Worldwide, recognition is increasing that individual water resources projects and policies have implications for other water users within a river or lake basin, both upstream and downstream. Increased stresses on a basin’s natural resource base caused by development pressures are leading to degradation that is felt well beyond the immediate area of a particular project. Integrated river basin management has been the primary mechanism to address these issues and impacts.

Key Challenges Basin management is anchored in the principle of decentralization of decision making to the lowest appropriate level. While it seems to be comparatively easy to translate this concept into laws and regulations, its actual application often encounters obstacles due to the varying interests of different stakeholder groups, including those that would have to promote the decentralization. Sound basin management requires attention to basin-wide water use efficiency and water quality management. In some circumstances, field efficiency is important because return flows degrade land and water resources. In other circumstances, one farmer’s water loss is another farmer’s recharge, and improved farm-level irrigation efficiencies often result in only paper, not real, water savings. Or savings in one sector are off set by wastage in another user group. What is required is improved, customized understanding of water balances and water quality in specific basins, so that the benefits from often costly interventions to reduce losses are assessed in terms of the contribution to overall basin water use efficiency and water quality. Such understanding includes determining how much water can be consumptively used on a sustainable basis while still meeting environmental and other in-stream flow requirements without overexploitation of groundwater. Back to Top

World Bank Response
The World Bank promotes, contributes to, and facilitates the adoption of river basin management approaches, where relevant. Its current approach to managing water resources is guided by the Bank’s Water Resources Sector Strategy (2003) (pdf). The strategy advocates the use of a comprehensive policy framework for basin management that views water as an economic good, combined with decentralized management and delivery structures and fuller participation by stakeholders. At the river and lake basin level, it means supporting the development of modern stakeholder-based institutions for managing water resources.

The Bank uses its convening power, relations with almost all riparian countries, a combination of knowledge and financial resources to engage at all scales. The World Bank is actively engaged in bringing best practice to bear, through knowledge generation, partnerships, and lending operations.

Both directly and through its role in the Global Environment Facility, the World Bank can play a major role in facilitating cooperation on international waters and in helping to finance priority investments resulting from cooperative management. To succeed, these ventures need to focus on sharing benefits, not on sharing water. The maintenance of environmental flows is now being addressed in the design of new infrastructure and the recalibration of operating rules in river basins.

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