Integrated, adaptive and domanial water resources management

Arising from concerns that integrated and adaptive water resources man-agement (I/AWRM) may not be sufficiently tailored to certain kinds of en-vironments, this article examines their design through a governmentality framework, positing that I/AWRM could be enhanced by increasing ac-countability and local appropriateness through citizen’s actions that ad-dress and are situated in three types of domains – spatial ‘holons’, hydro-logical regime ‘phases ’ and problem-solving ‘tasks ’ – an exercise termed ‘domanial’. As explained in the paper, the geo-economic scope of this pa-per are countries as in Sub-Saharan Africa where climatic variability and widespread irrigation dominates river basins that in turn have limited ca-pacity for well-financed administration commonly seen in Europe. The need to recognize irrigation in adaptive water management is born from the great proportion of freshwater depleted by the sector and its effects on water shortages and behaviors in other sectors. Because of these charac-teristics, there is a risk that in irrigated semi-arid environments, IWRM (with a regulatory emphasis on managing water use to effect water alloca-tion between sectors in large river basin units) or adaptive versions of IWRM (emphasizing iterative refinement and wider system complexity) will not engender satisfactory outcomes