Ruf Thierry auteur aut IRD Valcony M.J. auteur aut IRD text journalArticle fre text/pdf reformatted digital access The water resources integrated management model is based on principles set in Dublin in 1992 and reproduced under equivalent terms in most Water Conferences through the last 15 years. This paper introduces several of these principles and discusses them against specific irrigation situations in northern and southern Mediterranean countries. The first principle gives the definition of the hydrologic territory, the watershed, whose limits are never really clear in the Mediterranean context. The second principle considers the unity of the resource and its concerted management between users, planners, and deciders. It is a technocratic approach to observing composite human societies in Mediterranean territories compiling a variety of water concerns according to such concepts as origin, access, use, and reuse. The third principle focuses on the social issues on women, the part of society responsible for assuring the basic foundations of life. Still, in reality this approach hides the strong disparities which have developed in rural Mediterranean societies and which have produced very limited results as far as improved water management by women is concerned. The fourth principle, for which Dublin is the main reference, is the fixing of an economic value for water. There are four modes commonly used for sharing this resource: instituting the payment of tolls, classifying the resource as common property, administering the resource as a public good, and treating the resource as a good on the market. in actual fact, these four modes co-exist in the same areas of water management, especially in Mediterranean agriculture. Each area has developed an institutional economic compromise, but world water policies lead to the hydraulic impoverishment of the weakest producers in irrigated lands and to a new system for distributing resources in which the State, rather than disengaging from management of the resource, is expropriating the traditional holders of water rights and transferring them to the very people who already over-consume the resource. specialized globalization irrigation Mediterranean region resource management water conservation 098 062 16 4 294-300 2007 1166-7699 https://www.documentation.ird.fr/hor/fdi:010040796 10.1684/agr.2007.0120 1166-7699 [F B010040796] https://www.documentation.ird.fr/hor/fdi:010040796 https://horizon.documentation.ird.fr/exl-doc/pleins_textes/2024-12/010040796.pdf IRD - Base Horizon / Pleins textes 2007-12-03 2024-12-24 fdi:010040796 fre