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3. Water As A Resource
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Saha (1981 page 25) distinguished between the water resource management perspective, and the more modern river basin planning approach: "Water resource management is ... a set of well co-ordinated but technocratic interventions in the hydrological cycle undertaken to augment and better regulate the existing water supplies for meeting human needs more effectively. River basin planning situates these interventions in a broader set of interrelationships which transcend both environmental and social systems." This suggests the need for a more holistic and integrated approach (sometimes associated with an ecocentric as distinct from a technocentric ideology). Elliot (1981) suggests this change will be brought about by environmental managers who have the necessary powers of integration to operate at all appropriate levels.
Sustainable water resource management must take holistic account of the natural movement of the hydrological cycle
Saha (1981 page 25) distinguished between the water resource management perspective, and the more modern river basin planning approach: "Water resource management is ... a set of well co-ordinated but technocratic interventions in the hydrological cycle undertaken to augment and better regulate the existing water supplies for meeting human needs more effectively. River basin planning situates these interventions in a broader set of interrelationships which transcend both environmental and social systems." This suggests the need for a more holistic and integrated approach (sometimes associated with an ecocentric as distinct from a technocentric ideology). Elliot (1981) suggests this change will be brought about by environmental managers who have the necessary powers of integration to operate at all appropriate levels.
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"Heavier emphasis is placed upon research which cuts across conventional disciplinary lines of engineering and the physical, social and biological sciences to find answers to newly phrased questions relating to the environmental effects of human interventions in the hydrological cycle" (White 1977:2). |
How would you distinguish between a water resource management perspective and a river basin management perspective?