Draft of a chapter forthcoming in R. Munck, N. Asingwire, H. Fagan & C. Kabonesa, eds, Water and Development: An African Perspective, (London: Zed) [IT SHOULD BE OUT IN MID‐2015] 1 Can IWRM Float on a Sea of Underdevelopment? Reflections on 20+ Years of ‘Reform’ in Sub‐Saharan Africa Larry A. Swatuk Introduction More than a decade ago, at the second World Water Forum in the Hague, the Netherlands’ then‐Prince of Orange and now newly crowned King declared that the world water crisis was ‘a crisis of governance’. Scholars and development practitioners rallied around this phrase, further arguing that there was, in fact, no ‘water crisis’ at all, but a ‘crisis of water management’. Taken together, these two positions helped foster a series of frameworks, programs, projects and networks devoted to ‘solving’ the so‐called water crisis. The dominant paradigm simultaneously emerging from, framing and reflecting these activities is IWRM – integrated water resources management (Allan, 2003; Conca, 2006; Swatuk, 2008). The logic informing IWRM seems impeccable: the problems with water derive from fragmentation across government sectors, divisive approaches and understandings of the resource across the watershed, and narrow understandings of what water is (i.e. blue) and for (i.e. humans and (agro)industry). Most recently, within the context of global warming, no less an august body than the World Economic Forum has weighed in with the need to consider water governance and management within the context of ‘the water, energy, food and climate security nexus’ (WEF, 2011). To this end, both DfID in the UK and GIZ in Germany have begun to filter their development assistance through the ‘nexus’ framework (see for example http://r4d.dfid.gov.uk/Output/189277/Default.aspx). It is difficult to be ‘against’ either IWRM or a nexus approach: both policy and programming benefit from these integrated and holistic perspectives. But one wonders at the way in which such useful frameworks rather quickly turn into contextual spaces, wherein a wide array of ‘stakeholders’ use the discursive space created by ‘IWRM’ (and likely now ‘nexus’) to foster their own parochial and non‐integrative agenda. So, for many minor government actors ‘IWRM’ becomes another means to supplement income through per diems ‘earned’ through an endless series of meetings, workshops and trainings (see www.cap‐net.org for a sense of some of this activity). For many major government actors, IWRM becomes the justification for often poorly‐considered mega‐projects. In the transboundary setting, these projects are often justified as means to build peace and foster trust between and among otherwise fractured states (Earle, Jagerskog and Ojendal, 2010; Swatuk and Wirkus, 2009). For the private sector, IWRM provides the entry point for profit‐oriented water delivery systems; and for civil society organizations, IWRM is ‘a license to drill boreholes’ across rural landscapes (see www.wateraid.org/uk/ for an indication of some of these activities). Taken together, in my view, all of this IWRM‐fostered activity reveals and in many cases reinforces the disintegrated and divisive nature of water resource access, use, and management across the Third World landscape (Swatuk, 2010; MacDonald and Ruiters, 2005). In the words of Lewis Jonker, ‘scarcity is really about access’ (personal communication; see also Noemdoe et al, 2006; Mehta, 2007, 2001).