Abstract
Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) has been advanced as a response to growing problems of water scarcity in the developing world. While the precept of the IWRM process is unexceptionable, its practice has meant a package of interventions. The trouble with the ‘IWRM package’, and indeed the global water governance debate as a whole, is its intent to transform, all at once, a predominantly informal water economy into a predominantly formal one—something that would normally be the result of a long process of economic growth and the transformation that comes in its wake. In the IWRM discourse, formalizing informal water economies is improving water governance. But evidence across the world suggests that there is no shortcut for a poor society to morph its informal water economy into a formal one; the process by which this happens is organically tied to wider processes of economic growth. When countries try to force the pace of formalization, as they will no doubt do, interventions come unstuck. Interventions are more likely to work if they aim to improve the working of a water economy while it is informal.
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Notes
- 1.
The approach and methodology used by these researchers were similar to those used for computing the Human Development Index (HDI) (see, UNDP 2000). The index was constructed by combining five component indices that cover water resource endowments, access to water, human capacity, water use efficiency, and quality of water environment. Each of the five component indices was given equal weight to generate the Water Poverty Index that takes values in the range of 0 and 100, the higher the value, lower the water poverty.
- 2.
Which presumably means water supply through a local community-based or municipal body that takes some responsibility of quality.
- 3.
Scott Roselle used this phrase recently to refer to the unexceptionable tendency of agricultural population ratios of countries to fall as their economies grow. But I think this also applies to other responses to economic development as outlined in Fig. 2.1.
- 4.
If accounts of the travails facing global water companies like Vivendi and Thames Water who are forced to wind up even in these increasingly affluent east- Asian cities is any guide, we must conclude that South Asian cities have a long way to go before they can afford water supply systems of European or North American quality (see, The Economist, August 15–21, 2004).
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Shah, T., van Koppen, B. (2016). The Precept and Practice of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) in India. In: Narain, V., Narayanamoorthy, A. (eds) Indian Water Policy at the Crossroads: Resources, Technology and Reforms. Global Issues in Water Policy, vol 16. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25184-4_2
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