IWRM Definitions

Working DefinitionsIWRM “A process which promotes the coordinated development and management of water, land, and related resources, in order to maximize the resultant economic and social welfare in an equitable manner without compromising the sustainability of vital ecosystems.” Global Water Partnership, www.gwp.org/en/The-Challenge/What-is-IWRM/

It is based on the Dublin Principles, stating that: “1) freshwater is a finite and vulnerable resource, essential to sustain life, development and the environment; 2) water development and management should be based on a participatory approach involving users, planners and policy makers at all levels; 3) women play a central part in the provision, management and safeguarding of water; 4) water is a public good and has a social and economic value in all its competing uses; and 5) integrated water resources management is based on the equitable and efficient management and sustainable use of water.” Global Water Partnership, http://www.gwp.org/en/The-Challenge/What-is-IWRM/Dublin-Rio-Principles/

AM “Seeks to aggressively use management intervention as a tool to strategically probe the functioning of [a system]. Interventions are designed to test key hypotheses about the functioning of the [system]...[it] identifies uncertainties, and then establishes methodologies to test hypotheses concerning those uncertainties. It uses management as a tool not only to change the system, but as a tool to learn about the system...The achievement of these objectives requires an open management process which seeks to include past, present, and future stakeholders. Adaptive management needs to at least maintain political openness, but usually it needs to create it. Consequently, adaptive management must be a social as well as scientific process...” Resilience Alliance, http://www.resalliance.org/600.php

Engle, Johns, Lemos, and Nelson. 2011. Integrated and adaptive management of water resources: tensions, legacies, and the next best thing. Ecology and Society 16(1): 19. [online] URL:http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol16/iss1/art19/

Declaration of the Occupation

Declaration of the Occupation of New York City

Posted on September 30, 2011 by NYCGA

This document was accepted by the NYC General Assembly on september 29, 2011

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As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.

This economic collapse is a 'crisis of bigness' | Paul Kingsnorth | Comment is free | The Guardian

This economic collapse is a 'crisis of bigness' | Paul Kingsnorth | Comment is free | The Guardian: This economic collapse is a 'crisis of bigness'

This economic collapse is a 'crisis of bigness'

Leopold Kohr warned 50 years ago that the gigantist global system would grow until it imploded. We should have listened

Paul Kingsnorth
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 25 September 2011 16.00 EDT
Article history

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Illustration by Andrzej Krauze

Living through a collapse is a curious experience. Perhaps the most curious part is that nobody wants to admit it's a collapse. The results of half a century of debt-fuelled "growth" are becoming impossible to convincingly deny, but even as economies and certainties crumble, our appointed leaders bravely hold the line. No one wants to be the first to say the dam is cracked beyond repair.

To listen to a political leader at this moment in history is like sitting through a sermon by a priest who has lost his faith but is desperately trying not to admit it, even to himself. Watch Nick Clegg, David Cameron or Ed Miliband mouthing tough-guy platitudes to the party faithful. Listen to Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy or George Papandreou pretending that all will be well in the eurozone. Study the expressions on the faces of Barack Obama or Ben Bernanke talking about "growth" as if it were a heathen god to be appeased by tipping another cauldron's worth of fictional money into the mouth of a volcano.

In times like these, people look elsewhere for answers. A time of crisis is also a time of opening-up, when thinking that was consigned to the fringes moves to centre stage. When things fall apart, the appetite for new ways of seeing is palpable, and there are always plenty of people willing to feed it by coming forward with their pet big ideas.

But here's a thought: what if big ideas are part of the problem? What if, in fact, the problem is bigness itself?

The crisis currently playing out on the world stage is a crisis of growth. Not, as we are regularly told, a crisis caused by too little growth, but by too much of it. Banks grew so big that their collapse would have brought down the entire global economy. To prevent this, they were bailed out with huge tranches of public money, which in turn is precipitating social crises on the streets of western nations. The European Union has grown so big, and so unaccountable, that it threatens to collapse in on itself. Corporations have grown so big that they are overwhelming democracies and building a global plutocracy to serve their own interests. The human economy as a whole has grown so big that it has been able to change the atmospheric composition of the planet and precipitate a mass extinction event.

One man who would not have been surprised by this crisis of bigness, had he lived to see it, was Leopold Kohr. Kohr has a good claim to be the most important political thinker that you have never heard of. Unlike Marx, he did not found a global movement or inspire revolutions. Unlike Hayek, he did not rewrite the economic rules of the modern world. Kohr was a modest, self-deprecating man, but this was not the reason his ideas have been ignored by movers and shakers in the half century since they were produced. They have been ignored because they do not flatter the egos of the power-hungry, be they revolutionaries or plutocrats. In fact, Kohr's message is a direct challenge to them. "Wherever something is wrong," he insisted, "something is too big."

Kohr was born in 1909 in the small Austrian town of Oberndorf. This smalltown childhood, together with his critical study of economics and political theory at the LSE, his experience of anarchist city states during the Spanish civil war, which he covered as a war reporter, and the fact that he was forced to flee Austria after the Nazi invasion (Kohr was Jewish), contributed to his growing suspicion of power and its abuses.

Settling in the US, Kohr began to write the book that would define his thinking. Published in 1957, The Breakdown of Nations laid out what at the time was a radical case: that small states, small nations and small economies are more peaceful, more prosperous and more creative than great powers or superstates. It was a claim that was as unfashionable as it was possible to make. This was the dawn of the space age – a time of high confidence in the progressive, gigantist, technology-fuelled destiny of humankind. Feted political thinkers were talking in all seriousness of creating a world government as the next step towards uniting humanity. Kohr was seriously at odds with the prevailing mood. He later commented, dryly, that his critics "dismissed my ideas by referring to me as a poet".

Kohr's claim was that society's problems were not caused by particular forms of social or economic organisation, but by their size. Socialism, anarchism, capitalism, democracy, monarchy – all could work well on what he called "the human scale": a scale at which people could play a part in the systems that governed their lives. But once scaled up to the level of modern states, all systems became oppressors. Changing the system, or the ideology that it claimed inspiration from, would not prevent that oppression – as any number of revolutions have shown – because "the problem is not the thing that is big, but bigness itself".

Drawing from history, Kohr demonstrated that when people have too much power, under any system or none, they abuse it. The task, therefore, was to limit the amount of power that any individual, organisation or government could get its hands on. The solution to the world's problems was not more unity but more division. The world should be broken up into small states, roughly equivalent in size and power, which would be able to limit the growth and thus domination of any one unit. Small states and small economies were more flexible, more able to weather economic storms, less capable of waging serious wars, and more accountable to their people. Not only that, but they were more creative. On a whistlestop tour of medieval and early modern Europe, The Breakdown of Nations does a brilliant job of persuading the reader that many of the glories of western culture, from cathedrals to great art to scientific innovations, were the product of small states.

To understand the sparky, prophetic power of Kohr's vision, you need to read The Breakdown of Nations. Some if it will create shivers of recognition. Bigness, predicted Kohr, could only lead to more bigness, for "whatever outgrows certain limits begins to suffer from the irrepressible problem of unmanageable proportions". Beyond those limits it was forced to accumulate more power in order to manage the power it already had. Growth would become cancerous and unstoppable, until there was only one possible endpoint: collapse.

We have now reached the point that Kohr warned about over half a century ago: the point where "instead of growth serving life, life must now serve growth, perverting the very purpose of existence". Kohr's "crisis of bigness" is upon us and, true to form, we are scrabbling to tackle it with more of the same: closer fiscal unions, tighter global governance, geoengineering schemes, more economic growth. Big, it seems, is as beautiful as ever to those who have the unenviable task of keeping the growth machine going.

This shouldn't surprise us. It didn't surprise Kohr, who, unlike some of his utopian critics, never confused a desire for radical change with the likelihood of it actually happening. Instead, his downbeat but refreshingly honest conclusion was that, like a dying star, the gigantist global system would in the end fall in on itself, and the whole cycle of growth would begin all over again. But before it did so, "between the intellectual ice ages of great-power domination", the world would become "little and free once more".

Corporate Takeover of Drinking Water

The UN Is Aiding a Corporate Takeover of Drinking Water

Billions of dollars are being given out to the most ardent promoters of water privatization.

July 3, 2011 |

Early last month, pharmaceutical titan Merck became the latest multinational to pledge allegiance to the CEO Water Mandate, the United Nations' public-private initiative "designed to assist companies in the development, implementation and disclosure of water sustainability policies and practices."
But there's darker data beneath that sunny marketing: The CEO Water Mandate has been heavily hammered by the Sierra Club, the Polaris Institute and more for exerting undemocratic corporate control over water resources (PDF) under the banner of the United Nations. It even won a Public Eye Award for flagrant greenwashing from the Swiss non-governmental organization Berne Declaration. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
"There is no admission of problems with the Water Mandate, or the United Nations Global Compact itself" -- the strategic policy initiative committed to human rights, labor and the environment -- Blue Gold and Blue Covenant author and activist Maude Barlow, who also chairs the National Council of Canadians and Food & Water Watch, explained to AlterNet. "These initiatives continue to flourish, not least because the most powerful member states of the United Nations are fully behind them. This also means that the United Nations is not funded fully. Programs and agencies often rely on private sponsorship to function, and are often barely getting their core administrative budgets funded."
Another major problem is that routinely compromised and controversial institutions like World Bank, International Monetary Fund and regional development banks in general are in control of the United Nations' biggest projects. In April, the World Bank assumed control of the United Nations Climate Conference's new $100 billion Green Fund, which is the opposite of a comforting proposition, considering the World Bank's repeatedly noxious financing of oil and coal projects.
"That gives control of billions of dollars to those who have been the most ardent promoters of water privatization," added Barlow, whose foreword for the Council of Canadians' recently damning report on private sector influence over the United Nations (PDF) argued that the planet is on the verge of a water crisis of terrifying proportions. "We're also seeing the IMF forcing indebted nations to sell off public assets, including water systems, as a condition of receiving financial support. The whole system is rigged for these corporations, and they still are losing contracts, not meeting their obligations and watching as remunicipalization moves forward in France and other core markets."
That kind of illogical corporate performance would logically lead to less control, not more. But the United Nations continues to hand over the reins to multinationals like its new cosigner Merck, which has repeatedly settled in court over everything from carcinogenic pollution to deceptive marketing. Despite the fact that the United Nations' own Joint Inspection Unit stated in a 2010 report (PDF) that the Global Compact's corporate partnerships were an unregulated mess.
"The lack of a clear and articulated mandate has resulted in blurred focus and impact," the report stated. "The absence of adequate entry criteria and an effective monitoring system to measure actual implementation of the principles by participants has drawn some criticism and reputational risk for the Organization, and the Office’s special set up has countered existing rules and procedures. Ten years after its creation, despite the intense activity carried out by the Office and the increasing resources received, results are mixed and risks unmitigated."
The report suggested that not only was a clearer mandate from Member States required to "rethink and refocus" the Compact's corporate partnerships, but that the United Nations' General Assembly must better direct the Secretary-General to delineate the Compact's overall functions "in order to prevent a situation whereby any external group or actor(s) may divert attention from the strategic goals agreed to promote interests which may damage the reputation of the United Nations." The short version? It's not working, and won't work in its current form for the foreseeable future.
But the United Nations' own advice to itself has evidently fallen mostly on deaf ears.
"Unfortunately, the United Nations appears to be embracing more and more partnerships with the corporate sector across the board," Corporate Accountability International campaign director Gigi Kellett told AlterNet. "Civil society has been raising concerns about this flawed approach for over 10 years. There are strong voices within the United Nations, including some Member states, who are questioning the partnership paradigm adopted by the UN and calling for more transparency and accountability."
But they are voices in the wilderness without the concerted support of a motivated public, as well as the usual civil society champions who make stopping this strain of corporate abuse their life's work. Power truly respects only one thing, and that is equally exercised power. And the public is fully empowered to make all the change it wants, provided it can unplug itself from distracting sex scandals and mainstream media marketing primarily designed to nurture its collective complacency.
"Corporations rely on people's tacit support and willingness to look the other way when they engage in conduct that harms people or the environment and undermines democratic governance and decision-making," Kellett said. "When people come together in coordinated fashion and withhold their support from a corporation, that relationship is turned on its head. Boycotts are one powerful way that individuals can withhold their support, but there are range of other strategies. When activists come together and raise questions about a corporation's actions and tie them to its brand and image, the resulting media exposure can greatly impact how the corporation is perceived by consumers, investors or even government regulators."
But how do you boycott a multinational that controls your water supply? Can you shame a mammoth corporation into abdicating control over a lucrative commodity that should instead be regarded as a universal human right? Talk about your Sisyphean tasks.
"Boycotts are much more difficult with water than a product like Coke," said Barlow. "There are no substitutes for water, and when these corporations are given monopoly power over water systems, boycotts are very unrealistic. Suez, Veolia and others are very concerned about their corporate image, but there is no effective means to hurt them financially except to end or block the contracts before they are signed. Boycotts have been very effective as public awareness campaigns, but citizens need to apply pressure on their governments as the first step in stopping the proliferation of voluntary initiatives."
Demanding regulation of the private sector's products -- from water and natural resource commodification to inscrutable financial instruments and beyond -- as well as the public's political electives appears to be the paramount first principle. Because the problem is getting worse and going nowhere, especially now that our dystopian climate crisis has permanently disrupted business, and existence, as usual. From escalating warming and extreme weather to destabilized nations and environments, Earth is already precariously balanced on the tipping point. And giving profit-minded corporations voluntary control over their power and procedures is a 20th century anachronism best left behind.
"We have not proven to have what it takes to deal with the climate crisis," argued Barlow, "and this is because it is all seen as a giant political and financial game, rather than the best and only chance to head off a catastrophe like we have never before imagined. Climate change is upon us, but we will never admit it fully, nor invest in stopping it, if our governments continue to represent corporate interests above others. It is up to us to challenge our states, and make sure they know we are engaged and aware."

Coalitions, Science, and Belief Change

Status: Published

Weible, Christopher M. and Sabatier, Paul A.  (2009) Coalitions, Science, and Belief Change: Comparing Adversarial and Collaborative Policy Subsystems. The Policy Studies Journal, 37(2)

Christopher M. Weible and Paul A. Sabatier from the University of Colorado Denver found that collaborative approaches:  (and I quote from Page: 1)

• will mitigate conflict

• help integrate science and values

• policy subsystems are associated with convergence in some beliefs between rival coalitions

• policy participants are no more likely to rely on science-based, empirical beliefs in collaborative than in adversarial policy subsystems.

Weible and Sabatier "use the advocacy coalition framework (ACF; Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith, 1993; Sabatier & Weible, 2007) to compare adversarial and collaborative policy subsystems concerning (i) convergence in beliefs regarding both water quality problems and Comments from page 1 continued on next page agreement with policy proposals; and (ii) the relative use of empirical versus normative beliefs in supporting policy proposals."  Thus they Conclude (clipped directly from Page: 14)

• This long-term shift toward science suggests learning has occurred in the Basin and supports Weiss’s (1977) enlightenment function that science slowly accumulates like sedimentation in the minds of decision makers.

• Changes in beliefs, for example, might not result from the emergence of a collaborative subsystem but rather from turnover in policy participants or to other unknown factors. [$$$ is my personal experience].

• Political events in the Basin, however, show the same trends found across many environmental policy subsystems: a shift from adversarial processes … to collaborative processes.

• Analysis finds that in a collaborative policy subsystem some beliefs converge between coalitions, suggesting the mitigation of conflict to more intermediate levels.

Sabatier Paul A., and Hank Jenkins-Smith, eds. (1993) Policy Change and Learning: An Advocacy Coalition Approach. (Boulder, Co: Westview, 1993), 290pp.

Sabatier Paul A., and Christopher M. Weible. (2007) The Advocacy Coalition Framework: Innovations and Clarifications. In Theories of the Policy Process, 2nd edn, ed. Paul A. Sabatier. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 189–220.

Weiss, Carol. (1977) Research for Policy’s Sake: The Enlightenment Function of Social Research. Policy Analysis 3 (Fall): 531–45.

weavers leadership web
Author: (c) June 17, 2011 2:04 AM Eric Weaver

Integrated regional water management

Status: Published

Lubell, Mark and Lippert, Lucas (2011) Integrated regional water management: a study of collaboration or water politics-as-usual in California,USA  International Review of Administrative Sciences 2011 77: 76

Mark Lubell is a Professor at UC Davis helped Lucas Lippert an MS student who "conducted a survey of Bay Area stakeholders regarding their participation and attitudes towards IRWMP.”  Lubell and Lippert completed an evaluation of the IRWM development in San Francisco California specifically to inform other water management professionals of the importance of this collaborative model.  However, the majority of their reviews found that the old-guard set on the command and control paradigm would invariably circumvent and over ride any new stakeholder and cooperative collaboration that impeded their “politics-as-usual.”  Lubell and Lippert conclude by discerning the need to further research issues like “How much change, over what time span, is enough to continue investing in integrated approaches?”  Of course any research to reduce the fragmentation and encourage integration and collaboration is important while they found the IWRM “only make incremental changes in the short-run."

weavers leadership web

Author: (c) June 17, 2011 12:32 AM Eric Weaver

 

Institutional development for IWRM:

Status: Published

Bandaragoda, D. J. and Babel, Mukand S.(2010) Institutional development for IWRM: an international perspective, International Journal of River Basin Management, 8: 3, 215 — 224, First published on: 01 July 2010

Bandaragoda, is the Retired Regional Director for International Irrigation Management Institute (IIMI)'s South East Asia Regional Office and Senior Management Specialist for nine years in IIMI's Pakistan program based in Lahore after serving as a member of the Sri Lankan administrative service while MUKAND S. BABEL, is a Associate Professor, Water Engineering & Management at the Asian Institute of Technology, Pathumthani, Thailand.   Together they document the development of integrated water resources management (IWRM) through the United Nations Conference on Water in the Mar del Plata (1977), the International Conference on Water and Environment (1992), the Second World Water Forum (2000), the International Conference on Freshwater (2001), the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in 2002, and the Third World Water Forum (2003) which made IWRM central to global politics.  They discussed IWRM’s zenith with “The fourth World Water Forum in Mexico in 2006 dealt with sharing experience and finding ways to further the implementation of IWRM” before Bandaragoda and Babel went back into the concept’s history to note that China addressed water management back in the twentieth century BC.  After completing the historical review the authors reviewed current applications and ambitions attempts in Asia which resulted in critical questions:

1. Why have the water sector institutional reforms failed?
2. Is it necessary to have hydrologically based RBOs [river basin organization] for the promotion of IWRM?
3. Can the developed-country models of RBOs be successfully replicated in developing countries?

Although Bandaragoda and Babel claimed this review represents a “fairly bleak picture” professional water managers can benefit from these recommendations:

1. Pilot projects to establish sub-basin level stakeholder organizations were successful.
2. A clear water policy and related water laws are essential requirements to guide this collaborative arrangement.
3. Expensive institutional device such as RBOs is not necessary.
4. Local stakeholder involvement, an inter-sectoral representation is most essential.

weavers leadership web

Author:(c) June 17, 2011 12:37 AM Eric Weaver