Conclusions

The chapters of this book have highlighted the many pathways through which concepts related to water governance are emerging and being transferred in countries all around the world. The motivating purpose of collecting these chapters into one volume was to begin a critically-based understanding of the balance between learning and implementing lessons from abroad, and recognizing the special character of local contexts when assessing appropriate water governance approaches at a given scale (local, regional, national or international). We use this concluding chapter to accentuate the interesting aspects of these transfers, to make some notes on the commonalities that have been found, and to discuss what this means for possibilities to generalize statements about the transferability of water management knowledge. These refl ections are made on the basis of relevant theoretical insights (presented in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3) and empirical fi ndings (see Table 1.1 in Chapter 1 for an overview of Chapters 4 to 14).