Who Wants to be Part of IWRM? The Politics of Scale in Basins and Catchments

Abstract

Integrated Water Resource Management is a principle introduced to coordinate the diverse use and protection aims that appear when regulating the resource water. It takes into consideration demands from other resources and impacts from various sectors; in the European context the primary goal is to ensure the sustainability of vital ecosystems. In other parts of the world it is (additionally) mobilised as a framework or approach for redressing historical inequities in water allocation, for democratising water resources governance, for providing a platform for international water negotations, for increasing efficiency and productivity of water use, for ddressing water conflicts, or for other stated objectives. Unstated objectives may include attracting international development funding, centralisation of water governance and others. Given that IWRM is discursively widely accepted and introduced as a concept within international, national and regional water management guidelines, there are several open questions related to its concrete implementation and the various ways in which the concept has been appropriated. One major challenge is to think appropriate scale, by defining regulation boundaries, and identifying catchment areas and river basin dimensions. Boundaries are permeable and fuzzy in multiple ways. For example, pollution in rivers and surface water can be transboundary in nature where the physical, biological and chemical extent of pollution may transcend jurisdictions and transverse borders. Socio-political networks of governance and management may have a network character rather than be confined to geographical/hydrological space. Social scientists in general, and policy analysts in particular, are invited to contribute to addressing the question how to define appropriate water management scales. We therefore invite scholars to present their current research about cross-boundary water management, in the broadest sense of that term, with specific interest in multi-level decision-analysis, the identification of so-called functional spaces, the design of innovative instruments in water policy, and how scale is made and remade in water resources governance and management.

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