This is an interesting paper that describes an approach for including marginalised communities in participatory model building that can lead to deeper understanding of the water issues, management challenges and solutions, and their inter-linkages.

I believe this paper will make a very good contribution to the HESS Special Issue on "Contributions of transdisciplinary approaches to hydrology and water resources management". However, it is in need of some further work to realise its potential.

Two referees have identified a number of areas that need to be strengthened and points that need to be addressed. The authors have responded with clarity about the changes they will implement in response. These should all be implemented in the revised version of this manuscript that integrates the referees suggestions and concerns.

Furthermore, I have also identified some additional points that should be addressed in the revised version:
1) Consider removing "socio-hydrological" from the title to reflect the wording of the revised manuscript.
2) The concept of using these approaches to reveal leverage points is intriguing. The notion of leverage points you use in this paper, is that some interventions can be expected to have much greater impacts than other interventions. Regarding those that you identify in section 5.3, can you give some indication of which ones might have the greatest impact on the system? Can you highlight any leverage points that were counterintuitive in terms of priorities or strategies identified by the stakeholders versus their potential impacts on water quality?
3) Some font in Fig 2 is small and should be enlarged. The font in Figure 7 is also very small and should be enlarged.

The authors have addressed the reviewers' and my own comments very comprehensively to produce an extremely interesting and descriptive manuscript. My only outstanding concern is that Figure 2, location of the study area, needs improvement.