# **1. Background and Introduction**

Integrated water resource 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: that the whole array of resources and use patterns in the basin will be taken into account, public participation will be greater and broader, management decisions will be based on better knowledge of local conditions, and so on.

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, with the support of the World Bank, 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 involve relatively new basin organizations such as the Regional Water Management Authority in the Warta River basin in Poland and the Coordinating Commission for the Rio Grande de Tarcoles in Costa Rica. Others, such as the Guadalquivir river basin in Spain and the MurrayDarling river basin in Australia, have long histories.

Spain has perhaps the longest history of any country in developing formal governmental authorities on the river basin scale, with the earliest ones dating from 1926. Although the river basin authorities in Spain ( _confederaciones hidrograficas_ , or CHs) have experienced many changes that have reduced and expanded their responsibilities and their participatory structures over the ensuing 75 or more years, they represent nonetheless a notably long-lived set of basin management institutions.

The basin authority for the Guadalquivir river ( _Confederacion Hidrografica del Guadalquivir_ , or CH Guadalquivir) is one of the oldest in Spain. The Guadalquivir basin was selected as a case study for this research project not only because of CH Guadalquivir’s longevity, but because the basin faces the full array of water resource management problems (floods as well as drought, tensions between urban and agricultural water uses, water quality degradation and improvement, etc.) and is situated almost entirely within the Spanish region of Andalusia (thus minimizing some of the complications of trans-jurisdictional CHs in Spain).

Our study finds that the river basin authority appears to have been well suited to the tasks that dominated Spanish water policy from the time of its formation to about the 1980s—namely, the construction and operation of water supply and storage facilities with heavy central-government subsidies, to promote irrigation and hydropower development. As urbanization and industrialization have changed the population and economy of the basin, and as Spanish policy since the 1980s has elevated water demand management, quality protection, and ecosystem health to levels of priority equaling or approximating water supply augmentation, CH Guadalquivir has had difficulty making the transition.

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