The note highlights the importance of stakeholder participation in groundwater management, because groundwater stakeholders are those who have an important interest in the resources of a specified aquifer. This may be because they use groundwater, or because they practice activities that could cause groundwater pollution, or because they are concerned with groundwater resource and environmental management. Since surface water should be managed conjunctively with groundwater, and municipal or industrial wastewater may pose a threat to groundwater quality, stakeholders should also (where appropriate) include municipal, and industrial representatives. Stakeholder participation in groundwater management is essential for the following reasons: management decisions taken unilaterally by the regulatory agency without social consensus, are often impossible to implement; it enables essential management activities to be carried out more effectively and economically through cooperative efforts, and shared burdens; and, it facilitates the integration and coordination of decisions relating to groundwater resources, land use, and waste management. Groundwater management decisions taken with the participation of stakeholders should help to bring: social benefits, because they tend to promote equity among users; economic benefits, because they tend to optimize pumping and reduce energy costs; technical benefits, because they usually lead to better estimates of water abstraction. On the other hand, participatory management of highly-stressed aquifers should help take some, otherwise, unpopular decisions where-at least in the short run-benefits to a number of stakeholder groups are decreased, because they agree to reduce pumping in the longer-term communal interest.