Institutions and organizations: the key to sustainable management of resources in river basins

Abstract

Based on studies of water, poverty and livelihoods in nine river basins, this article reviews the role of institutions and organizations, focusing on their strengths and weaknesses, and to generalize as to why they fail to address the basin-wide issues of water, poverty and livelihoods. The authors show how a more comprehensive, integrated approach might change them to be more broadly relevant to basin-wide needs as well as to address the mismatch between development and the need to provide ecosystem services relevant to food, poverty, livelihoods and sustainable ecosystems.

Keywords:

• water resource management
• governance
• ecosystem services
• basin focal projects
• sustainable development

Acknowledgements

We recognize that Merrey and Cook (2011), which focused on the “bricolage” process, was a precursor of this chapter. We hope that we have fairly represented that paper in the body text, and we thank Dr Merrey for allowing us to refer to a pre-publication version.

Notes

1. To avoid overkill, we do not cite each case study at every mention in the text. References to the different locations imply the information is from the related case study. A full list of the papers, which appeared in Fisher and Cook (2010), is included in the references.

2. “‘Institutional bricolage’ [is] a process by which people consciously and unconsciously draw on existing social and cultural arrangements to shape institutions in response to changing situations. The resulting institutions are a mix of ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’, ‘formal’ and ‘informal’” (Cleaver 2001).