The Center for Development Research (ZEF) is an international and interdisciplinary academic research institute of the Rheinische-Friedrich-Wilhelms University of Bonn, Germany. ZEF's research aims at finding solutions to global development issues. The research programs build on the methods and analytical styles of the disciplinary research areas and link and integrate knowledge and capacities from these different areas. ZEF's three research departments are: Political and Cultural Change (ZEF a) Economic and Technological Change (ZEF b) Ecology and Natural Resources Management (ZEF c).

Household water provides the entry point for this ethnography and study of institutional change. The book discusses the political economy of poverty and presents the polyphone discourse on water and the environment. It outlines water history and water rights from the 1970s onwards, and analyzes social dynamics. It offers a critical voice in the debate on climate change by arguing that local and global perceptions are not necessarily coherent.

Water harvesting is gaining more and more recognition as the sustainable and resilient alternative to other water supply options. It is economically viable, socially compatible and environmentally friendly. Water harvesting has proven to be a robust solution to overcome or reduce water shortages all over the world. To apply this in a sustainable and effective way, it is important to understand exactly where it can be applied to make full use of its potential. The Handbook of Water Harvesting and Conservation: Case Studies and Application Examples is the most comprehensive, up-to-date and applied casebook on water harvesting and conservation yet published. The editors bring together the many perspectives into a synthesis that is both academically-based and practical in its potential applications. The Handbook of Water Harvesting and Conservation: Case Studies and Application Examples will be an important tool for education, research and technical works in the soil, water and watershed management area, and will be highly useful for drought strategy planning, flood management and adaptation to climate change in all urban, agricultural, forest, rangeland areas.

Decentralization reforms introduced to Africa in the 1990s have not always delivered the intended long-term outcomes. This is a collection on the consequences of these reforms two decades on. In addition to general and comparative overviews, the book contains case studies on Ghana, Senegal, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Ethiopia, and Uganda. The common theme across the chapters is that the reforms seem to have engendered political consequences beyond decentralization itself – mostly through interaction with the broader historical, political, social, and economic context. The book thus speaks both to the scholarly literature (on decentralization, democratization, and development) and to the community of development practitioners. Most of the literature on decentralization and development emphasizes questions of institutional design and policy, but here the harder-to-pin-down political patterns marking the workings of decentralization are the main focus of analysis. The debates on development, through the case studies, are connected to the scholarly literatures on comparative federalism, comparative decentralization, and local democracy. The main conclusion that emerges from the studies in the book is that no magic formula that can turn countries into peaceful, stable, and prosperous democracies overnight exists. Furthermore, there are risks involved in importing formal institutions without regard to the local historical, political, social, and economic context. The chapters of this book were originally published as a special issue in Regional and Federal Studies.

Water policy initiatives often run into difficulties when they encounter the realities of really existing societies. Policies may not get implemented as planned, and may not achieve their stated objectives. Many things happen when policy initiatives travel from formulation to implementation. The papers in this volume examine the travel and appropriation of water policy by looking at the contestation and the embeddedness of water policy. Organised in the sequence everyday politics of water, politics of water policy, hydropolitics, global water politics, the papers constitute a call for a policy approach that replaces a social engineering with a strategic action perspective.