Relevance

Over the past few decades, water management has undergone a major paradigm shift. In particular, the concept of integrated water resources management (IWRM) has become a prominent guiding principle in water research and practice. A major criticism levelled at the IWRM concept, however, is the continuing difficulty of transferring the theoretical overall concept into methods that can be applied in practice. At the same time, technical advances in operational water governance are massively increasing the amount of data and information available. Unless people have access to suitable methods for meaningfully analysing and categorising this input, it will exacerbate uncertainty in water management. Multiple stakeholders, and numerous different methods and tools running in parallel are causing significant delays to decision-making processes in water management. This is where the joint research project comes in. It will develop integrated solutions for water resources management and governance by shortening the reaction times in institutions actively involved in water management. In doing so, it will make a substantial contribution to increasing good governance in the water sector.