Reflections on Integrated Water Resources Management

Integrated water resources management (IWRM) is the reconcile between basic human needs, economic development, and ecological integrity, while respecting agreements between transboundary countries (Van der Zaag, 2005). Achieving this is a difficult while ambitious task, requiring efforts from different stakeholders and decisions being made inclusively. It is therefore a way of seeing problems and how to tackle them in real life (Van der Zaag, 2005). This blog would firstly discuss about the related interests of  IWRM, and then I would like to draw on different examples in illustrating these.

IWRM has consider a range of dimensions including the water resources themselves, the water users, the spatial scale, as well as the temporal scale (Savenije and Van der Zaag, 2008). Taking water resources into account is the action of taking entire hydrological cycle in to account, including everything from water quantity to river flows to water moisture; the water users are all of the people involved in water management economically; spatial scale refers to the physical distribution of water resources and uses while temporal scale takes into account the availability and demand for water resources at different time.


Fig.1: Integrated Water Resources Management

According to Van der Zaag (2005), IWRM requires institutional capacity to integrate. And the institutions should be based on existing customary practices and traditions (Mohamd-katerere and Van der Zaag, 2003). However, in real life, it is very difficult and ambitious to set up an institution aiming for integration in Africa considering the transboundary nature of most of the large rivers in Africa (Goulden el al., 2009). It is estimate that 90% of all of the freshwater resources in Africa are shared between two or more countries as they are located in shared river basins and lakes (UNDP, 2006). In addition, the competing national interests, different customary traditions and practices, and weak cooperation from nations make it challenging for collaborative water management (Goulden el al., 2009), as shown by the case of Manantali Dam in Senegal (Magistro and Lo, 2001).

It is also noted that, there are three key policy principles when making decisions in the framework of IWRM (Postel, 1992), which are equity, ecological integrity and efficiency. 

However effective it sounds in terms of mitigating the existing water problems, it is an elusive and fuzzy concept to me. Firstly, the concept encompasses a wide range of expectations and requirements at the same time, making it very hard and ambitious to achieve them all. Secondly, the institutions as well as the government actions needed in IWRM are particularly idealised and ignores a range of problems and differences in national interests. Achieving the reconcile between basic human needs, economic development, ecological integrity as well as abound to the international agreements with transboundary countries requires a 'transparent and inclusive decision-making process' (Van der Zagg, 2005: 868).
















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