Water Management

Water related problems such as floods, droughts, declining groundwater tables or polluted rivers have a major impact on numerous societies throughout the world. Despite these serious problems, policy makers seem to make scant use of the knowledge that is available with water experts. Conversely, water experts face the task of finding out how they should position themselves to ensure that their analysis contributes to policy making.

Embedded Reflection on Public Policy Innovation examines the impacts of reflection on the practice of conceiving of and organizing public policy innovation and knowledge transfer for water management. Reflection is provided for a specific community of practitioners: the professionals who work in an innovation program that must find and promote durable and novel solutions for the challenges in water management.

In Interactief Watermanagement wordt de stand van zaken in het beleid en beheer van het zoete water uiteengezet. Naast een grondige probleemverkenning bevat het een analyse van de historische ontwikkeling van het waterbeheer. Ruime aandacht wordt besteed aan mogelijke oplossingen, waarbij in het bijzonder wordt stilgestaan bij de ervaringen in diverse internationale stroomgebieden. De lessen die hieruit kunnen worden getrokken zijn toegepast op het door Nederland, België en Frankrijk gedeelde riviersysteem de Schelde.

The main question addressed in this book is: In what way can international law contribute to the achievement of sustainable development in and through water management? In search for an answer, water is analysed as a social, economic and ecological good.

River basin management is a key concept in contemporary water policy. Since the management of rivers is best designed and implemented at the scale of the river basin, it seems obvious that we should not confine ourselves to administrative or geographical borders. In other words, river basin management implies crossing borders. The book offers the reader more insight into processes of cross border co-operation in water management.

This book addresses the question how watershed management can be made sustainable. Research conducted in India as reported in this book demonstrates that for a watershed to be used sustainably, four main elements need to be considered: natural resources, technology, institution and economics.

In the urbanised delta of the Netherlands, it is important to take water-related and environmental impacts fully into account when deciding on socio- economic activities. This is the aim behind Water Assessment (WA). Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA). This thesis is centred on a comparative research of these policy instruments.