Governance tools to support
Governance sets the stage for water management decisions and is critical for citizens and water consumers to exercise their rights, negotiate and mediate competing demands, and form partnerships. However, the water sector is to a large extent driven by technocrats with a strong focus on water supply driven infrastructure development and governance is poorly understood. Tools like governance performance benchmarking can help to demystify governance, give it concrete, practical content, and guide priority setting and implementation of sector reform. Processes for negotiating mutually agreeable outcomes from competing demands by a range of parties at local, regional and even transboundary levels were presented in IUCN’s toolkit “NEGOTIATE” which aims to help water users to negotiate workable, fair and lasting agreements on how to best manage water resources and resolve disputes. The “4Rs” framework of rewards, risks, rights and responsibilities to structure, analyze and understand the diverse interests broadens possibilities to accommodate them. The human right to water and sanitation provides a framework and standard to improve equity in the provision of safe water and sanitation. It can help increase transparency and accountability, clearly define rights and responsibilities, and strengthen participation towards non-discriminatory and propoor service provision. A human rights based approach may also improve the social equity of water allocation and improve benefit sharing in integrated water resources management, and may help assess the effectiveness of IWRM implementation.
