Water Governance Group @ Bradford

Participants in the forum shared a variety of critical views on four key themes; the international water consensus, water as a scarce resource, water and the poor and managing water wisely

Documents

Children at a well

Alternative Water Forum

The Bradford Centre for International Development (BCID) began its contribution to the worldwide debate on the management of global water resources with the hosting of the Alternative Water Forum in 2003.  In the preceding two years, many thousands of people attended the Bonn Freshwater Conference (December 2001), the World Summit on Sustainable Development (September 2002) and the Third World Water Forum in Kyoto (March 2003). Whilst such meetings served many useful functions and provided excellent opportunities for networking and exchange of experiences, they also tended to work from common assumptions and generate a set of stock responses, which were then published in formalised statements or declarations.

Aware of these shortcomings, staff from BCID convened the Alternative Water Forum in Bradford at the beginning of May 2003. Some 55 participants attended, comprising academics and practitioners from the whole spectrum of water development issues.  From the presentations and the ensuing debates, four broad themes emerged, the water consensus, water as a scarce resource, water and the poor, and managing water wisely.

These themes are explored in our extended overview and Forum papers.

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