Elegantes Telefax - JAV der TUB - TU Berlin

SUMMARY
Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) has been developed as a concept integrating
the management of all water resources with the major water using sectors (water supply and
sanitation, irrigation agriculture, environmental protection, flood protection, shipping and hydropower)
nearly two decades ago. The World Bank is clearly the most prominent donor agency
endorsing the concept analytically and providing substantial financial support for its implementation.
It undertook two major efforts in the 1990s and between 2001 and 2004 in translating the
concept into a set of policies guiding its own operations. The paper assesses these policy developments
in the framework of the principal-agent theory, focusing on the interest of the World
Bank of maintaining its autonomy as an agent and the role of NGOs as third party to the principalagent
relationship.
The first effort consisted of the Water Resources Management Policy Paper of 1993 which was
based on an internal review with limited involvement of NGOs, but constituted a reaction to the
external critiques of the World Bank’s lending in general and in the water sector which had resulted
earlier in the creation of the Environment Department in 1987. The second effort meant to
come to a deal with its external critiques over dam and other water infrastructure building, the
support for the set up of the World Commission on Dams, but it led to a process which the Bank
did not control and whose conclusions it did not adopt finally. The efforts in the beginning of this
century resulted in the 2004 Water Resources Sector Strategy which was based on an internal
process with the explicit inclusion of recipient countries which constitutes a partial revision of the
1993 policy paper as it reconfirms the support for IWRM, but emphasizes a renewed inclusion of
hydraulic infrastructure in the lending policy.