exhaustion and its loss of credibility, are clearly of this type. Once it lost its central government support and its dynamic initial leadership, the CRGT’s status and composition left it vulnerable to becoming more of a discussion forum than a governing body.

Efforts to match the basin boundaries appear to have proceeded fairly well. The real difficulty lies in identifying who is responsible for what in the Tárcoles basin. The prevailing and traditional view that water has to be managed by its uses (drinking, irrigation, hydropower, etc) rather than in an integrated fashion has been reflected and reinforced by Costa Rican laws. There is considerable fragmentation and territorialism among agencies and institutes at the central government level. Likewise, at the local level, there is little interjurisdictional cooperation and coordination among municipalities, which have been gaining interest in entering water planning and water service business activities.

That there was little recognition of sub-watershed communities of interest has been one of the few criticisms directed at the basin commission by those who were and are sympathetic to it. One interviewee mentioned that the upper, middle, and lower basin areas entail “three different realities” with very different interests. This is a wellrecognized issue among stakeholders, and a bone of contention for how water resource management should be organized. One of the principal recommendations being considered by the ministry about how to proceed and how to restructure the basin commission was to establish upper, middle, and lower basin groups (mini-commissions) within the overall commission.

The basin commission’s greatest strength was to serve as a forum for information sharing and communication, but this appears to have waned substantially since its time of peak activity. Some individuals who had been active participants in the commission indicated that they would welcome its revival but that they have stopped attending for now either because they are unaware of meetings or because they do not see much point in going. Instead, basin stakeholders seem to have sector-based fora for information sharing (e.g., union of municipalities, chamber of industries, chamber of agriculture, etc.), which may serve operational purposes, but are not conducive to development of an agenda of basin activities.

Given Costa Rica’s size and the centrality of the Tárcoles basin, national entities (ministries and institutes) do most of the monitoring, as evidenced in the State of the Nation project which compiles data from these sources into comprehensive reports. There was not much evidence of institutionalized monitoring of the Tárcoles basin per se. The 1997-98 study paid for by IDB and led by ABT Associates remains the most recent effort at a comprehensive picture of the basin and its conditions.

# **_8.5 Other Factors_**

In each case study, there have been important factors relating to the emergence and success of basin management that were not envisioned in our analytical framework. This is in the nature of research on institutions, which are always shaped by particular contexts and therefore exhibit unanticipated or idiosyncratic features. In this case, at least two additional factors in Costa Rica have shaped the outcomes in the Tárcoles basin so far.

One factor is the relatively large number of separately identifiable river basins in a relatively small (geographically speaking) country. The Tárcoles basin is only one of 34 identified river basins in Costa Rica. In light of the country’s modest size, there is substantial difference of opinion about the appropriate scale on which to try to organize 27