This article examines community-driven multiple use water services (MUS) as pioneered by the Rural Village Water Resources Management Project (RVWRMP) in the Far and Mid-Western development regions of Nepal. These regions are characterised by poverty, remoteness, rugged terrain, food insecurity, water scarcity, and post-conflict legacy. Water provision for domestic and productive uses provides opportunities to address poverty and livelihoods in environments with highly decentralised governance. This study explores the first-hand lessons learned in the RVWRMP in Nepal since 2006.

The Coordination and Change Enabling Project (G5) worked in providing an enabling environment that promote connectivity of project research across topics and scales, from household agriculture- aquaculture farming systems to community polder water management through broader land use planning. The project also served as an interface between the programme and a variety of existing and potential stakeholders and worked towards scaling out research results to multiple stakeholders with common interest in achieving the goals for the CPWF for the Ganges coastal zone.

Integrated water resources management provides a set of ideas to help us manage water more holistically. However, these ideas have been formalized over time in what has now become, in capitals, Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM), with specific prescriptive principles whose implementation is often supported by donor funding and international advocacy. IWRM has now become an end in itself, in some cases undermining functioning water management systems, in others setting back needed water reform agendas, and in yet others becoming a tool to mask other agendas.

By increased rural-urban migration in many African countries, the assessment of changes in catchment hydrologic responses due to urbanization is critical for water resource planning and management. This paper assesses hydrological impacts of urbanization on two medium-sized Zimbabwean catchments (Mukuvisi and Marimba) for which changes in land cover by urbanization were determined through Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) images for the years 1986, 1994 and 2008. Impact assessments were done through hydrological modeling by a topographically driven rainfall-runoff model (TOPMODEL).

This study reviewed trends, issues and constraints affecting investments in agricultural water management in Cambodia. Informed by a review of current programs and the literature, workshops were convened in March 2013 to explore four keys areas: investments in irrigation, local institutions for managing irrigation, use of groundwater for irrigation and impacts of intensification on rice-field fisheries. We present some conclusions and unresolved questions here to promote a more broadly based debate around irrigation policy and investment in Cambodia.