Assessing the Roles of Water Resources Users Associations in line with the Principles of Integrated River Basin Management: Case Study of the Kuywa Water Resources Users Association

Integrated River Basin Management (IRBM) has become a rallying call of mainstream thinking on water resources management across the world. The Dublin Principles (1992) and the Rio Conferences Agenda 21 (1992) all stressed aspects of water resources management that are supposed to be integrated at the river basin level. The World Bank Water Policy (1993) underscored that in many countries, institutional reform will focus on river basins as the appropriate unit for analysis and coordinated water resources management. The European Unions Water Framework Directive (2000) enjoins all member states to ensure the appropriate administrative arrangements, including the identification of the appropriate competent authority, for the application of the rules of this Directive within each river basin district lying within their territory. In Kenya, the Water Act 2016 recognizes the river basin as the planning unit for water resources management and establishes Water Resources Users Associations (WRUAs) as vehicles for conflict resolution and collaborative management of water resources at the basin level. The WRUA Development Cycle (WDC) which is the tool that guides formation of WRUAs and development of their Sub-Catchment Management Plans (SCMPs) but it does not provide clear guidelines to the WRUAs towards achieving Integrated River Basin Management within the entire basins. The objective of the research was to assess the extent to which the WRUAs are implementing Integrated River Basin Management through their planned and funded activities. The case study was the Kuywa WRUA operating in the Kuywa river sub-basin in western Kenya. The study found out that the WRUAs activities were fully in line with the principles of Integrated River Basin Management, and that the WRUAs were having a major impact on the conservation of their sub-basins. However, lack of technical capacity and limited funding were the two major hindrances to the WRUAs efforts towards Integrated River Basin Management at the sub-basin level. Further, the research also established that a lack of coordination amongst WRUAs within the same basin was a major hindrance to achieving a basin-wide approach to Integrated River Basin Management