Integrated River Basin Governance - Learning from International Experience is designed to help practitioners implement integrated approaches to river basin management (IRBM). It aims to help the coming generation of senior university students learn how to design IRBM and it provides current researchers and the broader water community with a resource on river basin management. Drawing on both past and present river basin and valley scale catchment management examples from around the world, the book develops an integration framework for river basin management. Grounded in the theory and literature of natural resources management and planning, the thrust of the book is to assist policy and planning, rather than extend knowledge of hydrology, biophysical modelling or aquatic ecology. Providing a classification of river basin organizations and their use, the book also covers fundamental issues related to implementation: decision-making. institutions and organizations. information management. participation and awareness. legal and economic issues. integration and coordination processes. building human capacity. Integrated River Basin Governance focuses on the social, economic, organizational and institutional arrangements of river basin management. Methods are outlined for implementing strategic and regional approaches to river basin management, noting the importance of context and other key elements which have been shown to impede success. The book includes a range of tools for river basin governance methods, derived from real life experiences in both developed and developing countries. The successes and failures of river basin management are discussed, and lessons learned from both are presented. The ebook for this title is available to download for free on the WaterWiki.

One of the major problems facing practitioners and scientists working with water management is how to integrate knowledge and experiences from scientific, policy and stakeholder perspectives. In this book this science-policy-stakeholder interface (SPSI) is examined both analytically and through the description of practical experiences from river basins in Europe, India and South-East Asia. These include the Tungabhadra (India), Sesan (Vietnam/Cambodia), Tagus (Spain/Portugal) and Glomma (Norway), which particularly highlight issues associated with pollution, severely altered river flows and transboundary conflicts. Following two chapters which lay the framework for the book the authors describe how SPSI was managed in the case study basins and how stakeholder participation and scenarios were used to integrate different perspectives, and to facilitate the communication of different forms of knowledge. Four important aspects of water management and SPSI are then discussed; these are water pollution, land and water interaction, environmental flow and transboundary water regimes. Short descriptions of the case study rivers are provided together with analyses of how SPSI was managed in water management in these basins and policy recommendations for the basins. The book concludes by providing a series of recommendations for improving the science-policy-stakeholder interface in water management. It represents a major step forward in our understanding of how to implement integrated water resources management.

The concept of a river basin as a management or planning unit has gone through several stages and is in a state of flux.