Water governance decentralization in Africa: a framework for reform process and performance analysis

Over the past 20 years most African countries reformed their water laws and restructured their institutional and governance framework accordingly. While much effort and good will was put into decentralization reforms in many basins in the continent, results are not uniformly realized. The process of water management decentralization in African countries is seen as a means of advancing river basin management at the lowest appropriate level. The very different stages of advancement in the African river basins agencies indicate the difficulty of implementing decentralization in practice. This study set out to understand why some water agencies have succeeded more than others, what are the variables involved in such reform process, which variables have a positive or a negative impact on the implementation of decentralization processes in the African water sector, and which variables could be affected by policy interventions and how.