Governance and policy blog posts

Will 2013 be pinpointed as the year in which Africa’s ‘Green Revolution’ finally took root? It marks the tenth anniversaries of the 2003 Maputo Declaration and the resulting Africa-led Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP)...

IWMI’s Mark Giordano has struck a chord recently with his presentations of why Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) might not always be the best approach to solving our water problems.

A new report, Review of the Evidence on Indicators, Metrics, and Monitoring Systems, assesses how we evaluate and measure the effectiveness of sustainable development objectives.

IWMI and ACIAR's join workshop in Cambodia last week fostered open discussions and resulted in a re-orientation of the way research will be carried forward in some areas.

The past six years have initiated an extraordinary period in history when slowly developing constraint on growth - the availability of land and water resources - shocked those responsible for food security. One of the worst-hit regions has been the Middle East...

Examining the record, water seems to be more often used as a weapon of war or is a casualty of war or an excuse rather than the actual cause of conflict. What’s far more evident is transboundary cooperation over water.

Indeed a lot has been written about cooperation among countries in managing their shared water resources. As important as inter-country cooperation is, I am more excited by stories of cooperation forged at the level of farmers.

Cotton, sugar, palm oil... you name it. Most governments in the developing world believe such plantation cash crops must be a better use of land, and must deliver greater economic returns, than cattle pastures.

Africa’s small farm sector is failing to lift millions out of poverty and policy makers are frustrated. So frustrated that they are urging the consolidation of smallholdings into larger commercial farms.

Aditi Mukherji, water professional and researcher at IWMI, shares conclusions from her study on minor irrigation schemes in India and expands upon the policy implications from these findings.

In a massive review of more than 1000 research papers on ecosystem services in Latin America – justifiably subtitling itself “the state of the art” – it is clear that across nine countries and Puerto Rico, the subject is booming.

Feeding the world is easy. The panic about the ability of the world to deliver enough food for seven, eight, nine or even ten billion people is absurd.