Water quality management.

The sustainable management of water quality has policy, technical, institutional and financial components. In many developing countries restricted funding is usually combined with fragile or unstable institutions and limited technical capabilities to deal with an expanding range of water quality problems. Therefore, there needs to be a priority on establishing a coherent and realistic national policy response to water quality management so that limited funds and strengthening of capacity are strategically focused on essential issues, and institutional inertia or competition is eliminated. For example, the present state of many national data programs, for which there are no clear data objectives and no defined users of the data, represents an expensive failure of national policy. At the technical level, there has been great progress in western nations in developing more cost-effective monitoring, analytical protocols, and assessment methods. This flows not only from better scientific knowledge, but also from recognition that conventional monitoring programs are inefficient, expensive, and often not very useful. Regrettably, financial institutions and ODA programs tend to reinforce conventional approaches in developing countries with the result that these countries have little opportunity to develop a new, more appropriate and more sustainable data paradigm. In lesser developed countries where public health is the major concern, the traditional model of a centralized monitoring program often does not work, suggesting that a new model of decentralized community-based monitoring would be more effective. Growing national priorities for remediation of water quality in lake and river basins demonstrate the gap between needs and abilities in developing countries. This gap has a profound effect both on the types of interventions that are being (or should be) implemented and on how these can be sustained in developing countries. The increasing need for defensible, rational, remediation programs argues for a new model for capacity building so that the role of the consultant (company) is reduced to one of facilitator and not the primary implementer. Conventional approaches to river and lake restoration, such as dredging, are often ineffective and expensive. Alternative technologies that are more effective and sustainable are usually not considered because they do not fit into conventional engineering solutions. Financial sustainability is not a simple problem. It requires, in the first-instance, a well-defined and targeted program that meets specific management needs. It includes potential for cost-avoidance and cost-reduction as well as cost-recovery and income generation. It also depends on management and business skills at the program level and on fiscal policies and accountabilities at the state level that permit earnings retention and reinvestment. Experience suggests that redesign of national water quality data programs, including technical, institutional and legal components, is an effective first step to achieving cost-efficiency.