Publication
Decreasing water availability per capita in more and more countries is the result of bad management over the past centuries. The 'world water crisis', however, is not inevitable. The concept of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) has been promoted over the last ten years as a possible way of reversing such a trend. One of its most fervent promoters is the Global Water Partnership, according to which "IWRM is a process which promotes the co-ordinated development and management of water, land and related resources, in order to maximize the resultant economic and social welfare in an equitable manner without compromising the sustainability of vital ecosystems" (GWP, 2000: 22). A number of authors are critical of an appropriation of the IWRM concept by the Global Water Partnership devoid of its historical evolution over more than 70 years (Biswas, 2005; Mollard and Vargas, 2005a). As a result of this omission, these authors question the applicability and usefulness of the concept and call for assessing the effectiveness of IWRM implementation. The difficulties of practical IWRM implementation are manifold and include issues of scale, as well as institutional, political, and social constraints to sectoral and environmental integration (Tortajada, 2005; Duda and El-Ashry, 2000; Mitchell, 1990), that can be more or less specific to developing countries (Thioubou, 2002). The 1992 Mexican Water Law, amended in 2004, explicitly refers to IWRM as a national objective. As a result, there has been fairly extensive research on the implementation of IWRM in Mexico at the national level. This study assesses the implementation of IWRM efforts in the municipality of El Grullo (Jalisco), to identify the local and necessary conditions to enhance these. We first recall the innovative aspects of the IWRM concept, as compared to more traditional water management. Ambitious, integrated water resources management is a holistic approach that includes both the natural system (water and its diverse components –surface water/groundwater, quantity/quality– but also all other environmental resources such as land, forests and biodiversity in general) and the human system, including all the different uses (domestic, agricultural, industrial, etc.) (Mitchell, 1990). Integrated water management is an indicator of what Gleick (2000) qualifies as a change in paradigm between the 20th century –where infrastructure development enabled to better exploit resources, perceived as unlimited– and the 21st century, where finite resources are to be managed in order to maintain ecological integrity. Integrated water resources management is necessary to realise this 'blue revolution' (Calder, 2005). It requires, on the one hand, a participative and negotiation-oriented institutional framework and, on the other hand, water pricing tools, so as to balance demand and supply (Meublat, 2001). At the level of a municipality, implementing IWRM efforts translates, on the one hand, in ensuring