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The extensive dam network in Sri Lanka plays a pivotal role in water resource management in the country. Despite substantial socio-economic benefits offered by dams, the failures around the world have caused disastrous consequences, stressing the importance of dam safety management as a global concern. Having identified the significance, the Irrigation Department of Sri Lanka as the primary custodian of dam safety management in the country, has drafted local dam safety guidelines. Acknowledging the efforts to enhance safety practices in the country, the present study was carried out to assess the status of drafted local dam safety guidelines against the international standards, focusing on the level of documentation and the field implementation. The study utilized an expert questionnaire survey that targeted two audiences: 1) experts involved in dam safety guidelines and 2) on site-field engineers, to assess six technical aspects related to dam safety namely, geotechnical, structural, hydro technical, seismic considerations, risk assessment and management, and public involvement and emergency preparedness. The expert questionnaire survey was developed referring to the “Maturity matrix method” for institutional benchmarking in dam safety. The results of the survey revealed that documentation of the majority of aspects performs well compared with the international guidelines, whereas seismic considerations demonstrate a notable deficiency. Notably, the overall maturity levels obtained for the aspects during field implementation indicated clear room for further improvement, reflecting the need not only to maintain robust documentation of dam safety guidelines, but also to effectively translate the same into field implementation. Additionally, “Key informant interviews” were conducted to obtain insights from the field engineers which revealed crucial concerns and challenges to the field implementation of local dam safety guidelines such as, gaps in accessibility at the bottom level, ambiguity of dam ownership, concentrated responsibility and oversight, lack of records of the historical performance and dam surveillance data etc. Furthermore, the responses from the field engineers emphasized that dam safety regulation through a designated, legally empowered body, lifecycle-based dam safety guidelines, multidisciplinary organizational collaboration, sustained capacity building, and the involvement of downstream community as pivotal in enhancing the field implementation of dam safety guidelines. Overall, a periodic benchmarking approach as utilized in the study is recognized as a sustainable tool for the dam owners and governing authorities to self-assess the performance and effectiveness of their dam safety program, which ultimately contributes to strengthening documentation and field implementation of the local dam safety guidelines in Sri Lanka.