Water Governance

Water Governance. (from the first IWRM-net joint call in 2008)

Integrated Water Resource Management is a complex process involving a large number of issues to be considered. The EU has set out the requirement for member states to consider the trans-boundary issues in managing river basins, including those flowing through more than one country  and this consideration impacts on a number of integrative management issues, such as;

• Administrative bodies and their relationships across territorial boundaries (from local to trans-national scale)
• Communication between and within administrative organisations
• Conflict minimisation and resolution
• The integration of social issues more closely with those of water resource management.
• The development of methodologies to apply economic processes to a wide range of water resources.

IWRM-Net is looked to promote research that facilitates delivery of an integrated management system, to help develop common approaches, to coordinate actions and harmonise methodologies.

outputs expected were

• Provide techniques to associate costs to different types of water users and thus recover these costs fairly in order to maintain the balance between social, environmental and economic issues. Associated with this must be the consideration of valuation methods that integrate monetary values with other value systems.
• Provide techniques to assess costs and benefits of water management methods in basins so that river basin managers can effectively and efficiently apply appropriate management tool and methods
• Provide techniques for efficient setting of objectives in trans-boundary basins,
• Provide techniques for inter-disciplinary methods of management and in particular ways to improve the incorporation of social science understanding and methodology into river basin management.
• Provide decision-support tools for integrated water resource management combining multi-disciplinary models.
• Provide a comparison of approaches from a number of countries participating in IWRM-Net to the development and negotiation of shared objectives and for the management of river basins

Specific requirements for the WFD implementation

• The production of a river basin management plans (art.13) and
• Water-pricing provides adequate incentives for users to use water resources efficiently (art.9).