The Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) Concept

Working in concert with the Dublin Principles (1992) and Agenda 21 (1992), Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) has developed into an important leading concept of water management that has far-reaching international acceptance. It implies a multi-layered integration of management, spanning different resources, sectors, management principles and normative guidelines, in which existing approaches are in part very distinct from one another and dependent on the natural/environmental, political and socio-cultural conditions of the respective region.

By means of the IWRM concept the international development cooperation in the water sector expects a sustainable improvement for the situation in Southern countries as well as to utilise the opportunity to advance the goal formulated at the Millennium Summit of the United Nations in New York (2000) and at the World Summit for Sustainable Development in Johannesburg (2002) of reducing by a half the number of people without access to clean drinking water and without basic sanitation services by 2015. Finally, the competition over water requirements in most Southern countries between rural areas and ever faster growing cities, between irrigation agriculture, industry and households is leading to a situation where a sector-overlapping, integrated mode of water management is becoming more and more important and reallocations between areas, sectors and user groups, a necessity.

Yet experience has shown that a specific institutional, economic and political environment is necessary for the implementation of the IWRM. This environment is however not (yet) present in many countries of the South. The creation of the basic pre-conditions and the consolidation of the operating environment is often the first item on the agenda for these countries.

(Textsource: ISOE and Nexus)

Projects

The Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) Concept