WATER security is a stronger function of economic development of a country than many other variables, such as absolute water availability, according to a Global Water Partnership (GWP) paper released recently.The title of the paper is “Increasing water security: The key to implementing the Sustainable Development Goals”.
According to the GWP paper, as governments begin to implement the United Nation’s new development agenda up to 2030, and recognise the importance of water security in sustainable development, it is timely to critically review the key role that integrated water resources management (IWRM) can play in increasing water security.
The paper offers a timely and critical review of the IWRM approach; how it has developed over the past 25 years; its successes and disappointments as countries put it into practice, and provides indicative guidelines for the types of interventions that may help to improve the all-round working of a country’s water economy.
In September 2015, Guyana was amongst 193 member states of the UN General Assembly to sign on to a new development agenda that will drive sustainable development actions up to 2030.
Building on the successes, gaps, and lessons from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), this new agenda sets out 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 Targets.
The GWP report notes that the IWRM concept has gradually gained prominence over the past 25 years, as the demand and competition for limited water resources has increased.
“Our knowledge of water’s impact on the environment has grown, and more complex institutions have developed to negotiate and coordinate water allocations among different users,” the report says, adding:
“The quality of water governance in a country depends on the quality and size of human and other resources available, including public water institutions, their rule-enforcement capacity, and the ability of the poorest sections of society to pay for a minimum acceptable level of public water service. All this determines the potential to build a viable, modern water industry. All these drivers are weak in poor countries and strong in wealthy ones.”
In summary, the most powerful beneficial impact of IWRM has been to transform the global discourse on how governments and communities can best manage their water resources. It offered a sharply different view, compared with earlier thinking, on what, where, who, why, and how to intervene in the water sector from the micro to meso to macro levels. So different was this view that it was often considered theoretical, idealistic, aspirational, and far removed from the prevailing reality in many countries.
Two important lessons emerge from this report. The first is that implementation must be gradual and nuanced. Forcing the pace on developing countries has so far proved counterproductive. The second is that countries at different stages of socio-economic evolution have different needs and capabilities and it is essential to reflect this in the approach taken.