Water Policy Vol 9 No 2 pp 131–147 © IWA Publishing 2007 doi:10.2166/wp.2007.005
An approach to assessing socioeconomic implications of water management alternatives
Krishna C. Prasada, Kenneth M. Strzepekb and Barbara van Koppenc
aCorresponding author. UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education, Department of Water Engineering, Westvest 7, P. O. Box 30152601, Delft, The Netherlands. Fax: +31-15-2122921k.prasad@unesco-ihe.org: and International Water Management Institute
bDepartment of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0428, USA. Fax: +1-303-4927317strzepek@colorado.edu
cInternational Water Management Institute, 141 Creswell Street, Weavind Park 0184, Pretoria, South Africa. Fax: +27-12-8459110b.vankoppen@cgiar.org
ABSTRACT
Socioeconomic development objectives are integral to the integrated river basin management initiatives in several river basins around the world, including the Olifants River Basin of South Africa. All viable strategic water management alternatives are expected to contribute towards such, usually predefined, socioeconomic objectives in addition to other hydrological and ecological objectives. An assessment of the relative merits of different alternatives becomes imperative to trace the respective contributions of the alternatives to such objectives and thus to identify the best-bet and most agreeable alternative from a multi-stakeholders' perspective. This paper reports key findings from application of a methodology for this purpose in the Olifants River Basin of South Africa by (a) establishing a link between water management indicators and socioeconomic objectives, (b) assessing the potential socioeconomic implications of various water management alternatives and (c) rank ordering the identified alternatives against the socioeconomic objectives based on multi-criteria decision analysis techniques.
Keywords: Decision support system; Integrated river basin management; Multi criteria decision analysis; Olifants River Basin; Stakeholders' participation
Full article (PDF Format)
PAY-PER-VIEW: Buy this article for £20.00 (IWA MEMBER PRICE: £15.00)
|
