Science, Policy and Stakeholders in Water Management

Book excerpt: One of the major problems facing practitioners and scientists working with water management is how to integrate knowledge and experiences from scientific, policy and stakeholder perspectives. In this book this science-policy-stakeholder interface (SPSI) is examined both analytically and through the description of practical experiences from river basins in Europe, India and South-East Asia. These include the Tungabhadra (India), Sesan (Vietnam/Cambodia), Tagus (Spain/Portugal) and Glomma (Norway), which particularly highlight issues associated with pollution, severely altered river flows and transboundary conflicts. Following two chapters which lay the framework for the book the authors describe how SPSI was managed in the case study basins and how stakeholder participation and scenarios were used to integrate different perspectives, and to facilitate the communication of different forms of knowledge. Four important aspects of water management and SPSI are then discussed; these are water pollution, land and water interaction, environmental flow and transboundary water regimes. Short descriptions of the case study rivers are provided together with analyses of how SPSI was managed in water management in these basins and policy recommendations for the basins. The book concludes by providing a series of recommendations for improving the science-policy-stakeholder interface in water management. It represents a major step forward in our understanding of how to implement integrated water resources management.