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"The authors describe and analyze river basin management in the Guadalquivir River Basin in Spain. The Guadalquivir river flows westerly across southern Spain, with nearly all of its 57,017 km2 drainage area within the region of Andalusia. Water management issues in this semi-arid, heavily agricultural, but rapidly urbanizing region include drought exposure, water allocation, water quality, and in some areas, groundwater overdraft. A river basin agency (Confederacion Hidrografica del Guadalquivir, or CH Guadalquivir) has existed within the basin since 1927, but its responsibilities have changed substantially over its history. For much of its life, CH Guadalquivir's mission was water supply a...
Decentralization and increased stakeholder involvement have been major elements of water sector reform as ways to promote sustainable and integrated resource management particularly of river basins. Based on an analytical framework for relating decentralization and stakeholder involvement to improved river basin management, this paper infers several hypotheses about factors associated with greater or lesser likelihood of success of the decentralization process using data from 83 river basins worldwide. The results suggest that physical, political, economic, financial, and institutional characteristics of the basin do affect the process and the level of performance of the decentralization. In...
World Development Report 1998-1999, now in its twenty-first edition, focuses on the role of knowledge and information as a factor of development, including the important trade-offs in strategies and policies and many other challenges. It examines such important questions as why have some developing countries been able to exploit the rapidly increasing stock of global knowledge more than others and what can be done to help those falling behind? The Report also looks at the challenge of finding the balance between private initiative and public intervention that encourages innovation and manages attendant risks. It deals with the role of international assistance and international organizations, which can help develop understanding about these complex processes, help to transfer lessons of development experience across countries, and help finance crucial knowledge investments of importance to developing countries. Known as the standard reference for international economic data, the World Development Report 1998-1999 provides a set of Selected World Development Indicators as an appendix, presenting social and economic statistics for more than 200 countries.
This report offers a review of what is known about opportunities and risks of biochar systems in developing countries. Its aim is to fill in critical knowledge gaps between the biochar research community and development practicioners on the ground.
"Rights to water are increasingly crucial and increasingly contested across theglobe. Urbanization, industrialization, environmental degradation, agriculturalintensification, rising per capita water use, increasing population, andother social, political, and economic transformations contribute to growing scarcity and demand for better management of water resources. In responding to these challenges, the world can draw on a rich heritage of institutions for regulating rights to water and resolving disputes, and a diversity of institutional arrangements that demonstrate great ingenuity in designing solutions to fit the conditions and priorities of various river basins. However, policy discussi...
This volume explores perceptions of risks and opportunities by decision makers in countries considering cooperation over international waters. Analysis of five historical case studies shows that perceived risks exerted a significant influence on cooperation decisions.
World population is set to increase by a third in the next 25 years, with no corresponding increase in global rainfall. About seventy per cent of the world's abstracted water is used in farming and therefore the economics of irrigation is becoming an increasingly important issue for sustainable development. Water for Agriculture provides a thorough overview of this highly topical subject, written in a clear and accessible style. The Scope of the book is wide both in its analysis and in its geographical coverage. Topics covered include the infrastructure, operation and maintenance of irrigation service supply, the supply of drainage services, economic cost benefit analysis, water resource planning at the regional scale, political economy and irrigation policy. The content of Water for Agriculture is enhanced by numerous tables, diagrams, and in-depth case studies. This book will be an essential read for those professionals involved in the planning of water resources, and for advanced students studying this topic as part of agriculture, development studies, economics, engineering, environmental science, geography, hydrology and planning courses.
"The authors describe and analyze management in the Murray-Darling Basin of Australia, long regarded as a model for integrated river basin management. This interior basin of over 1 million km2 in semi-arid southeastern Australia is defined by the catchment areas of the Murray and Darling Rivers and their tributaries. Water management issues include allocation, quality, and dryland salinity. Because of Australia's federal governmental structure, institutional development has been more a matter of integrating state and local endeavors than decentralization of national authority. The Australian national government has little constitutional power over water resources. The five states in the basi...