New Evaluation Procedures for a New Generation of Water-Related Projects (World Bank Technical Paper No. 349)

The change from a construction to a management approach to solving a country ' s water problems alters the basic nature of assistance required by the water manager. This effect is described here as a new generation of water-related projects, a type that the Bank is increasingly asked to consider. These projects aim to enhance a country ' s capacity to collect, process, and use the most critically important input to the process of water management: information. Thus, the goal of achieving substantive improvements in water-use efficiency and the improvement of water quality presupposes such detailed knowledge as how water is presently used, conditions of water supply, accurate and timely forecasts of meteorological events, alternative institutions for water management, and conditions requisite for their effective operation. The Bank ' s new generation of water-related projects creates the need for a new generation of evaluation procedures and methods. The present study explores three approaches -the inferential approach, the anecdotal approach, and the minimum impact approach that might be used to evaluate such projects, using the Mexico Water Resources Management Project (WRMP) as the expository vehicle. The WRMP is detailed and then evaluated by applying the three approaches.