ABSTRACT
In many ways, those concerned with the development and management of water and related river basin resources have spearheaded international efforts to understand and operate the principles of sustainability during the last decade. In the Dublin Statement, issued by water specialists before the Rio ‘Earth Summit’ in 1992 (WMO 1992), the essential, but missing, interdisciplinarity of water (and land) resource management became established. The shortfall between the ideals and actualities of integration was clear to those who had worked to show the links between hydrology and other biophysical sciences and with the social sciences (Falkenmark 1997). Partly as a consequence of its widespread appearance in Agenda 21 (four chapters), international support has risen sharply for integrated approaches to water resource management (IWRM) within river basin frameworks (IRBM). Whilst there is a growing body of criticism of the approach (e.g. Biswas 2004) there are equally strong signs of government acceptance (e.g. in the European Union’s Water Framework Directive). To the framework of integration have been added bolder, cross-bracing approaches to ecosystem protection, new frameworks for water governance (framed in the language of participation – our focus in this Chapter) and treatment of water as an economic resource. Latterly, the prioritisation of poverty alleviation through urgent provision of water supply and sanitation has raised questions about the forbidding breadth, duration and technical demands of IWRM/IRBM (Hens and Nath 2003; Mwanza 2003).
