# **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 water 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 Tárcoles basin of Costa Rica where a river basin commission, the Coordinating Commission for the Río Grande de Tárcoles (CRGT), was established in the early 1990s.

This case has been extremely valuable because the formation of the basin commission was a locally-initiated action that occurred in the fairly recent memory of many individuals who are still actively involved in water and government, and whose perspectives on the origin, growth, and recent difficulties of the basin management effort are both fresh and rich. The Tárcoles basin therefore provided an opportunity to explore the early life cycle of a river basin organization and some of the factors that were linked to its origin, early growth, and recent stagnation.

This paper focuses on analysis of the effort to establish river basin management in the Tárcoles basin, and provides only brief descriptions of its physical characteristics, social and economic profile, and historical development. More detailed information about those important matters may be found in the appendices.

# **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 5