ABSTRACT
Around the globe, scholars, practitioners and a number of international organizations have been increasingly focused on improving governance and policy outcomes related to a wide range of social, economic and environmental problems. Internationally, ‘good governance’ has become somewhat of a holy grail in both developed and developing countries. For the past two decades, scholars and practitioners at the international and domestic levels have been using the concept of ‘good governance’ as part of a quest for improving human governance of the world’s ecosystems in a period of population growth, climate change, and increasing human demands on the natural environment. Good governance of water resources, within countries and in shared transboundary water systems, is part of this pursuit given predictions that global water demand will increase by 55% by 2050 (OECD 2015a) and that both scholars and policy practitioners realize that “water crises are primarily governance crises” (OECD, 2015a). Water governance is also a critical part of the United Nations Water Action Decade 2018–2028 (UN 2018).
