Encyclopedia Of Geography Pdf Free Download

River basins are geographical units in which all streams drain to a common terminus, but as a political boundary it is also the result of a choice and social construction. The concept has, from the nineteenth century onward, chiefly been mobilized for justifying and rationalizing the large-scale development of water resources by powerful water bureaucracies imbued with their "hydraulic mission." Excessive development resulting in basin closure and social and environmental externalities must be understood as a political phenomenon. The relevance of looking at water-related problems through the lens of the water basin has been debated and the complexity of multilevel governance unearthed, not least at the transboundary level. Whether river basin organizations are needed or desirable, and what their prerogatives should be, are also under question.

Discover the world's research

20+ million members
135+ million publications
700k+ research projects

Join for free

River basin management

and development

François Molle

Institut de Recherche pour le Développement

(IRD), France

International Water Management Institute

(IWMI), Egypt

River basins in historical context

In common language, the concept of the river

basin pertains to the eld of physical geography,

and is well established in secondary classrooms:

river (or drainage) basins are extents of land that

drains all streams and rainfall toward the same

terminus, generally a river or the sea, or some-

times an inland water body. River basins are also

often called catchments in British English, while

watershed, which in American English designates

smaller basins of a few thousand square kilome-

ters, refers to the line dividing two river basins.

River basins which drain to an inland water body

are called endorheic basins, and form large areas of

Central Asia and desert regions, like the Sahara

or the Arabian Peninsula. River basins can also

be seen as nested "rainfall collectors," with small

tributaries converging to larger rivers.

Although there are indications of sophisti-

cated knowledge of both river systems and the

hydrological cycle by the Chinese as early as

the third century BC (with a clear description

of how vapor generates clouds and clouds

rivers), and despite the rened hydraulic skills of

ancient civilizations and later of the Romans and

The International Encyclopedia of Geography.

Edited by Douglas Richardson, Noel Castree, Michael F. Goodchild, Audrey Kobayashi, Weidong Liu, and Richard A. Marston.

DOI: 10.1002/9781118786352.wbieg0907

the Arabs, the conceptualization of hydrology

remained limited. Land and water resources

were in general exploited through piecemeal

projects destined for channeling, lifting, storing,

poldering, or diverting water in places deemed

suitable, based on the characteristics of the land,

the understanding of the ow regime, and the

available technology.

The clear articulation of the notion of the

river basin was probably hindered by diculties

in comprehending the hydrological cycle, most

particularly the origin of springs and why and

how rivers were owing despite the absence

of rainfall for long periods of time. In 1674

Pierre Perrault, a French geographer, wrote the

treatise De l'origine des fontaines (On the Origin

of Springs), which established a crude water

balance of the upper Seine river basin, where

he compared the river discharge with "the

rainwater that falls around its bed," a calculation

which would later be extended by Mariotte to

the ow of the Seine through Paris. In 1752,

Philippe Buache, a French cartographer attached

to the court of King Louis XV, published an

essay attempting to describe the structure of

continents based on the study of mountain

ranges, streams, and rivers which dened a river

basin as "the set of all the slopes on which fall the

waters that converge to a same river or creek."

His theory was rapidly taken up by Gatterer in

Germany who improved it and made it the basis

of a theory of the division of the world into

lands and regions.

Industrialization paralleled by scientic and

technological development would subsequently

project the river basin as the locus of the

human conquest of nature. Ambitious national

water projects including irrigation schemes or

RIVER BASIN MANAGEMENT AND DEVELOPMENT

hydropower generation were often discursively

rooted in the promotion of the river basin as a

natural unit for planning development or orga-

nizing societies. The river basin concept, beyond

its alleged naturalness, thus came to embody a

number of ideologies and was instrumentalized

by dierent constituencies. In the late nineteenth

century the concept of a river basin nurtured

utopias and political struggles concerning the

relationships between central and local power

in several countries. In France, the concept

was captured by political interests to serve as a

weapon against the revolution and centralization,

and was supported by the landowning aristocracy

who sought to re-establish the pre-eminence

of the "local." In Spain, the regeneracionismo

movement embraced the river basin as a "natural

unit" that signaled a natural and harmonious

order that was in contrast to the traditional

political and administrative divisions inherited

from the past; it was used against the tradi-

tional landowning elite. In the United States,

John Wesley Powell advocated the establish-

ment of self-determined "commonwealths,"

independent of both capitalists and bureaucrats,

organized along hydrographic basins and based

on natural resources rather than on the prevailing

township and county system.

Although its relation with the basin scale

was not always prominent because early devel-

opments occurred in the context of a relative

abundance of water, irrigation development

became the center of water resource develop-

ment during the second half of the nineteenth

century, with enthusiastic private investments in

places such as the western United States, Aus-

tralia, and India often meeting with bankruptcy

and calling for public intervention. As a result of

this nancial failure and given various national

objectives, the states stepped in and endorsed

the role of (large-scale) developers of water

resources. Imbued with the fresh legitimacy of

technical marvels and the presumably unlim-

ited power of science, inspired by the colonial

deeds of the British in India and the Sudan, the

Dutch in Indonesia, and the French in Vietnam,

hydraulic bureaucracies were created to take up

the challenges of ood protection, large-scale

public irrigation, and hydropower generation.

These bureaucracies took as their motto the

promise that not a single drop of water should

reach the sea without being put to work for the

benet of humanity: the "hydraulic mission"

was born (Molle 2007).

The beginning of the twentieth century was

thus marked by the creation of many hydraulic

bureaucracies in dierent parts of the world.

These include the US Bureau of Reclamation

(1902), the National Irrigation Commission in

Mexico (1926), the Department of Canals in

Siam (1902; now the Royal Irrigation Depart-

ment), the General Directorate of Public Works

in Turkey (1914; now DSI), the Inspetoria de

Obras Contra as Secas in Brazil (1909; later

DNOCS), and the strengthening of many of the

corps of engineers that had been created in the

eighteenth and nineteenth century in European

countries, as well as colonial irrigation adminis-

trations in Indonesia, Egypt, and India. But the

mission of reducing ood damage or irrigating

elds was soon to be enlarged with hydropower

and the task of generating electricity, fueled by

progress in technology in high dam construction,

turbines, and high-voltage transmission lines at

the beginning of the twentieth century.

These technological innovations and the many

"missions" entrusted to hydraulic bureaucracies

were pooled and came to be associated with river

basin planning and management, as epitomized

in the 1930s by the advent of the Tennessee

Valley Authority (TVA), launched by Roosevelt

in the aftermath of the economic crisis. River

basin development was taken to new heights

by combining the concept of unied development

RIVER BASIN MANAGEMENT AND DEVELOPMENT

(the damming of all the streams of a given river

basin to bring the river under total control),

the benets of multipurpose dams (hydropower,

ood protection, transportation, irrigation, and

other uses), and the idea of regional develop-

ment (associating water development with other

interventions such as reforestation, production of

fertilizers, industrial development, etc.). These

ideas were soon expanded to the Columbia

Basin in the United States which was to become

the "battery" of the west coast, with the rst

concrete for the grandiose Grand Coulee Dam

poured in December 1935. Similar large-scale

projects and planned development were oated

in Stalin's Russia, in a political and parallel

contest, where technology, mechanization, and

large-scale centralized planning and production

processes were part and parcel of a vision of what

Josephson (1995) called a "supremely rational

society," which would plan massive hydropower

plants and canals (e.g., the infamous White

Sea–Baltic Canal), as well as "domesticate" rivers

like the Volga.

In the postwar period of the 1950s and 1960s,

which was marked by the need for reconstruc-

tion and to grow food for a world in shambles,

grandiose water resources development schemes

were soon in high demand. In the United States,

the Bureau of Reclamation and the United

States Army Corps of Engineers engaged in a

sweeping damming of the country's rivers (Reis-

ner 1993/1986) and envisaged megaprojects like

the transfer of water from Alaska to Mexico. In

the Soviet Union, electricity production, and

how it would transform society and the econ-

omy (a vision long nurtured by Lenin), received

much attention from Stalin who launched the

Volta Project – epitomized by the Kuibyshef

dam – and the 1948 Plan for the Transformation

of Nature. This plan and the later Siberian river

reversal project to divert water to Central Asia

were echoed by what Shapiro termed "Mao's

war against Nature" and its major ood control,

canal and hydropower projects in the 1950s.

In Spain, Franco undertook the relentless con-

struction of 800 dams (and irrigation schemes)

as a way of legitimizing his power and buying

support from rural elites. Hydropower develop-

ment soared in countries like Canada, Norway,

and Sweden, where rivers were, in the words of

Jakobsson, "industrialized."

In the developing countries, particularly

newly independent ones, elites and governments

enthusiastically embraced the icons of moder-

nity and development epitomized by large-scale

irrigation schemes and dams – in India famously

referred to by Nehru as "the temples of modern

India." In that, they were supported by either

Western countries or the Soviet Union, which

had both economic and geopolitical interests

in fueling this postcolonial hydraulic mission.

Massive investments – most pre-eminently in

dams and irrigation systems – in countries with

potential rural instability were thought by the

United States to be the best defense against

the spread of communism. It was in this context

that the TVA, marketed in particular by the

prophetic tone of Lilienthal's book TVA: Democ-

racy on the March (1944), was to become both an

icon of modernity and development and a major

asset of US overseas development and diplomacy

(Ekbladh 2002): in a matter of years the TVA

would become the "grand-daddy of all regional

development projects," embodying the social

engineering drive that Scott (1998) has termed

"high modernism," and inspiring a multitude

of TVA-like projects in river basins such as the

Jordan, Danube, and Mekong, and in countries

as diverse as Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Colombia,

China, and South Africa. This further spurred

the creation of national water bureaucracies

entrusted with river basin planning and the

construction of hydropower dams, reservoirs,

and canal networks for irrigation.

RIVER BASIN MANAGEMENT AND DEVELOPMENT

The four decades following World War II

witnessed massive investments in reservoirs

(large dams increased globally from 5000 in 1950

to around 50 000 at present, while irrigated areas

doubled from 140 million ha to 280 million

ha). All the ingredients of nineteenth-century

scientism, hubris, and utopias were alive and

well and the hydraulic mission was in full swing,

predicated on an ideology of the domination of

nature, where "conquering," "harnessing," and

"taming" the wilderness were touted as part of a

civilizing mission, and rooted in the conviction

that water owing to the ocean was a waste that

called for infrastructure to capture and manage

the resource in each river basin.

Beyond promises to feed the masses, raise rural

income, or meet energy requirements, the devel-

opment of public irrigation and associated dams

was central to Cold War geopolitics as well as to

wider national state policies, whether it was to

settle nomads (as in the Middle East and Tunisia);

to provide jobs to returning servicemen after

the two world wars (as in Australia and South

Africa); to break up haciendas and colonize

them, with farmers practicing "revolutionary

irrigation" (Mexico); or to strategically occupy

land (as in the United States, Israel, and Sri

Lanka). As a result, the hydraulic mission era was

characterized by a massive injection of public

money in all countries, with associated subsidies

and political favors.

In industrialized countries the hydraulic mis-

sion started to lose momentum in the early

1980s, with the growing recognition of asso-

ciated social and environmental costs, and also

with the decreasing availability of suitable dam

and irrigation sites. A similar trend was observed

15 years later in developing countries, although

infrastructure development remains largely

unabated in a number of countries. This change

was due to the rise of environmental concerns

(priority shifting toward water quality and

environmental sustainability), the public costs of

such water resources development, and increas-

ing criticism from aected groups and the civil

society at large. Challenges to conventional river

basin development also resulted from the shift

from government to governance, whereby water

issues came to be considered as societal questions

requiring participation from, or co-management

with, concerned stakeholders. In the early 1990s

these concerns were reected in the Dublin Prin-

ciples and the formulation of integrated water

resources management (IWRM) approaches,

which were later formalized by the European

Union in its Water Framework Directive. The

directive sanctioned the river basin as the appro-

priate unit for managing water, partly under the

inuence of some national models (e.g., France

and Spain), and partly as an embodiment of the

promotion of basin-centered management by

mainstream international organizations. But the

appeal of river basins as an organizing principle

also came from its "naturalness," as the locus of

hydrological processes where the integration of

water-related issues, as well as the participation

of stakeholders, should be facilitated. The pro-

motion of the river basin as a universal unit for

water management has triggered wide discussion

and scholarly debates from various disciplines.

Current research agenda

Basin management, modeling,

and hydrology

River basin management is a subject of predilec-

tion for modelers. Hydrologists and engineers

have developed numerous models to reproduce

hydrological processes and to study and optimize

the allocation of resources. Models, long limited

to the study of surface water, have grown in

sophistication and now increasingly include

groundwater modules coupled with surface

RIVER BASIN MANAGEMENT AND DEVELOPMENT

water. However, it often remains dicult to

appreciate, for example, time lags and two-way

interactions between surface water and ground-

water resources, how changes in land use, in

particular deforestation, alter runo and ground-

water recharge. Likewise, actual management

rules of dams and irrigation schemes, and more

generally the change in actors' behaviors at all

levels in the face of extreme events, are dicult

to model. A growing body of literature is also

addressing the evolution of supply and demand

in river basins under varied scenarios of climate

change. Economists have developed their own

models to optimize the economic eciency of

resource allocation within river basins. Despite

growing sophistication, these models generally

work at a high level of aggregation and are

often unable to reproduce local dynamics and

to capture the complexity of the interaction

between physical and humanz systems.

The question of eciency in water use within

river basins has also been the subject of many

works that have emphasized the concept of

river basin eciency, as opposed to local user or

system eciency. They have shown how local

"ineciencies" associated with leaky canals,

reservoir spills, return ows from irrigation,

or other system "losses" are often the primary

source of water for other users or for ecosystems

within the basin. Successive reuses of water

across nested scales greatly complexify water

balances and accounting, and introduce addi-

tional and intertwined questions about changes

in water quality and energy costs. Although

this important work has critical implications

for the concepts of eciency and allocation, it

is not always well understood, and reasoning

based on conventional point-of-use eciencies

often prevails, partly because of adherence to

classic engineering conceptions but also because

it provides easy justication for investments in

water-saving technologies.

River basin overbuilding and trajectories

Long-term interactions between societies and

their river basin environment are sometimes

described by the term "river basin trajecto-

ries," which examines human eorts to assess,

capture, convey, store, share, and use available

water resources in the face of changing physical

and social environments, as well as how the

distribution of decisional and discursive power

results in specic water regimes, with particular

patterns of distribution of costs, benet, and

risk across space, time, and social groups. Other

concepts and approaches within the eld of

political ecology, such as the hydrosocial cycle or

the socioecological concept of the waterscape,

although seldom applied to river basins as such,

also emphasize relations of power behind the

manipulation of the water cycle.

One commonplace aspect of a basin trajectory

is basin closure, which occurs when the quantity

of water abstracted from the river or the aquifer

is so high that it can no longer ensure the

supply to downstream users, dilute pollution,

control salinity intrusion, ush sediments, or

sustain healthy ecosystems at the river mouth

(or terminus). This imbalance can manifest itself

only during a few dry months (where the basin

is said to be closing ), or almost permanently

(where the basin is said to be closed). Closure

and resulting scarcity can sometimes occur in

sub-basins or small catchments, while the larger

basin remains open. Rivers hardly reaching the

sea, or contracting lakes, are the most visible signs

of basin closure, as exemplied by the Colorado

or Yellow rivers, the Aral Sea, and the Dead

Sea. In some cases, like in the Lerma–Chapala

Basin (Mexico), overabstraction of groundwater,

and excessive surface water withdrawals can lead

to water depletion exceeding annual renewable

water.

The natural interconnectedness of ecosystems

and users across a river basin increases with

RIVER BASIN MANAGEMENT AND DEVELOPMENT

basin closure. As the amount of available water

is insucient to dampen or absorb uctuations

in supply and demand, or to dilute salt and

pollutants, conicts and negative externalities

increase, posing increasing challenges to regu-

lation and management. What particular actors

do at a particular point in space and time (e.g.,

digging farm ponds, tapping groundwater, har-

vesting water, lining canals, changing cropping

patterns, or irrigation techniques) modies

the circulation of water, salts, sediments, and

biota, disrupting the environmental processes

and human activities associated with the pre-

vailing water regime. The lack of data on, or

knowledge of, both hydrological processes and

actors' behaviors often makes it dicult to com-

prehend, evaluate, or anticipate how the water

cycle is altered and what positive and negative

social and economic externalities are produced.

Externalities travel across space and time and

sociopolitical categories of stakeholders. They

amount to a constant redistribution of costs and

benets along lines of power that eventually

tend to determine who are the winners and the

losers between diverse stakeholders. Third-party

impacts must be regulated, with the state usually

playing a critical role.

Basin closure is generated by the overbuilding

of river basins, a socially constructed process of

overextension of the water abstraction capac-

ity, in general for irrigation. The process is

fundamentally driven by the vested interests

of politicians, water bureaucrats, private con-

struction rms, and development banks and

the powerful incentives they face in sustaining

water resources development. Overbuilding is

also caused by regional politics and issues of

equity, whereby dierences in relative wealth

between regions are used by poorer ones to

claim for hydraulic (and other) investments even

if hydrologic and economic conditions should

discourage them. In other settings, between

federal states (e.g., India) or between nations

(e.g., Nile), it is commonplace to see a rush

toward infrastructure development in order to

lay claim to or to support a prior claim on the

shared resource. Supply augmentation options

are more attractive to decision-makers because

they avoid politically costly reductions in use or

reallocation, but are often adopted at the expense

of the public purse and environment preserva-

tion, with opportunistic, optimistic hydrologic

or economic hypotheses that have to be paid for

later: overallocated resources, managers having to

tap reservoirs' security stocks, helplessness in the

face of aquifer overexploitation, and the necessity

of reallocating water between sectors by at or

stealth, in general toward municipal and indus-

trial users and to the detriment of agriculture,

the environment, or weaker constituencies.

The overdevelopment of water use infrastruc-

ture, principally irrigation schemes, generates

water scarcity "mechanically." When most avail-

able resources are committed, little slack remains

in the stock and uxes of the river basin, and

any disruption caused by hydrologic variability

(compounded by climate change) or mismanage-

ment (notably the tendency to overallocate the

resource) generates crises that are opportunisti-

cally seized by politicians or interest groups to

further develop supply. Politicians then often

"naturalize" water scarcity and "securitize" the

debate by framing and justifying their responses

and policies under the cloak of national or food

security or other overriding metajustications.

In both discursive and material ways, scarcity is

manufactured.

Critique of the river basin scale

and boundaries

River basins are promoted as the integrative

locus of human uses and the environment, the

scale at which the resource can be eciently

RIVER BASIN MANAGEMENT AND DEVELOPMENT

managed and allocated, and where participation

of actors with a stake in the basin's water should

naturally occur. It is therefore not surprising

that river basins have been associated with

IWRM and promoted as one of its cardinal

"best practices." They have also been justied

by the alleged necessity to improve "spatial t,"

that is, the matching of resources boundary and

institutional regimes governing them. A grow-

ing scholarship has challenged this prescription.

From a management point of view, it has been

pointed out that river basin boundaries may not

be relevant, for example in the case of small

islands, deltas, arid areas, oodplains, and coastal

areas; that surface and groundwater interactions

need to be considered; that aquifer systems are

often noncoterminous with river basins; and that

interbasin transfers are also frequent and demand

consideration of an expanded scale.

From the government's point of view – with

a focus on the structure of power and processes

of decision-making – river basin boundaries are

problematic in dierent ways (Norman, Cook,

and Cohen 2015). The accountability and legit-

imacy of organizations or policies based on river

boundaries can be weak, and may generate con-

icts with the existing layers of sectoral or polit-

ical administration and agencies.

More crucially, river basins are aected by

social or ecological processes which unfold at

dierent scales and spatial units (e.g., climate

change, invasive spaces, etc., which therefore

have dierent "problemsheds"), and basin reg-

ulations or management practices may intersect

in sometimes conicting ways with other "poli-

cysheds," or geographical units in which policies

(e.g., on land-use planning, reforestation, urban

or industrial development, spatial conservation,

or protection areas) are implemented. Thus,

there has been a recognition that many drivers

and consequences of river basin dynamics can

be located outside the basin, where solutions to

local problems may also lie. This recognition in

particular speaks to the relationships between

food production, water, and energy, and has

triggered calls for integrating policy thinking at a

higher level, through what is commonly referred

to as a "nexus" approach.

Hydrologic boundaries are a starting point

but often beg to be pragmatically adjusted to

particular geographic, administrative, and politi-

cal realities. Mechanisms to harmonize policies,

resolve conicts of prerogatives, and ensure

participation in the coordination of multiple

levels of organization and administrative layers

need to be established. Coordinating existing

state and nonstate actors may therefore be the

primary goal, rather than creating a new basin

organization. Eventually, the selection of bound-

aries for water or environmental management,

whether of the river basin or otherwise, is a

political choice.

Ecosystemic approach and environmental

management

Intensive river basin development has resulted in

major ecological changes. Dams have radically

altered the natural ow regime of rivers and the

circulation of sediments; large-scale irrigation

schemes have withdrawn and depleted large

amounts of water; cities, industries, and agricul-

ture have injected massive amounts of chemicals

and pollutants. Although hydraulic infrastruc-

tures have provided huge benets in terms of

ood control, energy and food production, or

navigation, the dramatic alteration of existing

hydrologic regimes in terms of quantity, quality,

and timing have often undermined or destroyed

rich ecosystems, together with the elaborate

human uses that had developed around them.

Dams, irrigation, and pumping schemes have

led to the loss of springs or wetlands, to the

gradual disappearance and contamination of

RIVER BASIN MANAGEMENT AND DEVELOPMENT

terminal lakes or seas, and to the many benets

associated with oods (source of nutrients,

recharge of aquifers, support of wetlands and

biodiversity, ood recession agriculture, repro-

duction of sheries, etc.), which have been

severely curtailed.

Not only has development, in most cases,

resulted in a shift of benets from the local pop-

ulation to other, often urban, populations, but

the overall economic assessment has sometimes

been negative, the loss of ecosystem services

and existing productivity used being higher than

the benets generated by the investments, as the

cases of the Hadejia' Jama'a oodplain in Nigeria

and the Kafue Flats in Zambia famously illustrate.

The necessity to view a river basin as a con-

tinuum of interconnected ecosystems in order

to understand how changes in one part of a

basin aect both water availability and envi-

ronmental health in other parts of the basin

has spurred the development of an "ecosystem

approach," dened by the Convention on Bio-

logical Diversity as a strategy for the integrated

management of land, water, and living resources

that promotes conservation and sustainable use

in an equitable way. It has contributed to rais-

ing people's awareness about the diversity of

services obtained by people from ecosystems,

either directly (fresh water, food, fuel, ber,

genetic resources, recreation, aesthetic experi-

ences, spiritual enrichment, etc.), or indirectly

(air quality maintenance, climate regulation,

erosion control, regulation of human diseases,

water purication, etc.), and has substantially

enriched the conception of river basins and the

understanding of their management.

This concept has also spurred work in the

eld of economics, with the development of

methodologies for valuing ecosystem services to

reveal the hidden costs of interventions and con-

test cost–benet analyses and feasibility studies

that routinely justify projects by ignoring their

negative environmental externalities. They also

argue that higher water prices could encourage

conservation (thus increasing river ows) and

have developed the concept of payments for

environmental services.

Environmentalists have also promoted the

notion of environmental ow, dened as the

ow regime required to ensure the maintenance

of particular environmental functions in a river

ecosystem. Although the scientic determina-

tion of these environmental ows is problematic,

and although these ows are often the result of

negotiations between dierent interest groups,

claiming a share of the available water for the

environment has contributed to the political

recognition of environmental requirements, and

inuenced major policy shifts and regulations

such as the European Water Directive Frame-

work. It even gave way to more radical claims,

as illustrated by the movement for the removal

of dams, which symbolically heralds a nascent

paradigm shift.

Basin governance or management models:

river basin organizations

The international promotion of the river basin as

the natural or adequate scale for water resources

management has contributed to the creation

and spread of river basin organizations (RBOs).

"River basin organization" is a generic term

for organizations that come under a variety of

names, including agencies, committees, commis-

sions, authorities, associations, administrations,

directorates, councils, hydraulic confederations,

boards, and trusts. If the diversity of those

denominations is partly due to the approximate

translation into English of local administration

names, it also reects the historical pathways of

the dierent basins and does make clear from the

start that those organizations may sometimes be

so dierent that grouping them under a single

RIVER BASIN MANAGEMENT AND DEVELOPMENT

category might actually be misleading: basins

may be managed without RBOs, and some

RBOs have a very narrow mandate that does

not amount to basin management.

Discriminating factors rst include the size of

the basin (both the problems and the solutions,

and how dierent stakeholders may contribute

to them, vary greatly between small watersheds

and international river basins) and the mandate

of the organization: an RBO may be respon-

sible for any combination of tasks that include

construction, maintenance and management

of infrastructures, development of basin master

plans, allocating water or administrating rights,

monitoring and collecting hydrologic or water

quality data, law enforcement, fee collection, and

promotion of public participation and awareness.

But, from a governance point of view, an RBO

can be typied, rst, by its vertical integration

within the state administration and, second, by

its horizontal integration with nonstate actors.

Within the state, an RBO can be given

all-encompassing powers that include plan-

ning, construction, and management, as well

as regulation, in which case it will often be an

autonomous authority, with prerogatives that

override those of line agencies. But it can also

be entrusted with a more limited mandates,

in which case it will often be located under a

particular ministry or department. The idea of

integration has also promoted the concept of

regulation, where an RBO is often supposed

to dene the rules of the game (like water

quality standards, maximum aquifer withdrawals,

user fees, and water rights) by which dierent

sectors, users, and governmental agencies must

abide. Unsurprisingly, the creation of a layer

of governance at the basin-level results in

the redistribution of bureaucratic power and

often generates tensions or conicts with other

segments of the bureaucracy, as well as with

local administrations. Because of the political

diculties of reshuing prerogatives, RBOs

often end up layered on top of existing institu-

tions rather than replacing or complementing

them. The development of a regulatory RBO,

often located under the new and weak ministry

of environment, is often not well accepted,

especially if it threatens sectoral vested interests

associated with the planning and construction of

infrastructure or with unchecked pollution.

The degree of horizontal integration indicates

how nonstate actors, such as representatives

from the agricultural or industrial sectors,

environmental nongovernmental organizations,

and various civic groups, are contributing to

decision-making. Nonstate actors can be called

on to participate in dierent ways, from just

consultation or participation in basin councils or

platforms to representation in executive boards

and decision-making, to being the driving force

of RBOs that are partly independent from the

state (which will be more common in small

watersheds).

Integration is often taken as a justication

for centralizing decision-making power and

internalizing decision-making in a powerful

organization, with the frequent risk of com-

bining regulation and operation, and limiting

accountability. However, it can be used to

promote polycentric governance, where both

dierent levels/scales and the views and inter-

ests of state/nonstate entities are expected to

be harmonized, with the risks of stalemate by

fragmentation of decision-making power and

high transaction costs. These patterns of vertical

and horizontal integrations dene various forms

of governance that must be further analyzed and

characterized, for example by looking at their

eciency in terms of delivering sustainable or

equitable management, the way their legitimacy

is built and armed, their degree of accountabil-

ity to society, and their capacity to be nancially

self-sustaining.

RIVER BASIN MANAGEMENT AND DEVELOPMENT

Collaborative arrangements for river basin

governance are growing, as a result of the

failure or limitations shown by models of

decision-making restricted to state bureaucracy

and experts, of the increasing demand from the

private sector, interest groups, and civil society

to have a seat at the table, but also of the new

emphasis on, and the interest of the public in,

restoring environmental quality in line with new

values and uses, such as recreation and aesthetics.

These factors have been at the root of the surge

in the 1990s of the US watershed management

movement, which includes over 1000 watershed

experiences in collaborative planning, whereby

local stakeholders decide the issues and discuss

their options, with some technical assistance and

funding from both federal and state agencies.

The mandate and prerogatives of an RBO may

evolve with time, as a reection of changes in the

problems and challenges, in societal values, and in

state–civil society relationships, and of political

changes. More generally, these changes refer to

the continuous adjustment of governance frame-

works to ever-changing context and challenges, a

need advocated by scholarship on adaptive man-

agement and governance.

The recent work of geographers on the poli-

tics of scale and processes of rescaling addresses

the social production of scale and its impact on

the distribution of power. Here the issue is how

actors gain or lose inuence as a result of author-

ity being recongured around new spatial levels

or by virtue of their own ability to work across

dierent scales or levels

Transboundary basins and hydro-hegemony

Scholarship on transboundary river basins exam-

ines how water is managed in the 263 basins that

cross national boundaries. They represent 60%

of total river ows and 45% of the Earth's land

surface, while being home to about 40% of the

world's population. A rst focus is on legal issues,

including the 1997 UN Convention on the Law

of the Non-navigational Uses of International

Watercourses, with its two main principles of

"equitable and reasonable use" and the obligation

not to cause "signicant harm" to neighbors,

treaties between two or more countries sharing

a river basin, or other institutional arrangements

for transboundary river basins on issues such as

pollution and navigation (as with the Rhine and

the Danube), water allocation (the Indus and the

Nile), and joint management (the Mekong and

the Senegal).

Despite such arrangements, binding agree-

ments are rare or nonexistent; transboundary

management organizations are only given lim-

ited power; mechanisms for monitoring and

enforcement are lacking; hydrological data

remain secretive; and historical political relations

between neighboring countries, as well as strong

sentiments of territorial sovereignty, make it

dicult to ensure equitable and environmentally

friendly management.

One way forward has been to respond to the

lack of public involvement in interstate water

agreements by developing river basin councils,

platforms, and forums in which water user

representatives discuss plans and allocation issues

within a country, like in the Zambezi basin,

where a basin strategy has been developed with

the active involvement of stakeholder groups in

all eight riparian countries. Another way has

been to develop the concept of benet sharing ,

whereby the stalemate in negotiations over water

allocation is overcome by introducing other

benets related either to the use of water (e.g.,

sharing the benets of hydropower between

countries) or to other issues such as trade.

Yet, the topic remains a favorite of political

scientists, who have in particular developed

the concept of hydro-hegemony to describe

RIVER BASIN MANAGEMENT AND DEVELOPMENT

relations of power between countries sharing a

same river basin.

Future research directions

This brief review of ongoing scholarship about

river basin development and management points

to a few questions and areas of research that

deserve further inquiry. Modeling approaches

and stochastic hydrologic models are crucial to

providing information on management options

and associated levels of risk, but the study of

extreme events must be paralleled by an under-

standing of policy and political processes that are

dicult to model. Although often limited by the

availability and quality of data, hydrologic mod-

eling needs to rene the representation of the

interaction between surface water and ground-

water, and to better take into consideration

water quality issues.

Given the baing diversity of physical river

basin environments, the combinations of prob-

lems faced, and the multilayered institutional

arrangements, more eort should be put into

understanding the relationship between the

nature of water governance regimes and their

eectiveness. More elaborate typologies of

river basin organizations and other institutional

arrangements should consider the wider histori-

cal, social, and political contexts in which these

governance regimes emerge and evolve, and

provide insight into the administrative congu-

rations which should be favored in a particular

context.

These typologies also require a more nuanced

understanding of bureaucratic dynamics and

reforms, in particular a closer look at the

structure of incentives available to dierent

actors and organizations, when the structure of

decision-making power is recongured to address

issues of basin-level environmental management.

More work is needed on the societal and

political drivers of river basin closure, as a

means of challenging discourses that naturalize

water scarcity and water crises or frame them

in Malthusian terms. The preference for supply

augmentation and capital-intensive solutions

results in the generation and compounding of

water crises, and is therefore self-sustaining; this

preference must be explained by analyzing the

social distribution of costs and benets attached

to dierent policy responses, in particular the

convergence of the interests of politicians,

bureaucrats, and interest groups.

Urban studies focusing on water and sanita-

tion issues have produced a substantial body of

scholarship in the eld of critical geography.

Insights from urban studies need to better fer-

tilize, and to be integrated into, studies on river

basin dynamics and governance, and vice versa.

More generally, studies of river basins provide

an opportunity for multidisciplinary work inte-

grating approaches from hydrology, economics,

human geography, and policy studies, among

others.

Multisectoral or nexus approaches also have

the potential to rene understanding of the sys-

temic complexity of resource use and economic

activities, although it is unclear whether they

can substantially inuence sectoral policies and

practices.

Last, the transfer, operationalization, and

adaptation of river basin-based management or

governance reforms in dierent contexts must be

accompanied and scrutinized. Critical work on

the ideologies, interests, and social mechanisms

that sustain the reproduction and dissemination

of particular practices and policy models is

needed. Europeanization, for example, and the

application of the European Water Directive

Framework provide an opportunity to assess

the confrontation of uniform policy guidelines

RIVER BASIN MANAGEMENT AND DEVELOPMENT

with the diversity of environmental and human

contexts.

Further reading

Barrow, C.J. 1998. "River Basin Development Plan-

ning and Management: A Critical Review." World

Development, 26(1): 171–186.

Huitema, D. and Meijerink, S., eds. 2014. The Politics

of River Basin Organisations: Coalitions, Institutional

Design Choices and Consequences. Cheltenham, UK:

Edward Elgar.

Kemper, K.E., W. Blomquist, and A. Dinar, eds. 2006.

Integrated River Basin Management through Decentral-

ization. Berlin: Springer.

McCully, P. 2001. Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Poli-

tics of Large Dams. London: Zed Books / New York:

St Martin's Press.

Molle, F. 2008. "Why Enough Is Never Enough: The

Societal Determinants of River Basin Closure."

International Journal of Water Resource Development,

24(2): 247–256.

Molle, F., and P. Wester, eds. 2009. River Basin

Trajectories: Societies, Environments and Develop-

ment. Wallingford, UK: CABI. http://www.

iwmi.cgiar.org/Publications/CABI_Publications/

CA_CABI_Series/River_Basin_Trajectories/

9781845935382.pdf (accessed April 6, 2016).

Newson, M. 1997. Land, Water and Development: Sus-

tainable Management of River Basin Systems, 2nd edn.

New York: Routledge.

Svendsen, M. 2005. Irrigation and River Basin Man-

agement: Options for Governance and Institutions.

Wallingford, UK: CABI. http://www.iwmi.

cgiar.org/Publications/CABI_Publications/PDF/

Irrigation_and_Basin_Water_Management.pdf

(accessed April 6, 2016).

Tecla, L.A. 1967. The River Basin in History and Law.

The Hague: Martinus Nijho.

Wengert, N. 1985. "The River Basin Concept as Seen

from a Management Perspective in United States."

In Strategies for River Basin Management ,editedby

J. Lundqvist, U. Lohm, M. Falkenmark, 299–305.

Dordrecht: Reidel.

Zeitoun, M., and J. Warner. 2006. "Hydro-

hegemony: A Framework for Analysis of Trans-

boundary Water Conicts." Water Policy, 8(5):

435–460.

... This is even less than the average of ~5 g zC m −2 year −1 for shallow Antarctic shelves (Arntz, Brey, & Gallardo, 1994) but such habitats are young, still being colonized and stressed by sedimentation (Sahade et al., 2015). We scaled up our three study glaciers to the 216 retreating in the WAP region (Cook et al., 2016), but there are 14,725 marine glaciers in the wider southern polar region (Paul, 2017). Thus a considerably higher scaling factor (up to 68×) is likely to become appropriate to understanding potential blue carbon change with glacier retreat. ...

... Similar WAP environments can be more productive (Grange & Smith, 2013;Sahade et al., 2015) by a factor of ~1.44 (Barnes, 2017). There are many assumptions implicit in our calculations, such as using mean glacier thickness (Paul, 2017). ...

Rising atmospheric CO2 is intensifying climate change but it is also driving global and particularly polar greening. However, most blue carbon sinks (that held by marine organisms) are shrinking, which is important as these are hotspots of genuine carbon sequestration. Polar blue carbon increases with losses of marine ice over high latitude continental shelf areas. Marine ice (sea ice, ice shelf and glacier retreat) losses generate a valuable negative feedback on climate change. Blue carbon change with sea ice and ice shelf losses has been estimated, but not how blue carbon responds to glacier retreat along fjords. We derive a testable estimate of glacier retreat driven blue carbon gains by investigating three fjords in the West Antarctic Peninsula (WAP). We started by multiplying ~ 40 yearmean glacier retreat rates by the number of retreating WAP fjords and their time of exposure. We multiplied this area by regional zoobenthic carbon means from existing datasets to suggest that WAP fjords generate 3,130 tonnes of new zoobenthic carbon per year (t zC yr–1) and sequester > 780 t zC yr‐1. We tested this by capture and analysis of 204 high resolution seabed images along emerging WAP fjords. Biota within these images were identified to density per 13 functional groups. Mean stored carbon per individual was assigned from literature values to give a stored zoobenthic Carbon per area, which was multiplied up by area of fjord exposed over time, which increased the estimate to 4,536 t zC yr‐1. The purpose of the current study was to establish a testable estimate of blue carbon change caused by glacier retreat along Antarctic fjords and thus to establish its relative importance compared to polar and other carbon sinks.

... Arrow (1972) developed technology spillover conception with externality theory and argued that innovative investors directly earn from innovation and others also benefit from innovation by spillover effects. Sun and Fan (2017) defined technology spillover as 'the unintentional technological benefits to firms that come from the research and development efforts of other firms without the costs being shared'. Nie (2010) developed the spatial spillover theory and argued that technology spillover may yield industrial clusters. ...

Pu-yan Nie
Chan Wang
Hong-xing Wen

Technology spillover has crucial effects on innovation investment. This article captures the mechanism the technology spillover that affects innovation with dynamic game theory approaches. First, both technology spillover and competition improve consumer surplus. Consumers benefit from technology spillover. Second, firm with high technology undertakes a loss from technology spillover, while opponents benefit from spillover. Finally, technology spillover reduces the patent price. Under fierce competition, the patent price is also reduced. This conclusion helps patent price in theory. The policy implication is to subsidise innovation in some fields.

... Climate change represents somehow additional uncertainty towards the scope for increasing water productivity and may additionally hamper the availability of water resources as one of the main concerns regards increased rainfall variability. Reductions in rainfall at tropical latitudes have been already observed [9], while irrigation water withdrawals are currently stressing many of the world's major river basins [10]. ...

... (2006, 99 f.;Herv. i. O.) Neben mehr-als-menschlichen Geographien leisten daher posthumanistische Ansätze im Allgemeinen einen wichtigen Beitrag dazu, die besondere Rolle von Technologien zu verstehen, wenn es darum geht, die Grenzen des Menschlichen und Nicht-Menschlichen herauszufordern (Ginn 2017). Diese wurden wesentlich durch Arbeiten von Haraway beeinflusst, insbesondere ihrem "Manifesto for Cyborgs" (Haraway 1985), und fordern dazu auf, die Kategorien Mensch, Technologie und Tier immer wieder zu hinterfragen (siehe auch Haraway 2008, 330). ...

... Bölgesel kalkınmada dünyada en başarılı deneyim olan TVA (ST, 2008: 331), büyük ölçekli ilk "bölgesel planlama örgütü"dür. BKA'lara öncülük etmiş (Pike et al., 2006: 76) ve onların "ata"sı olmuştur (Molle, 2006: 8;Molle, 2017: 3). ...

Filippo Menga
Dominic Davies

It is widely recognised that the growing awareness that we are living in the Anthropocene-an unstable geological epoch in which humans and their actions are catalysing catastrophic environmental change-is troubling humanity's understanding and perception of temporality and the ways in which we come to terms with socio-ecological change. This article begins by arguing in favour of posthumanism as an approach to this problem, one in which the prefix 'post' does not come as an apocalyptic warning, but rather signals a new way of thinking, an encouragement to move beyond a humanist perspective, and to abandon a social discourse and a worldview fundamentally centred on the human. The article then explores how the impending environmental catastrophe can be productively reimagined through graphic narratives, arguing that popular culture in general, and comics in particular, emerge as productive sites for geographers to interrogate and develop posthuman methodologies and narratives. Developing our analysis around two comics in particular-Here (McGuire, 2014) and Mad Max: Fury Road (Miller et al., 2015)-we show how graphic narrative can help us to move beyond the nature-society divide that is rendered anachronistic by the Anthropocene.

C. J. Barrow

River basins have been used for development planning and management since the 1930s. Various forms of river basin development planning and management have been applied in many countries. Unfortunately, the results have often been disappointing. This paper critically reviews river basin development planning and management to assess why problems occur, and then focuses on possibilities for improvements.

P. McCully

This book explains the history and politics of dam building worldwide. It describes the many technical, safety and economic problems that afflict the technology, and explores the role played by international banks and aid agencies in promoting it. The author also examines the rapid growth of the international anti-dam movements, and stresses how replacing large dams with less destructive alternatives will depend upon opening up the dam industry's practices to public scrutiny.

N. Wengert

In the USA interest in river basins as units for water planning began in the late 19th century as technological progress in engineering provided data for such broader approaches. The emphasis on integrated, comprehensive river basin planning peaked in the 1930s and 1940s as epitomized by the Tennessee Valley Authority experience and New Deal emphasis on rational decision making. Well into the 1950s efforts to intertwine the water concepts of river basin development with regional economic and social planning continued to receive support. But for various reasons in the 1960s till today river basin development and regional planning have pulled apart, river basin management being limited largely to hydrological aspects of river systems engineering. Regional planning and development, in turn, has ceased to focus on the river basin, becoming primarily concerned with inter-related urban socioeconomic and political factors and forces with some attention to environmental values and constraints. Thus regions have become foci for urban socio-economic and political analyses, and river basins continue as significant hydrological planning units for efficient control of water resources.

Paul R. Josephson

En depit des changements sociaux, politiques et economiques des differents regimes sovietiques de Lenin a Gorbatchev, il a toujours existe une relation etroite entre le pouvoir sovietique et le developpement et l'evolution technologiques

Those who control water, hold power. Complicating matters, water is a flow resource; constantly changing states between liquid, solid, and gas, being incorporated into living and non-living things and crossing boundaries of all kinds. As a result, water governance has much to do with the question of boundaries and scale: who is in and who is out of decision-making structures? Which of the many boundaries that water crosses should be used for decision-making related to its governance? Recently, efforts to understand the relationship between water and political boundaries have come to the fore of water governance debates: how and why does water governance fragment across sectors and governmental departments? How can we govern shared waters more effectively? How do politics and power play out in water governance? This book brings together and connects the work of scholars to engage with such questions. The introduction of scalar debates into water governance discussions is a significant advancement of both governance studies and scalar theory: decision-making with respect to water is often, implicitly, a decision about scale and its related politics. When water managers or scholars explore municipal water service delivery systems, argue that integrated approaches to salmon stewardship are critical to their survival, query the damming of a river to provide power to another region and investigate access to potable water - they are deliberating the politics of scale. Accessible, engaging, and informative, the volume offers an overview and advancement of both scalar and governance studies while examining practical solutions to the challenges of water governance.

Des Walling
Malcolm Newson
Clive T. Agnew
Ewan Anderson

The book reviews the evolution of river basin management and the history of applied hydrology in the context of the river basin system and its contemporary management. Technical coverage includes the basin as a geomorphological system, the influence of land use on hydrology, soil erosion and the problems of river modification and regulation. Physical laws are set in the context of their boundary conditions at a variety of size and time scales. River systems and their management are also assessed within both physical and social frameworks. -from Author

Drawing upon a worldwide survey of river basin organizations and in-depth studies of eight river basins in a variety of locations around the globe, this book examines how institutional arrangements for managing water resources at the river-basin level have been designed and implemented, the impetus for these arrangements, and what institutional features appear to be associated with greater or lesser success in river basin management.

Source: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320754049_The_international_encyclopedia_of_geography_people_the_earth_environment_and_technology

Posted by: jeneejeneegeermaniea0251619.blogspot.com