Browsing by Subject "Water management"

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    Building the Agenda for Institutional Research in Water Resource Management
    (JAWRA Journal of the American Water Resources Association, 2004) Blomquist, William; Heikkila, Tanya; Schlager, Edella
    This paper pursues more specifically the recommendations of a recent National Research Council report recommending greater attention to research on institutions in the field of water resource management. The important challenge for the future in institutional research lies in going beyond the observation that institutions are important and in explaining instead how institutions actually affect management options and outcomes. It is possible to illuminate the relationships between institutional features and water management through comparative institutional research. This paper offers recommendations for studying water institutions in a comparative context, including methodological recommendations concerning approaches to comparative institutional research, and topics for comparative institutional research that appear especially fruitful at this time. The example of conjunctive management is used to illustrate the importance of institutional factors in water management, drawing to some extent on the authors’ recent experience with a comparative study of conjunctive management institutions.
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    Institutional and Policy Analysis of River Basin Management: The Warta River Basin, Poland
    (World Bank Group, 2005) Blomquist, William; Dinar, Ariel; Tonderski, Andrzej
    The authors describe and analyze the emergence of river basin management in the Warta River Basin of Poland. The Warta basin’s 55,193 km2 cover approximately one-sixth of Poland, and the Warta is a principal tributary to the Oder. Water management issues include pollution of the Warta and its main tributaries, prompting cities to rely on groundwater supplies that are beginning to show signs of overdraft, and growing problems of water allocation and scarcity as the basin urbanizes and industrializes. Since the end of the 1980s, the Polish government has been promoting decentralization, constructing a federal system that includes provinces, counties, and municipalities with authority over land use, water use permits, and environmental protection. Polish authorities have also established river basin management authorities corresponding to basin boundaries throughout the nation, including one for the Warta basin. The efforts toward decentralization and integrated water resource management in Poland have been earnest, but the dispersion of water policy authority across several levels of government, the establishment of basin authorities lacking power and funding to implement resource management programs, few arrangements for stakeholder participation, and delays in Polish water law reform have complicated the development and implementation of integrated management at the basin level. This paper—a product of the Agriculture and Rural Development Department—is part of a larger effort in the department to approach water policy issues in an integrated way. The study was funded by the Bank’s Research Support Budget under the research project “Integrated River Basin Management and the Principle of Managing Water Resources at the Lowest Appropriate Level: When and Why Does It (Not) Work in Practice?”