Governing urban-cprs and public goods, particularly water system resources are more challenging than ever. There is abundance of literature on governmental and private kind of governance, as well as self-governance. The concepts like adaptive, integrated, interactive, robust, resilient and sustainable water governance invariably advocate collective action and participation of community in successful management of water system resources. From successes and failures, it is observed that small size and homogeneity of community contribute majorly in the success of collective governance. In India, more than fifty cities have above million populations that are invariably heterogeneous. Both collective actions of organizations and community participations in the water governance seem to be realized as necessary, but at the same time face challenges to really execute the approach. Focusing on the status of urban lake governance in Mansagar Lake in Jaipur-India, the paper presents interesting field experiences regarding ‘collective governance’ between government, businesses and the local community. In-depth interviews of the government and non-governmental officials, experts and the local people highlight that, because the governance of urban lakes is about multi-actor/sector/level partnership, three major challenges are of great concerns: to share common understandings to set up common goals and to ensure compliances to achieve a sustainable natural resource management. What came out of the fieldwork was that the concerns are ingrained in the socio-ecological aspects of the urban occupations called the ‘attributes of the community’, drawn from the main variables of the social-ecological framework by Elinor Ostrom. The paper is part of PhD research on ‘search for attributes of collective governance in managing urban lakes in India’.
