# **1. Background and Introduction**

Integrated water resources management (IWRM) and organizing it primarily at the river basin level are two of the most common and widely repeated recommendations in the water resources literature of the last decade if not longer (Allee 1988; Galloway 1997; McDonald and Kay 1988; World Bank 1993). Basin management is often associated with the concept of decentralization, of managing water resources at the “lowest appropriate level.” (See, e.g., International Conference on Water and the Environment 1992; Mody 2001). Several conceptual arguments have been presented in favor of decentralization in water resource management, and basin-level management in particular, including that the whole array of resources and use patterns in the basin will be taken into account, management decisions will be based on better knowledge of local conditions, and incentives for stakeholders to actively participate in management will be stronger.

Empirical studies of river basin management systems provide opportunities to examine the claims made for basin-level integrated resources management, and to explore factors that appear to influence its implementation and outcomes. In this research project the project team has searched for those factors and their relationships to river basin management in two ways: with a survey of river basin organizations throughout the world, and with case studies of eight river basins analyzed in greater detail. Some of those eight cases have long histories of basin-scale institutions for water resource management, such as the Guadalquivir river basin in Spain and the Murray-Darling river basin in Australia. Others have emerged recently, as in the Fraser basin in British Columbia, Canada where the Fraser Basin Management Board was established in the early 1990s, succeeded in 1997 by the Fraser Basin Council.

This case has been an extremely valuable addition to the research project, for three main reasons. First, it adds an example of a nongovernmental river basin organization, whereas the other cases were of governmental or inter-governmental structures. The Fraser Basin case is not one of governmental decentralization, but of the creation of a non-governmental body facilitating the coordination of a number of decentralized private-sector and public-sector activities within the river basin. Second, the Fraser Basin Council has pursued a very broad scope of topics that its members see as related to an overall concept of basin “sustainability,” which includes social and economic as well as environmental aspects. Third, the formation of the basin council (and its predecessor basin management board) was a locally initiated action that occurred in the fairly recent memory of many individuals who are still actively involved, and whose perspectives on the origin and evolution of the basin management effort are both fresh and rich.

This paper focuses on analysis of the establishment of a non-governmental, multistakeholder, and consensus-based approach to river basin governance and management in the Fraser River basin. Only brief descriptions of the basin’s physical characteristics, social and economic profile, and historical development are included in this paper; more detailed information about those important matters may be found in Calbick et al. (2004).

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