CPWF Articles in Journals

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10568/3252

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Now showing 1 - 5 of 5

Catching up in southwestern Bangladesh
(Newsletter, 2013-07-01) Clayton, S.
Socioeconomic and Environmental Impact of Development Interventions: Rice Production at the Gallito Ciego Reservoir in Peru
(Journal Article, 2013-08-15) Chavez, H.; Nadolnyak, D; Saravia, Miguel
Apart from direct economic impacts, development projects have complex social and environmental impacts among which sustainability plays a major role. The Gallito Ciego reservoir was built to increase and improve agricultural production at the Jequetepeque valley in Peru. Cost-benefit analysis of rice production from 1992 to 2007 is used to measure the immediate economic impact of the project. Also, a matrix of other relevant impact indicators is constructed to expose changes in the project’s environment during its life cycle. The main conclusion is that, even though there is a significant positive increase in income from agricultural production, the social and environmental impacts are not necessarily positive.
Electricity reforms and their impact on ground water use in states of Gujarat, West Bengal and Uttarakhand, India
(Conference Proceedings, 2010) Mukherji, Aditi; Shah, Tushaar; Verma, Shilp
Indian policy discourse on the most suitable form of agricultural electricity tariff has come full circle. Until the early 1970s, all state electricity boards (SEBs) charged their tubewell owners based on metered consumption, but, due to a whole range of administrative issues, this was later changed to a flat tariff in the early 1980s. However, the flat tariffs remained low over the years and the SEBs started making large losses. Low flat tariffs also led to the over-exploitation of groundwater in arid and semi-arid states of India. Therefore, recently, there has been a renewed interest in reforming the electricity sector. This has been triggered by the poor financial status of most SEBs. The main element of electricity sector reform has been the unbundling of services – that is, the separation of the electricity generation, transmission and distribution functions and the universal metering of all consumers. Almost 50% of India’s pumps depend on electricity for pumping groundwater and hence, reforms in this sector profoundly affect the groundwater sector.
The Green to Blue Water Continuum: An Approach to Improve Agricultural Systems’ Resilience to Water Scarcity
(Conference Paper, 2010) Vidal, Alain
Access to green and blue water for agriculture is not simply addressed by opposing rainfed and irrigated agriculture. Indeed, agricultural systems have never been strictly rainfed or irrigated. History of Mesopotamia teaches us that even if farmers were mastering some irrigation, they were not operating under full irrigation nor were they cultivating only using rainwater. Between irrigated and rainfed agricultural, the farmers reality has been that they simply have never grown any crop without water, which they have stored, mobilized and applied to plants by different ways depending on the nature of the resource available. Irrigated farmers typically also use green water and rainfed farmers sometimes also use blue water, even in the absence of formal irrigation systems. In a nutshell, farmers’ reality around the world have always been to deal with a green to blue water continuum, from which they have struggled to extract the best productive value.
Fostering Institutional Creativity at Multiple Levels: Towards Facilitated Institutional Bricolage
(Journal Article, 2012-02) Merrey, Douglas J.; Cook, Simon E.
Problems occur when institutional arrangements for collective management of food and water systems fail to meet demands. Many of the problems characterising river basins and other collectively managed water resource systems can be ascribed largely to the failure of institutions to enable problems beyond the individual to be managed collectively. The nature of these demands, and the institutional responses to them, vary widely and are not amenable to simple definitions and prescriptions. We begin with a brief review of conventional approaches to analysing institutions and organisations, focused largely, but not exclusively, on river basins. We observe that attempts to reduce the institutional landscape of river basins to over-simplistic formulas introduces more problems than solutions, because the reality is that institutions evolve through complex creative processes that adopt and adapt diverse ingredients – rather like making a stew. Despite such intricacies, institutions are clearly non-random, so we continue a search for a means of describing them. We adopt the concept of bricolage, as proposed by Cleaver and others, and use it to show the value of promoting and facilitating an organic creative approach to building and strengthening river basin and other water management institutions.

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