INTRODUCTION

Water is managed in highly diverse ways by decisions made in local areas as well as in national capitals, and international river basin negotiations. This chapter reviews the various types of participants – individual and collective – in many of those decisions and their modes of interaction in deciding how water will be used or controlled. The future character of water management will be profoundly affected by the kinds of organization, scientific findings, and evaluative criteria that are employed in specific situations. The resulting modes of decision making will, in effect, strongly influence how the resources of water are used and how the related environment is affected.

VARIETIES OF DECISION MAKING

The most elementary decisions about water are made by individuals or corporations that draw upon or manage an available source for a single purpose without directly collaborating with others and without being subject to guidance or regulation by other individuals under prevailing social policy. Decisions become more complex when they start to involve collaboration with other managers, or when they are subject to some kind of influence by a public agency or other organization, affecting the criteria used in the decision process. According to the number and diversity of the other users and of social organizations, the complexity of the basic decisions varies enormously. The range in complexity of the decision process is thus from a single family as the sole user of one water source to a highly diverse population of individuals, corporations, and public agencies over an entire international river basin using and altering water in ways subject to standards and regulations set by a variety of public agencies in competing areas with differing standards of water quality use and cost sharing.