INTRODUCTION

The introductory chapter briefly described the state of water management and the natural and social systems principally affected during recent centuries. At the present time the challenge to concerned people is to ask what opportunities there are to recognize wise principles that might be applied in the years ahead to the correction of previous unwise activity and to the guidance of new activity. This chapter reviews the state of global water management at the end of the twentieth century as seen by selected analysts, and summarizes samples of thinking at that time as to policies that should guide further action.

As an aid to appraising both past and future water management it briefly examines the changing criteria for evaluating the effects of such management. General criteria which might guide future choice of policies and technologies are reviewed with attention to specific efforts made by non-governmental, national, and international agencies to specify their definitions of desirable policy. In a general sense, many of those criteria fall into the category of efforts at what is loosely termed “sustainable development.” Because of the range of definitions often employed for those terms, an effort is made to express the various connotations of sustainable development more precisely as they apply to water management. They are then given meaning for the concrete aims of setting the demands for potable water, of meeting food needs, of supplying energy requirements, and of maintaining biodiversity in natural systems.