Resources

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Policy Brief n°7 - Community management of rural water supply in Malawi: part of the sustainability problem, not the solution

Community management has been seen since the 1990s as the key to ensuring clean water supply in rural villages in low-income countries. Community management approach is ‘the idea that communities should operate and maintain their
own water supply systems’ (Schouten and Moriarty, 2003). The core of the community management model is the Water Point Committee, typically a group of 6 to 10 villagers elected or otherwise delegated by their community to take responsibility for a water point such as a borehole with handpump, a protected spring, or a gravity-fed tap.

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Policy Brief n°6 - Everyday Politics of Water: From Water Reform Policies to Water Resource Configurations in Rural Africa.

Often to the disappointment of policy makers, water flows in agriculture seldom follow policy directives. Especially given the notoriously capricious nature of water, relatively little is known what happens between government's policies on paper and everyday water management practices within rural waterscapes. This paper zooms in on this ‘grey’ area, in a concerted attempt to identify and shed light on spaces of negation, tinkering and bricolage and how this affect the implementation of agricultural water policies.

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Policy Brief n°4 - Transboundary Governance of the Senegal and Niger Rivers: Historic Analysis and Determining Factors Identification

The Senegal River Basin Development Organization (OMVS) and the Niger Basin Authority (NBA) are recognized as examples of international watercourse governance best practices. Thanks to a set of skills that goes beyond the restrictive framework of flows management, they constitute genuine agencies for economical and social development. Despite their proximity, these organisations differ as their respective path to success undergone highly contingent features. Therefore we propose to compare the evolution of governance with respect to the Senegal and Niger watercourses in order to highlight common factors that led to coordination success as well as specificities of each case. We thereby ensure the tranposability of each model.

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Policy Brief n°5 - The Status of Common Facilities and Benefit Sharing in the Senegal and Niger River Basins

The Senegal River Development Organisation (Organisation pour la mise en valeur du fleuve Sénégal (OMVS) in French) and the Niger Basin Authority (NBA) have put into place specific regimes on the management and rational use of water resources. In order to concretize the concept of community of interests and right, both basin institutions have developed specific arrangements on the management of facilities and benefit sharing, taking into account the particularities of the two basins.

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Policy Brief n°3 - The Reconfiguration of Water Policies in Central Asia: A Reflexion on the IWRM Implementation in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan

In the framework of Political Geography of Water, this contribution examines the logics of water policies implementation in Central Asia. Reflecting on the interactions between water policies, political power, and hydraulic territories, it analyzes the Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) implementation - the global water paradigm promoted by the development organizations since the mid-1990s - its logics and rationales, in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan at the basin / local level (Middle Zeravshan Valley, Uzbekistan / Arys Valley, Kazakhstan).

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Policy Brief n°2 - Entry into force of the Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses (1997)

The entry into force of the Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses (United Nations 1997 Convention) on 17 August 2014 constitutes a major milestone for water international law development.

 

Policy Brief n°1

Multilevel governance
International Geneva as a hub for water governance

Policy Brief n°1 - Multilevel governance: International Geneva as a Hub for Water Governance

Geneva is one of the world’s major hubs for world governance and multilateral diplomacy. With its high concentration of international organisations, non-governmental organisation and permanent missions, Geneva plays a leading role in the active governance of the world’s most pressing issues and challenges. This is represented across all sectors and water governance is no exception. Many of the principal actors who are engaged on water governance policy and cooperation, those both locally and globally focused, are situated in the Geneva area.