Multi-Stakeholder Platforms for Integrated Water Management (Ashgate Studies in Environmental Policy and Practice)

Multi-Stakeholder Platforms (MSPs) are becoming a very popular mode of involving civil society in debates and decision-making on resource management, as they provide a negotiating space for a diversity of interests. MSPs ideally emerge when stakeholders recognise their interdependence and the shared nature of the problems they are facing.Illustrated by a wide geographical range of case studies from both developed and developing worlds, this book focuses on water management to take a positive, if critical, look at this phenomenon. It recognises that MSPs will neither automatically break down political and institutional divides nor bring actors to the table on an equal footing, and argues that if MSPs promise too much or are based on wrong principles, then they may do more harm than good.The volume then examines how MSPs can make a difference and how they might successfully co-opt the public, private and civil-society sectors. The book highlights the particular difficulties of MSPs when dealing with integrated water management programmes, explaining how MSPs are most successful at a less complex and more local level, rather than at water basin level. It finally questions whether MSPs are, or can be, sustainable and puts forward suggestions for improving their durability.