A Comparison of IWRM Frameworks: The United States and South Africa

There is increasing global interest in Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) as an approach to address a myriad of water resources issues in a more effective and efficient way. Although there are a growing number of individual IWRM and watershed management successes that reflect technical cooperation on a regional or local scale, broader, international and national efforts to implement IWRM are often hampered by inadequate or inefficient political and institutional environments. Accordingly, it is helpful to compare alternative national IWRM approaches to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of different political and institutional environments for IWRM. This paper examines two national IWRM approaches that were adopted in the late 1990s. The United States has a growing number of collaborative grassroots level watershed management initiatives, but little or no national political, legal, or institutional framework to guide and coordinate those efforts. Conversely, the Republic of South Africa was extremely proactive in codifying a formal IWRM strategy at the national level, but has limited experience with collaborative institutions. This paper compares these alternative bottom-up and top-down approaches to identify and assess some common challenges to the longterm sustainability of IWRM institutions.