Contents:
All over the world human societies are intervening in water systems. More and more these interventions reduce or exceed the carrying capacity of our rivers, lakes, wetlands, etc. And climate change will aggravate this. Integrated water management is an approach with many faces. The understanding of a small farmer in Peru, for instance, will be completely different from that of an international river basin manager in Europe or from other scale levels. As integrated water management is context dependent, you will learn to identify assumptions, approaches and traditions in different situations. Students will be able to critically appreciate different knowledge and conceptual stance and methodologies applied in other continents and at different spatial and governance scale levels. To improve management of our water resources, we need to better understand interactions between human interventions and water system functioning. The IWM course addresses such interactions by analysing water management from local urban water to transboundary river levels, characterized by messy problems and uncertainties in knowledge.
You will acquire the capacity to analyse such messy situations and to propose and critically assess research strategies. To do so dimensions of integration are identified and systems
thinking approaches are used. We put emphasis on linking scientific approaches with the practice of integrated water management in the real world. Throughout the course students will learn about concepts and gain practical experience by participating in a serious game based on the real-world IWM case of the Markermeer in the Netherlands. Students
will use concepts to produce scientific reflection on practical experience gained through participation in the game and analyzing cases literature from around the world.
Learning outcomes:
After successful completion of this course students are expected to be able to:
critically reflect on different definitions [JA1] of integrated and adaptive water management;
explain systems thinking approaches and methods that play a role in integrated and adaptive water management;
analyze complex, multi-scale and multi-stakeholder water issues from a researchers perspective;
assess the process of developing solutions to integrated water management issues / challenges.
