enabling – or disabling – conditions for effective stakeholder participation to come about? If stakeholder involvement is translated into basin-level management, how can the active involvement and effective resource management be sustained over time and changing conditions? What factors might account for the longevity of decentralized arrangements in some cases and their demise in others?

This research study is one effort to take stock of decentralization attempts in order to evaluate under which conditions decentralization has come about, and with what results. To that end, the study includes river basins where organizations have been developed at the basin scale (in some cases, sub-basin also) and where those organizations perform (or coordinate the performance of) management functions such as planning, allocation and/or pricing of water supplies, flood prevention and/or response, and water quality monitoring and improvement. The study is expected to inform decision makers engaged in on-going and planned activities in this regard, and make a contribution to improved river basin management.

Several institutional and political variables are relevant to such an effort, and are incorporated in a theoretical framework used in this study.<sup>3</sup> The variables represent political and institutional factors that can and should be incorporated into an account of the success or failure of decentralization initiatives in water resource management. These variables and their hypothesized relationships come from theoretical and, in some cases, empirical studies of water and other natural resource management, several of which are summarized and presented in Mody (2004).

This paper presents that theoretical framework, and compares the approaches to river basin governance and management adopted in the following river basins: the AltoTietê and Jaguaribe River Basins, Brazil; the Brantas River Basin, East Java, Indonesia; the Fraser River Basin, British Columbia, Canada; the Guadalquivir River Basin, Spain; the Murray-Darling River Basin, Australia; the Tárcoles River Basin, Costa Rica, and; the Warta River Basin, Poland.<sup>4</sup> The analysis focuses on how river basin management has been organized and pursued in each case in light of its specific geographical, historical and organizational contexts and the evolution of institutional arrangements.

3 Although integrated into the discussion below of hypothesized relationships, the variables include: level of national economic development; level of basin economic development; distribution of resource endowments among basin stakeholders; cultural or other differences among individuals or groups whose cooperation or coordination is needed; histories of interactions among individuals and groups, and their anticipations about future interactions; norms of trust and reciprocity; whether decentralization initiatives were top-down, bottom-up, or mutual; involvement of existing community institutions; basin-level financial autonomy (including whether revenues generated within the basin are retained there for basin management activities); familiarity or experience of basin stakeholders with provision and management of other services or resources; whether and to what extent basin stakeholders can create or modify institutional arrangements; and adequate time for implementation and adaptation of new arrangements.

4 The eight case studies employ a single theoretical framework, as part of the study “Integrated River Basin Management and the Principle of _Managing Water Resources at the Lowest Appropriate Level_ – When and Why Does It (Not) Work in Practice?” funded by the World Bank. Policy Research Working Papers on each case study have been composed: the Guadalquivir Basin in Spain (Blomquist et al. 2004a), the Warta Basin in Poland (Blomquist et al. 2004b), the Brantas Basin in Indonesia (Bhat et al. 2005), the Tárcoles Basin in Costa Rica (Blomquist et al. 2004e), the Murray Darling Basin in Australia (Blomquist et al. 2004c), the Fraser Basin in Canada (Blomquist et al., 2004d), and the Alto Tietê and Jaguaribe Basins in Brazil (Formiga Johnsson and Kemper, 2005a, b).

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