Urban areas in India have been experiencing unprecedented growth in population and income [United Nations, 2011]. As cities grow and incomes rise, a new challenge has arisen: that of supplying water reliably to rapidly growing, increasingly wealthy urban populations, while ensuring that the urban and rural poor, the health and well-being of future generations and food security of the nation are not jeopardized. The implications for this massive urbanization on water resources are only beginning to be understood.

In the context of change, the management of water bodies must seek to continuously reflect both the changes in biophysical processes linking actions to outcomes, and changes in what outcomes stakeholders care about. Using the case of the TG Halli reservoir catchment near Bangalore, we illustrate how both these (processes and stakes) have changed over time with increasing urbanization. While over time, different groups have articulated different management approaches, often concerns are only raised after the damage is done, making it difficult to act proactively. In this paper, using a coupled human-environment systems approach, we argue that it is possible to anticipate both the biophysical and normative changes in the catchment and take appropriative corrective actions.