Introduction 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. The current intellectual ferment among water scholars and practitioners is more exciting than anytime in the last 50 years, yet the reality of water-related problems is more and more daunting with each passing year. While the literature presents new notions of green, blue, and virtual water, everyday water governance falls further and further behind mounting problems. For instance, the reallocation of water has moving agricultural water from food to biofuels with lightening speed, increasing food prices and worsening worldwide food shortages. Energy development is requiring increasing quantities of increasingly scarce water, and non-conventional energy development, such as biofuels and tar sands exploitation is water intensive. Worldwide, thirsty cities are steadily eroding agriculture’s grip on water rights, aggravating food scarcity. Water quality problems continue to plague even developed countries after nearly halfa-century-long clean up campaign. Contemporary experience suggests that

increasing human pressures upon water resources will harm the natural environment. Environmental damage, in turn, diminishes the environmental services upon which all life depends. Evaluating the state of common pool resources, Elinor Ostrom (personal communication) concludes that much of the news is negative. This chapter will first consider what lessons about water governance can be learned from previous and contemporary experiments with water reforms. The record on most reforms is decidedly mixed. Among the lessons are that a substantial gap exists between promise and practice. Reforms stall out at the critical stages of marshalling support for adoption and implementation, which by necessity are political processes. The third section suggests that the art of politics must come back into the discussion of water if change is to occur. Among the critical shortcomings in contemporary water politics are the failures to frame issues in ways to attract public interest, to engage a water ethic and to address deep-seated inequities, and to recruit and to inspire leaders. The fourth section introduces the notion of a contextual approach to water management that takes into account the history, culture, and sense of place. Rather than depending upon the adoption of one or another of the universal remedies, this approach suggests that mixed strategies that appeal to multiple values and fit into local circumstances are more appropriate than universal remedies.