[Editor's Note: This article was originally published in the "BSR Insight" newsletter from Business for Social Responsibility, and is reprinted with permission.]

In a northeastern U.S. town of about 1,000 people, at the first public hearing to discuss Nestlé Waters North America's (NWNA) interest in bottling water from a local spring, the company listened as citizens outlined their primary concerns about the project: increased costs to the town, negative impacts to residents, and feuds among neighbors.

When it comes to the management of water resources, people are at the center of the debate, both in our capacity to implement strong governance systems and in our ability to ensure that those systems support individuals' rights to access the resource.

For NWNA, the largest producer of bottled spring water in the United States, these community objectives complicate an already unique set of challenges related to managing a natural resource widely perceived as a public good. At the company's spring water sites in North America, community members and others have two primary concerns: They want to ensure that NWNA's water withdrawal does not have negative ecological impacts, and they want the opportunity to participate in decisions about their water resources.

At its existing sites, NWNA currently has progressive water-management techniques, including systems allowing hydrologists and geologists to monitor springs, and processes to encourage regular dialogue with residents and community officials. However, new trends have emerged that are reshaping the context in which companies like NWNA operate.

Today, the public is increasingly concerned about water scarcity, and local communities are more vigilant about their water resources. As a result, natural resource and extractive companies struggle with the balance between the use of natural resources and the rights of local communities and healthy ecosystems.

In September 2009, NWNA engaged BSR to help develop an updated siting and community-engagement framework for today's business context. The eight-month project involves analysis of NWNA's existing practices, and the design of a framework for engaging communities at future spring water sites. To execute this project, we paired our experience developing community-engagement strategies for the extractives industry with our research on responsible corporate management of natural resources.

How Nestlé Waters Stacks Up

From October to December 2009, we conducted interviews with internal stakeholders and national experts at several of NWNA's U.S. sites in the Pacific Northwest and Maine to collect positive and negative feedback about the company's existing practices related to community engagement and water stewardship.