Water Governance and Water Institutional Reform - The Politics of Water Institutional Reform in Neopatrimonial States - page 5

2 Water Governance and Water Institutional Reform

Since the beginning of the new millennium, 'water governance' has become the new catch
phrase in the international discourse on water and water crisis. This chapter provides an over
view of the concept and discourse of water governance. It gives background information for
the research question and the problem statement of this study. The chapter 2.1 describes the
development of the water governance concept and its implications for research and practice. A
means to achieve good water governance is water institutional reform the dependent variable
of this thesis, explained in chapter 2.2.

2.1 From Water Management to Water Governance

The declaration of the UN Year of Freshwater in 2003 and subsequently the UN International
Decade for Action “Water for Life” 2005 2015 are the highlights of an evolution that accredits
water vital importance for sustainable development. Yet in the 1992 Rio Declaration on Sus
tainable Development water was not one of the priorities. Only in 1998, the role of water as a
key resource for (sustainable) development was acknowledged and set on the agenda of inter
national development organizations (UNESCO 2003: 18, 370; ADB 2004). This change in
emphasis coincided with a change in approach towards water management: Shortcomings of
old concepts led to a shift stressing the influence of political and institutional factors in water
management. At the Bonn Freshwater Conference in 2001 the term 'water governance' as a
new catch phrase entered the international stage. This sub chapter will give an overview on
this development and then introduce the water governance concept.

2.1.1 The International Discourse on Water Management

Tony Allan (2003) identified four paradigms as shaping modern thinking about water man
agement: 4
1)

The paradigm of industrial modernity (starting at the end of the 19 th century);

2)

The ecological paradigm (starting in the 1960s);

3) The economic paradigm (starting in the beginning of the 1990s);

4) The political institutional paradigm (starting around the year 2000).

4 Allan actually distinguishes five paradigms, starting with the “pre-modern paradigm“. Given the problematic
connotation of the term “pre-modern“ and the fact that Allan neither defines it sufficiently nor would this be the place
to discuss it, I will only refer to the four 'modern' paradigms.