Good management of water resources - universally identified as a key aspect of poverty reduction, agriculture and food security - has proven, in practice, as difficult to achieve as it is eagerly sought.
Governance embraces the full complexity of a wide range of regulatory processes and their interaction. This is reflected in the definition of water governance by UNDP: “Water governance refers to the range of political, social, economic and administrative systems that are in place to regulate development and management of water resources and provisions of water services at different levels of society (UNDP, 2000)”.
A major challenge is to understand how all these different processes in concert determine certain policy outcomes and how change in governance regimes occurs.
The Nehterlands has 800 years of experience with water governance, optimizing it’s water use, flood protection, quality of surface water, control of quantities of surface water.
The Dutch Unie van Waterschappen (Union of Water Boards) has taken the initiative to start a Water Governance Centre. Supported by the Government of the Netherlands (Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment; Ministry of Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation; and Ministry of Foreign Affairs), the centre aims to make better use of the Dutch knowledge on water governance, both in the Netherlands and abroad. Simultaneously, societal changes, greater complexity of problems, competing interests and climatic change call for strengthening water governance. The centre, which opened on 20 May 2011, will act as a network organization.
