Constitutional Transitions Visiting Fellow George Anderson is the co-editor of Federal Rivers: Managing Water in Multi-Layered Political Systems, which has just been published by Edward Elgar in the United Kingdom. While there is a considerable literature on the management of river basins across international boundaries, this book is the first to take a systematic and comparative look at experiences within federal or devolved regimes.

Its twenty-one chapters cover case studies in nine federal countries as well as China.  Anderson wrote the synthesis chapter in which he reviews the variety of federal systems, the nature of water management issues (which are overwhelmingly over the use of the resource, not over revenues, as with petroleum and other minerals), the allocation of water-relevant power, and the politics of water policy in federations.  Though the water policy community strongly advocates integrated river basin management organizations, only some federations have adopted this model, and often only for some basins.  Anderson’s chapter examines the functional, institutional and political reasons for why many federations fail to address the challenge of responsible water management.

More information about the book is available through Edward Elgar here.

Related:

Introducing 2013-14 CT Fellow George Anderson
(14 October 2013)