Elegantes Telefax - JAV der TUB - TU Berlin

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I. INTRODUCTION
Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) has been developed nearly two
decades ago as an encompassing new concept integrating the management of all
water resources with the major water using sectors (water supply and sanitation, irrigated
agriculture, environmental protection, flood protection, shipping and hydropower).
Since then, it has been promoted as a concept for water policy reforms in
most developing countries by a number of donor agencies and other international
organizations dealing with water policy issues. The World Bank is clearly the most
prominent donor institution endorsing the concept analytically and providing substantial
financial support for its implementation. It prides itself for its intellectual leadership
role and it undertook two major efforts – in the early nineties and between 2001 and
2005 – in translating the concept into a set of policies guiding its own operations. The
first round of reform was the result of the actions of external stakeholders, mainly
Washington based environmental Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), pressuring
the US Congress and the US Treasury to request from the World Bank various
procedural changes which amounted to an upgraded environmental review process
and an IWRM based sector policy. The second effort ten years later originated from
within the Bank and the shareholders emphasizing the implementation of IWRM principles,
but reversing the retreat from dam-building that had occurred gradually over
the 1990s. Here, the role of NGOs was minor and the stakeholders included the major
dam-building countries which make up a large share of the non-IDA borrowers.
While not acting prominently in the process leading to and immediately following
the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in 1992 1
which helped to propagate the concept among the UN participants and their constituencies,
the World Bank started its own process at the same time preparing its 1993
policy paper in Water Resources Management which contains most of the ideas of
the IWRM concept, but has a Bank-specific emphasis on economic topics. A number
of comparable processes in the water using sectors were pursued in the nineties,
while creating analytical support internally with the water resources group and externally
by engaging in supporting networks as the Global Water Partnership (GWP)
and the World Water Council (WWC): The most prominent effort in dealing with a
controversial topic was the participation in the creation of the World Commission of
Dams (WCD). The internal review of the implementation of the 1993 policy paper by
1 For account of the role of the IWRM during this phase cf. Scheumann and Klaphake 2001.