The Water Framework Directive (WFD) provides a European policy basis for water management and the elaboration of policies for river basins. It prescribes the development of river basin management plans focusing on clearly defined objectives.

The preparation of such plans is a difficult and complex task, since it involves various types of integration and collaboration:

• The integration of different physical domains in water management such as hydraulics and ecology.
• The integration of socio-economics and physics such as economic water demand and water availability;
• Collaboration with various stakeholders, policy development and the public; etc.

The variety in physical properties, socio-economics, management etc. throughout Europe results that each basin has its own unique characteristics and makes the development of river basin management plans all but straightforward.

Due to these factors an increasing need is felt for guided use and methodologies of harmonised high quality computer based tools (ICT-tools) supporting the design or river basin management plans and implementation of the WFD.

Harmoni-CA's strategy is first of all based on the fact that much expertise relevant to the objectives of Harmoni-CA is already available or will be developed in ongoing projects. To achieve the main objectives this expertise needs to be elaborated and harmonised.

To achieve the broad participation and the involvement of the scientific and policy worlds, users and other stakeholders in integrated basin management a variety of methods is applied: workshops, conferences, newsletters, web-publishing and web-based discussion forums. Involvement is stimulated through organisations throughout Europe that bring together a large amount of expertise on the various issues in integrated river basin planning and the use of ICT-tools.

The overall objective of Harmoni-CA is to create a forum for unambiguous communication, information exchange and harmonisation of the use and development of ICT-tools relevant to integrated river basin management, and the implementation of the WFD.

Though much of the work involves ICT-tools, Harmoni-CA is not about ICT-tools as such: Harmoni-CA is about harmonisation and guidance on development and use of ICT-tools.

Harmoni-CA is a large-scale concerted action, meaning that it does not carry out a research project, but syntheses available knowledge with the help of knowledge providers such as researchers. Typical actions of Harmoni-CA will be meetings and workshops, leading to synthesis reports and guidances.