There is an urgent call for dealing with these
mismatching scales through a better understanding of the various
boundaries that operate in the coast as a natural resource man-agement (NRM) region especially in the context of nascentenvironmental governance regimes such as the river basin.
In this context, the present paper explores the boundary issues
in the inclusion of the coastal regions of the west coast of peninsular
India within the Integrated River Basin Management (IRBM)
framework. The densely populated west coast of India is a biologi-cally rich tropical tract with swift draining rivers from the western
Ghat mountains forming complex coastal drainages before meeting
the Arabian Sea. The rapidly changing livelihoods and resource use
patterns, exhaustive development of its water resources and
increasing conflicts over resources have heightened the need for
sustainable resource management in the region.