Integrating ‘Livelihoods’ into Integrated Water Resources Management: Taking the Integration Paradigm to its Logical Next Step for Developing Countries
D. J. Merrey; P. Drechsel; F.W.T. Penning de Vries; H. Sally (2004)
What is wrong with recent developments in Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) approaches? What can be done to make them more people-centered?
This International Water Management Institute paper examines the weaknesses in the current understanding of IWRM from a livelihoods perspective. It argues that IWRM should not only include attention to natural resources and water management institutions, but also market access, making information available for smallholders, and the provision of supporting infrastructure like roads and telephone networks. Livelihoods-based IWRM has the potential to focus on how local-level communities can best use their available water supply to meet needs they themselves identify, and on how to bring additional water supplies to such communities to enable them to improve their livelihoods.
The paper highlights that:
Poverty has many dimensions, but lack of access to a reliable water supply for household as well as for productive purposes is one of its central features.
Communities have multiple water needs: for personal uses, agriculture, livestock, fishing, laundry, small businesses like brick making among others – and inadequate water supplies play a leading role in low productivity.
The authors recommend that:
Attention should be on working with local communities, to empower them to solve their own water problems locally, including by encouraging stronger local institutions.
Interim forums should be established, in which the diverse stakeholders’ interests would be represented to acknowledge equity issues as well as taking downstream effects into account.
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