ABSTRACT
The water resources research and practice community excels at the development of innovative and varied ideas and blueprints to replace existing flawed water management institutions. History is littered with formulas that were embraced by both scholars and practitioners, but either failed to take hold, or, when implemented, failed to live up to their promise. One after another, multi-objective planning, principles and standards, centralization, coordinated river basin planning and management, watershed management, devolution and decentralization, markets, privatization, and many other formulas have had some period of years in the sun and then faded. Often these ideas corrected errors and made things better in some places, but proved to be no panacea for the ills of water governance in many other contexts. Today, hopes are fixed upon Integrated Water Resources Management and Adaptive Management, which envision more collaborative governance and a more flexible and engaged role for science. I will argue in this chapter that there is much old wine in these new bottles. But, beyond suggesting that there is much to be learned from past experience, the larger point is that the realities of water governance unfold on the ground (or in this case on the water), and that not only must remedies be designed for the context, they also actually must be implementable and implemented.
