Integrating 'livelihoods' into Integrated Water Resources Management: Taking the Integration Paradigm to its Logical Next Step for Developing Countries

This paper examines the weaknesses in the current understanding of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) from a livelihoods perspective. Empowering poor people, reducing poverty, improving livelihoods, and promoting economic growth ought to be the basic objectives of IWRM. But as currently understood and used, IWRM often tends to focus on second generation issues, discouraging attention to making water available to poor people for productive and domestic uses. This paper argues that IWRM needs to be placed in the broader context of modern Integrated Natural Resource Management (INRM) and the livelihoods approach, which take a holistic and people-centered approach. The paper concludes with an alternative definition of IWRM as involving the promotion of human welfare, especially the reduction of poverty, encouragement of better livelihoods and balanced economic growth through effective democratic development and management of water and other natural resources in an integrated multi-level framework that is as equitable, sustainable and transparent as possible, and conserves vital ecosystems. Transparent user-friendly information and models for assisting decision-making are an essential feature of livelihood-oriented IWRM