Hydropolitics

Hello everyone, welcome back! As mentioned, this post is going to look at IWRM in practice. IWRM is often used as a fuzzy term to explain ways of managing water resources as recommended by various international organisations as the best way forward in improving water security. However, often it isn’t adequately transitioned from a set of principles and policies into reality. This post is going to look specifically at the Berki watershed in Ethiopia as a case study, as this is one of the selected trial locations for the initial stages of implementing IWRM  (Global Water Partnership, 2015 ). Ethiopia is a country with immense water resource potential, however, due to the unequal distribution of water resources, as well as temporal factors influencing availability, around 50% of the population still don’t have sufficient access to an improved, safe water source. The region faces frequent droughts and floods, as well as an increasing population creating a higher demand for water...

Hello everyone! Welcome back to my blog. The past few blog posts have considered the colonial and post-colonial influences on water management on the Nile. In this blog post, I would like to move away from the Nile, and look deeper into the concept of Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM), which I briefly introduced in my post about the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. IWRM is an important topic, as it is believed to be the way forward with regards to dealing with issues of transboundary water management.   IWRM in History IWRM is a relatively new concept, it only came into discussions after the Agenda 21 and World Summit on Sustainable Development in 1992 ( Savenijie and Van der Zaag, 2008) . During the 60s and 70s water resources theory focused on water as an exploitative resource, concentrating efforts on engineering, and pioneering new technologies and ways of using water resources. However, in the 80s up until the 90s it was recognized that water was a finite re...