Governance and policy blog posts

If the UN high-level panel on sustainable development goals gets its way, the world will from 2015 be chasing a target to “reduce bribery and corruption”.

At the end of the Water in the Anthropocene conference in May the participants issued the Bonn Declaration on Global Water Security, which sets out in stark

After months of planning, the CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems (WLE) is taking its first step toward an integrated approach for research and development. At the end of May, WLE will hold the Volta and Niger Basins Consultation and Design Workshop...

Many large river basins support both—energy production from hydropower and withdrawals for irrigated food production (in addition to many other uses, such as for households and industries, fisheries and the environment).

Food, nutrition and health of small-scale farming families throughout the world depend to a major extent on the benefits obtained from nature, ranging from the provision of a wide diversity of food resources, fuel-wood for cooking and medicinal plants, to the sustenance of agriculture and disaster risk reduction.

This blog is part of WLE’s participation in the conference on “Water in the Anthropocene: Challenges for Science and Governance. Indicators, Thresholds and Uncertainties of the Global Water System“.

Disaster management and flood protection is a prominent theme this year at the 2nd Asia-Pacific Water Summit in Chiang Mai.  My main interest here is in disaster management and flood mitigation and there are many concurrent technical sessions under the same sub-theme including: “Flood

We agree with Dr. Mark Giordano’s key point when he says that IWRM has reasonable principles (e.g., ‘a coordinated, democratic approach to managing water’, ‘involving multiple interests’), but that those principles can cause problems when they become formulaic doctrine or dogma. But isn’t that true of any concept?

Once upon a time, not so long ago, we were all mobile. Movement was what enabled our ancestors to track resources that were here today, gone tomorrow. In parts of the world where water, pasture or good hunting are not constantly available, mobility is still the key that unlocks scattered resources.

As the discussion on farm size continues to grow from Stephen Carr's blog post on farm size, Carr responds to comments. "I find the snippets from pro large-farm comments lack an apparent awareness of the real issues..."