Challenges for integrated water resources management: How do we provide the knowledge to support truly integrated thinking?

The ideas of good governance through integrated water resources management (IWRM) are predicated on bringing together our understanding of water from many domains, thus the provision of knowledge and information is an important part of any enabling environment. Strategies put forward so far have been based on developing systems to integrate existing data from many sources then using different analytical methods such as Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) to determine the effects of particular policies or management strategies on various water subsystems. This paper reviews some of the challenges associated with such approaches, ranging from the practical problems of data provision to the more fundamental ones associated with adopting such a positivist, techno-scientific framework. It becomes obvious that new approaches are needed which take on board important research findings emanating from fields such as social theory and geographical information science (GIScience).