Governments and developing agencies promote participatory approaches in solving common pool resource problems, such as in the water sector. Two main participatory approaches have been applied separately, namely negotiation and mediation. In this paper the authors apply the Role-Playing Game that...

The environment and security literature has argued that freshwater scarcity often leads to inter-state conflict, and possibly acute violence. The contention, however, ignores the long history of hydro-political cooperation exemplified by hundreds of documented agreements. Building on a theory...

It is difficult and time-consuming to get adequate information about influence groups in a society. Dinar, Balakrishnan, and Wambia develop an approach to estimating the political risk associated with implementing a set of institutional reforms in the water sector. Their approach endogenizes the...

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...

The authors focus on policy interventions for improving irrigation water allocation decisions by including both macro and micro considerations in a unified analytical computable general equilibrium (CGE) framework. The approach is demonstrated, using the case of Morocco, by analyzing selected...

Piecemeal approaches to river basin development and management may not fully recognize the interactions and interdependence among components of a river basin system. River basin management that focuses on a single water use, on a single sector, or on the supply to particular segment of the basin...

Economic efficiency has to do with how much wealth a given resource base can generate. Equity has to do with how that wealth is to be distributed in society. Economic efficiency gets far more attention, in part because equity considerations involve value judgements that vary from person to...

From the earliest times, water resources have been allocated on the basis of social criteria -maintaining the community by ensuring that water is available for human consumption, for sanitation, and for food production. Societies have invested capital in infrastructure to maintain this...

This cross-country evaluation of institutional responses to problems in the water sector shows that changes in the nature of water problems have changed the development paradigm underlying water institutions. There is increasing recognition of how decentralized allocation mechanisms can...