On the Negative Side

Critiques of IWRM tend to fall under at least six dominant headings: (a) vagueness, (b) Western bias, (c) institutional bias, (d) top-down orientation, (e) cannot succeed in conditions of poor governance, and (f) cannot accommodate complexity. Each of these are discussed here briefly. Perhaps the most consistent critic of IWRM is the scholar A. K. Biswas. For Biswas (2004, p. 251), IWRM is “a vague, indefinable and un-implementable concept” (also, Watson et al., 2007). More than a decade later, Tortajada and Biswas (2017) claimed the following:

The emphasis continues to be on short-term fashionable solutions like Integrated Water Resources Management and Integrated River Basin Management, neither of which has been able to provide sustainable and implementable policies or solutions for macro- and meso-scale projects and programmes over at least two generations. These non-performing concepts will become even more irrelevant in a future world which will be more complex, uncertain and unpredictable. Future water problems cannot be solved by using past paradigms and experiences that have not proven to be effective (p. 849).

Biswas has consistently attacked IWRM as an unhelpful approach to ensuring sustainable and equitable water for all (Biswas, 2004, 2008; Tortajada & Biswas, 2017).

Nevertheless, as with other ideals—sustainability, democracy, the family, community—belief in the value of IWRM is almost as important as evidence of its success in fact. Like “sustainable development,” IWRM’s central weakness, its vagueness and generality, is also possibly its greatest strength (Martinez-Santos & Aldaya, 2014; Mitchell, 2005). The lack of specific means of monitoring and measuring its progress combined with the broad generality of its principles (coordination, participation, inclusion) allows almost any water-related success to be deemed a result of IWRM, and any new or continuing failure a result of its absence (Molle, 2008).

A more damning critique emanates from scholars and practitioners across large swaths of the Global South, that of Western bias. Warner et al. (2009) argued that Kazakh IWRM was formulated in terms of European standards through consultancy, without taking into account ground level or local problems, and was thus largely ignored. For Van Koppen et al. (2007), the regulatory measures introduced through IWRM not only paid scant attention to long-standing community-based institutional arrangements in the Global South, but too often undermined them. Shah and Van Koppen (2006) stated that whereas the typical ingredients of IWRM may work in the Global North, they were inappropriate and often harmful in the “informal water economies of the developing world.” Giordano and Shah (2014b, p. 37) supported this critique by stating that in developing countries,

IWRM tends to be driven not by indigenous need but rather by foreign intervention where it arises and is enforced “through international organizations, loan conditionality, expert consultations, and economic as well as political pressure,” often at the expense of alternative solutions and paths (also quoting Laube, 2007).

The same authors, in a different publication (Giordano & Shah, 2014a, p. 366), stated: “[t]his transformation of an idea into a ‘sanctioned discourse,’ of a means into an end (backed by loan conditionality), can divert attention from actual water problems and national priorities.” Reflecting on IWRM in Nigeria, Ngene et al. (2021) noted that IWRM must have support to be successful, and many institutions in Nigeria do not support it as they regard it as an expression of neocolonialism.

Alongside Western bias is Lenton and Muller’s (2009) critique that IWRM reform tended to focus on the high levels of scale, on policy and legislation reforms at the national level and the establishment of river basin organizations (RBOs), what Shah (2016) labeled “the IWRM package.” Muller (2019), Wester and Warner (2002), and Blomquist and Schlager (2005), among others, also questioned IWRM’s focus on large catchment or river basins as the only or best management scale and framework. Van der Zaag (2005), hinting at the importance of water to wealth creation and political power, warned: “IWRM should explicitly deal with the fact that water tends to build asymmetrical relationships between people, communities and nations.” External actors pressing for the devolution of decision-making power from one settled organizational form—be it highly centralized in ministries of state or highly localized in irrigation cooperatives—to another, in this case, the river basin level, have been resisted most effectively almost everywhere.

Given that most water-related challenges concern the urban and rural poor, Merrey et al. (2005) criticized IWRM’s “lack of concern for people, poor and marginalized.” Similarly, Cullet (2018) stated:

IWRM is a limited framework that makes specific assumptions about the water sector, including seeing water mostly as an economic good and focusing on private property rights. This leads it to privilege efficiency over equity, appropriation over sharing, giving in effect more importance to economic regulation of water than to human rights (p. 333).

To be sure, a significant amount of the discourse around not only IWRM but the “global water crisis” takes place at the highest levels of social organization. Water has long featured as a key input in national development plans, so its capture by elites for economic and political purposes is nothing new. In transboundary settings, “benefit sharing” has overwhelmingly focused on aggregate benefits as defined by dominant actors (e.g., multipurpose dams for big agriculture and electricity). The “trickle down” of benefits to average people is generally implied but often highly exaggerated. At the same time, international development has pressed for a bottom-up, participatory, stakeholder-based approach for several decades. Given water’s place in social organization, it is understandable that influential concepts such as IWRM would come in for serious scrutiny. Numerous scholars have criticized IWRM for its top-down approach (Bruns, 2003; Butterworth et al., 2010; Cleaver, 1999; Currie-Alder, 2007; Gyawali et al., 2006; Mollinga, 2006). For Lankford and Hepworth (2010, p. 83), IWRM is often “excessively comprehensive and too formal to be effectively implemented and for certain African basins may not be sufficiently tailored to circumstances, especially the unpredictable dynamism in water supply and demand found there.” IWRM is a “cathedral” model where management is based on regulatory legal authority when what is often needed is a “bazaar” model of flexible, informal, polycentric water resources management. Granted, the capacities of local-level stakeholders may be limited, be they technical, financial, or human-resource based (Ben-Daoud et al., 2021; Godinez-Madrigal et al., 2019; Whiten, 2019). This is no excuse for ignoring the voices of those most negatively impacted by the shortage or surfeit of water resources (Wester et al., 2003).

A further critique of IWRM centers on its inability to succeed in conditions of poor governance. On one hand, there are those who believe that the functional aspects of IWRM can improve governance piece by piece (Butterworth et al., 2010). On the other hand, Bezerra et al. (2021) showed that IWRM was implemented in different basins across Latin America but was ineffective because of poor communication among stakeholders and poor water governance. Additional programs, in their view, would be needed to help with implementation and ensure success. This is an interesting conclusion as it points to the circularity of IWRM planning and practice: It cannot succeed where there is weak governance; further training will improve IWRM (Rogers & Hall, 2003).

A slightly different take on the question of governance and IWRM involves path dependence. As Suhardiman et al. (2015, p. 296) illustrated in the case of Nepal, “[o]f particular importance is to consider the existing power relations among public agencies in the water sector, where the most powerful actors have more reasons to resist than to support IWRM implementation.” Jonker et al. (2010) presented similar results in the context of South Africa’s attempted shift to catchment management agencies. In the Southern African transboundary context, there is even stronger resistance to the new institutional architecture. Fatch and Swatuk (2018) showed how RBOs contribute functionally to management of the region’s shared rivers. This is through, for example, joint fact-finding missions. Political power, however, remains with the central authorities, who jealously guard their sovereignty.

An interesting critique of IWRM is the observation that it cannot accommodate complexity (Yahn Filho, 2020). For a concept founded on integration and systems thinking, one would think that this would be the basis of its attractiveness. In rural China, Mao et al. (2020) observed, IWRM implementation had some successes when it solved preexisting water issues but also created new problems. For Lankford and Hepworth (2010), in contrast to the overly mechanistic and institutionalized “cathedral” approach, the “bazaar” approach emphasized a management style that was grassroots focused, organic, flexible, and driven by real-world issues in real time. Is it not better to build upon actually existing practices rather than impose a “cookie cutter” model developed by predominantly Western “experts”? Supporters of IWRM would argue that this critique is unfair, that the principles informing the practice counsel localization, promote inclusion, and encourage approaches that accommodate cross-cutting issues such as gender. Moreover, IWRM acknowledges complexity and aims to build models and other decision-support tools that are conscious of their limitations in relation to “known unknowns,” such as climate change (Muller, 2021).

These six categories of critique are not meant to be definitive, but rather are indicative of dominant trends. Critique aside, a less well-researched and less openly acknowledged challenge for IWRM concerns the way in which its dominant country purveyors themselves have resisted implementing its central tenets, in particular, institution building at the watershed level (Muller, 2015; Suhardiman et al., 2015). Yahn Filho (2020), for example, observed that in a transboundary basin like the Columbia River Basin, there are too many stakeholders and no independent governing body to oversee the basin. In the Southern African region, while states have assiduously worked toward establishing RBOs within and between countries, decision-making power rests firmly in the hands of central authorities (Fatch & Swatuk, 2018). Given the considerable worldwide resistance to the devolution of decision-making power from central authorities to RBOs, scholars and practitioners have continued to develop new concepts and frameworks, and revisit and repackage old ones as well, in the hope of achieving more or less the same goal as that set by IWRM’s supporters. Water security, for example, is one such idea (Grey & Sadoff, 2007; Grey et al., 2013; GWP, 2019; Muller, 2021; Zeitoun et al., 2016). The water–energy–food nexus is another (Allan et al., 2015; Muller, 2015; Swatuk & Cash, 2018). Muller described the nexus as a “practical framework.” Its practical nature derives in part by shifting the focus from watersheds to what J. A. Allan (2006) labeled “problemsheds”—that is, the socio-politico-economic tensions-interests-networks created by sometimes far-flung demands on water (for energy, food, people, and ecosystems).

On the Positive Side

Those who perceive an IWRM approach to be beneficial tend to emphasize three elements: (a) the human dimension, (b) its practical aspects, and (c) its emphasis on inclusive processes. For Hileman et al. (2016),

A general strength of IWRM is that it emphasizes the importance of the human dimension—water users, stakeholder groups, and institutions—of water development. IWRM is a participatory, inclusive and multi-stakeholder process, and addresses conflicts as they arise between parties with diverging goals for water resources management (p. 6).

Muller (2006) also emphasized the value of IWRM in terms of reconciling competing demands:

IWRM provides a framework within which to consider tradeoffs between different development objectives and, where possible, to identify win-win water investments. By aligning and integrating interests and activities that are traditionally seen as unrelated or that, despite obvious interrelationships, are simply not coordinated, IWRM can foster more efficient and sustainable use of water resources (p. 1).

Granted, within 10 years, Muller, among many other scholars and practitioners, had largely fallen off the IWRM bandwagon. Labeling it “Dublin IWRM,” perhaps to distinguish it from other integrated approaches to water management, he argued:

In the water sector, Dublin IWRM was imposed through Washington Consensus institutions, encouraged by rich world governments; environmental activists gained from new forms of deliberative democracy and environmental governance; the private sector was (initially) happy to see new opportunities created and governments’ role curbed. In practice, the new approach failed to meet the needs of many key actors (Muller, 2015, p. 689; also, Muller, 2010).

Yet, for others, it was the practical elements within IWRM that were appealing. Smith and Cartin (2011), for example, observed that in relation to the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s water and nature initiative, which aimed to mainstream an ecosystem approach into catchment planning and management, IWRM processes such as stakeholder engagement and joint planning facilitated positive outcomes at different scales across Global South pilot projects. Shammout and Shatanawi (2021) showed that IWRM processes were used to solve the Zarqa River Basin’s main concern of poor water management. Similar examples may be drawn from a diverse array of case studies in Iran (Goharian & Azizipour, 2020; Hernandez, 2012; Vieira et al., 2020), the Caribbean more generally (Cashman, 2012), the Yakima River Basin in Washington State (Yakima Basin Integrated Plan, 2019), and the Bundelkhand region in Uttar Pradesh, India (Goyal et al., 2020). Each of these suggests that processes that were both participatory and inclusive, and where groups were involved from the start, had more likelihood of success than processes that were largely delivered to people by external actors (Suhardiman et al., 2015). Moreover, the IWRM success stories also indicate that collective and collaborative decision making is an iterative process, not a one-off result determined by grand design (Watson et al., 2019).

On Balance

The year 2022 marks 30 years since the Dublin and Rio conferences. Over the decades, there have been concerted attempts to address these shortcomings through theory and practice. For example, Lenton and Muller (2009) argued against the basin-only focus, suggesting that integrated development and management could take place at a variety of scales. Moriarty et al. (2004) argued that an “IWRM-light” approach focusing on actionable interventions—“low-hanging fruit”—undertaken with a “full-IWRM” sensibility, was a reasonable way forward. The Southern African Development Community (SADC) relocated its water division within its Directorate of Infrastructure and Services Directorate, arguing that IWRM could not only be about demand management in the Global South. The Global Water Partnership has produced a variety of “workbooks” to guide application.

Shah and Van Koppen (2006) itemized the “normal IWRM package,” decrying its utility in the Global South: creation of water rights through permits, water pricing and user-pay fees, and basin-scale management agencies; a national water policy; revised water laws and regulatory frameworks; and stakeholder participation through water user associations, river basin forums, and the like. While the framework appears logical to many and is embedded in institutional arrangements such as the European Union’s Water Framework Directive, scholars of the Global South continue to question its relevance.

There have also been consistent attempts to mainstream gender into IWRM planning and practice. Integration of gendered approaches promised accountability of the most marginalized and the vulnerable. However, such changes were not reflected in the governance systems around the world. Although the Dublin principles of IWRM are to some extent well-established, the third principle on gender is commonly missing in practice (Packett et al., 2020). Women’s underrepresentation in IWRM has far-reaching consequences. As Fauconnier et al. (2018, p. 20) noted, ‘There is a circular and self-reinforcing relationship between the constrained roles of women in governance and the under-valuation of their roles in production and resource use.’ To date, most countries have struggled to implement gender-inclusive IWRM at scale. Only 16% of national water plans mention women as key stakeholders or primary participants in climate adaptation. In a 2013 survey of 65 countries, only 15% of countries had a gender policy in their water ministry, and only 35% of countries included gender considerations in their water policies and programmes. Furthermore, only 22% of surveyed water ministries had gender focal points (Fauconnier et al. (2018: 10).