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When the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) was created in 1970 “to initiate, encourage, support and conduct research into the problems of the developing regions of the world,” it immediately turned its attention, and some of its financial support, to water-related research. Its early focus on supply technologies — such as inexpensive, simple-to-use handpumps — evolved to encompass water treatment and quality control, and has more recently broadened to questions of conservation and management. In doing so, IDRC has recognized that the water crisis is, as reflected in the summary report of the World Water Vision, “a crisis of managing water so badly that billions of people — and the environment — suffer badly.” It has also recognized that local organizations and communities who have the most at stake are key to effective management of scarce water supplies.

This book synthesizes IDRC’s experience in local water management and presents a number of pointed, well-constructed recommendations for decision-makers, policy analysts, and researchers. From a review of the issue of freshwater supply and local water management, it explores examples of IDRC-supported field research in three broad, interconnected categories: small-scale water supply; wastewater treatment and reuse; and watershed management and irrigation. Based on this research, a series of policy-relevant results are addressed in propositions aimed at decision-makers and researchers in government and beyond. To summarize:

For decision-makers:

• Water management research can generate powerful consequences for politics and policy.
• Decision-makers make a big mistake when they dismiss small groups and small solutions, as they often do.
• Distributing the costs and benefits of managing scarce water imposes hard choices. Making those choices, and giving them effect, requires institutional capacity.
• There is one iron rule for managing groundwater and aquifer supplies: assume the worst.
• Successful local water management requires, and deserves, close collaboration between communities and governments.

For researchers:

• Hard data can pay rich dividends, even when outcomes disappoint.
• Local participation and local education increase the chances for successful and effective research.
• Scaling up can generate welcome economies but intensify inequalities. Both effects need to be understood.
• Scaling up can succeed where institutions are capable of distributing the gains and the costs.
• Social and economic factors are always important in local water management. Sometimes they are paramount.

Armed with these propositions, the book goes on to advance the following recommendations for policy and for research:

• Up, down, and sideways: local water management should always be informed by a three-part economic analysis.
• Policy and research should shift their focus from enlarging supplies of water to managing demand.
• Policymaking should always start by accepting social custom and cultural norms as given, but not sacrosanct.
• Beware of generalizations, but share knowledge promptly.
• To achieve good government, and good science, evaluate in a transparent, participatory, and continuous manner.

Finally, the book plots some future directions in which faster progress can be made in both the science and the conduct of local water management.

About a decade before the 1997 formation of the World Water Council and its vision exercise, IDRC had begun to place greater emphasis on participatory research and on community-based approaches to development. Thus, it is entirely appropriate that this effort to bring its research on water directly to the attention of policy analysts and decision-makers should deal with local water management.

Devolution of the power to manage water (not just read metres and fix leaks) will not come easily. The forces to maintain a top-down approach to water are well entrenched and serve many power elites. However, it will not come at all without a vision that indicates that, in the right circumstances, management by villages, communities, nongovernmental organizations, and water-users’ associations may be the most appropriate way, not just to deliver water, but also to conserve its quality and its quantity. If this publication expands recognition of that vision, it will have achieved its purpose.

Margaret Catley-Carlson
January 2002

Margaret Catley-Carlson is Chair of the Global Water Partnership, a member of the World Water Commission, and a governor of Canada’s International Development Research Centre. She is former President of the Population Council, a nonprofit, nongovernmental research organization established in 1952. Prior to joining the Council, she was Deputy Minister of Health and Welfare Canada, President of the Canadian International Development Agency, and Deputy Executive Director (Operations) of UNICEF.

Document(s) 1 of 9