Some of the difficulty appears to be inherent in the policy changes themselves: managing water for the simultaneous satisfaction of supply, quality, economic, and environmental values is significantly harder than managing for one of those values alone, and even the existence of a recognized river basin authority with considerable staff and revenues does not assure successful implementation and performance of this multifaceted mission. Some of the difficulty appears to be due to organizational inertia, as an agency that had one role for 60 years adjusts to new roles and in the meantime falls behind on some of its newly assigned tasks. Last but certainly not least, some of the difficulty appears to be due to patterns of stakeholder involvement and stakeholder relationships with basin authority personnel. The formal structure of the basin authority gives greater weight to the traditional irrigation constituency that is interested primarily in the authority’s water supply augmentation functions, and the basin authority’s decision making practices reinforce that constituency’s favored position. Irrigators are a well organized set of water users in the basin who are quite clear about what they want, and know how to use the basin authority’s organizational structures and decision making processes to get it. By contrast, public and private organizations serving or representing urban centers and environmental concerns, or promoting economic approaches to water management, appear to have less influence within the basin authority and have sought alternative means to pursue their goals. In these respects, the experience of the Guadalquivir basin appears to reflect trends and tendencies in Spain as a whole.

# **2. Analytical Framework**

To analyze the data gathered for this project from the case studies and from the survey of river basin organizations, the project team has developed a framework that identifies a number of political and institutional factors which may be associated with the emergence, sustainability, and success or failure of decentralized approaches to integrated water resource management at the basin scale. These factors, and their hypothesized relationships with basin management in a country that has decentralized or is attempting to decentralize water resource management institutions, are derived from the institutional analysis literature relating to water or other natural resource management and to decentralized systems (especially Ostrom 1990, 1992; also Agrawal 2000; Alaerts 1999; Blomquist and Schlager 1999; Bromley 1989; Easter and Hearne 1993; Wunsch 1991). Our information gathering and analysis focuses on the following sets of variables.

- Contextual factors and initial conditions

- Characteristics of the decentralization process

- Characteristics of central government/basin-level relationships and capacities

- The internal configuration of basin-level institutional arrangements

- Variables considered within each set are listed in the appendix.  The Guadalquivir basin case is discussed in terms of these categories and variables in Section 9 below.

# **3. Methodology**

We pursued a case study approach for this project in order to examine closely the processes of institutional change as well as the current situation. An expert in water 6