Towards a New Water Management Practice: Experiences and Proposals from Guanajuato State for a Participatory and Decentralized Water Management Structure in Mexico

Per-capita water availability is relatively high in Mexico (about 5000 m 3 per year). Nevertheless, water demand is concentrated in some critical zones, where scarcity and pollution are causing growing conflicts between water users and authorities. The Lerma-Chapala basin is one of those critical regions. The recent demands to preserve Chapala lake have added an explosive ingredient to the historical importance of its mining and agricultural production, its industrial and commercial development and its relevance as a communications link due to its location in the geographical centre of Mexico. In Guanajuato state, located right in the middle of the basin, water availability per capita does not even reach 1000 m 3 per year, with the resulting pressure coming from water users in dispute over a resource that is becoming each day more scarce, polluted and over-exploited. For this reason the state government implemented a programme oriented to the building of a participatory management structure, together with the consolidation of the technical, managerial, financial and social capacity of local organizations, based on a new paradigm of real decentralization, to which government brings the necessary support, in a subsidiary form, for the social participation structures to become the central actors in the achievement of a sustainable method of using water. Cultural change is the basis of this effort. This vision of water management has implied leaving behind the established one, in which decentralization programmes are constrained to the transfer of predefined programmes and their financial resources, according to rules and supervisory bodies coordinated from Mexico City.