation (micro, meso and macro) and modelling within one platform. This can facilitate collaboration between landholders, scientists and policymakers through the transfer of knowledge and data from small-scale drainage basins to larger aggregates or transboundary basins, contributing to well-informed decisions and policies (Figure 3).

**Figure 3.** Representation of macro-, meso- and micro-level stakeholder groups.
