Research for Impact in CPWF River Basins

This blog is off to a slow start, in part because I am trying to learn new skills, I am in Nairobi with very limited connectivity, and I am managing a project to advise Kenya's government on irrigation institutional reform. But this experience has again brought home to how difficult it is to achieve institutional reform, but how critical achieving this will be to bring about the vision Kenya has for a productive prosperous irrigated agricultural sector. Comatose institutions underly the lack of public investment and indeed deterioration of performance in some schemes. But there are more vested interests in retaining the status quo than risking change in what is a complex institutional matrix. Similiarly, getting the institutional matrix in place to promote better water access, higher productivity, while avoiding or reversing resource degradation in river basins is complex--more so on basins shared by more than one political entity (states in federal systems, countries). Several comments have been posted already, and I would like to invite you to check out the following on an alternative to the standard international law approach in Simon's comment: http://www.water-alternatives.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=45&Itemid=1.

I look forward to participants' views and comments--and we would welcome suggestions for more people to add to this blog.