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Abstract

Both the Fergana Valley in Central Asia and the Lower Jordan River Basin are international hotspots in water management. The irrigation and land use systems in both basins have seen important changes during the last century and the economic, social, and political stability in those regions depends largely on the availability and fair distribution of the basins’ water resources. How these water resources are managed depends in many ways on the different institutional settings and their adaptation capacities. In both regions, path dependencies, resulting from the construction of major water engineering projects (MWEPs) and existing institutional settings, constrain the introduction of integrated water resources management (IWRM) within a transboundary context. Those constraints can only be lifted by the introduction of adaptive and participative instruments.