ABSTRACT
No one is against good water governance. In fact, with economically viable supply-side options decreasing and demand management tools not always delivering desired results, water governance has emerged as perhaps the most important topic in the international water community in the twenty-first century (Rogers and Hall, 2003; UNDP, 2004; UNESCO, 2006). The 2001 Bonn International Conference on Freshwater, a precursor to the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development (Bonn, 2001), identified water governance as the first of three areas of priority action. The second World Water Development report (UNESCO, 2006) highlighted the central role of water governance in improving water resource conditions and boldly stated that “the world water crisis is a crisis of governance—not one of scarcity.” The World Bank has also recognized the importance of key governance tenets, such as accountability, in its efforts to reduce the impact of water scarcity (Bucknall, 2007).
