Degradation of freshwater ecosystems and the services they provide is a primary cause of increasing water insecurity, raising the need for integrated solutions to freshwater management. While methods for characterizing the multi-faceted challenges of managing freshwater ecosystems abound, they tend to emphasize either social or ecological dimensions and fall short of being truly integrative. This paper suggests that management for sustainability of freshwater systems needs to consider the linkages between human water uses, freshwater ecosystems and governance.

This article shows how large-scale commercial farmers, individually and collectively, are responding to land and water reform processes in the Thukela River basin, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. With a high degree of innovative agency, commercial farmers have effectively executed four strategies, enabling them to adapt and use their access to resources to neutralize multiple water reform efforts that once promised to be catalysts for inclusive change in the post-apartheid era.

The Nile Delta and its 2.27 million ha of irrigated land makes up two thirds of Egypt’s agricultural land. It is also the terminal part of a river basin that spans and feeds 11 countries. Increases in dam and irrigation development in upstream parts of the basin is poised to conflict with agricultural expansion and population growth in Egypt. Understanding where and how waters comes into and leaves the delta is therefore a crucial question for the future of the country.

Cooperative management of transboundary river basins is widely recognized as important. Emphasis on joint management of shared aquifers has also grown in recent years. Perhaps surprisingly, despite abundant focus on transboundary surface water and growing focus on shared groundwater, there is scant focus on their intersection.

Building on existing literature and the analysis of a portfolio of development projects (past and under implementation), this paper reviews the evolution of water user associations (WUAs) in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), reflecting on the conceptualization of how they operate, and the promised outcomes related to irrigation development, and the efficient and effective delivery of irrigation services.

Conversion of natural forest to other land uses could lead to significant changes in catchment hydrology, but the nature of these changes has been insufficiently investigated in tropical montane catchments, especially in Africa. To address this knowledge gap, we identified stream water sources and flow paths in three tropical montane sub-catchments (27–36 km2) with different land use (natural forest, smallholder agriculture and commercial tea plantations) within a 1 021 km2 catchment in the Mau Forest Complex, Kenya.