The purpose of this site is to create a community of scholars and practitioners of watershed development around the world, focusing particularly on watershed issues in developing countries. Specific activities will include providing web-based information on watershed programs, projects, literature, and providing a forum for sharing information, experiences, and innovations.

The Watershed Window is one of 13 water management areas, or “windows,” under the World Bank’s Bank-Netherlands Water Partnership Program (BNWPP). The Watershed Window is concerned with the improvement of integration of the land, water, and social dimensions of watersheds. The focus is on upper watershed areas The Window encourages empowerment of local government in the management of watersheds through decentralization in the planning process. By procuring expert advice to assist in the support to local planners, this window assists in the responsible decentralization of watershed planning and management, making such processes more sensitive to the needs of local populations.

The Watershed Window focuses primarily on upper watersheds. These are areas of higher slopes where land and water interactions are more dynamic. In parallel, upper watersheds are commonly those areas where under-serviced and often isolated communities of rural poor predominate, and they are where remaining forest resources tend to be located. The combination of these factors tends to make upper watersheds places where issues of rural poverty and natural resource management are intimately linked. As a result, they are also areas that tend to offer very real opportunities for improving natural resource management and downstream impacts through effective poverty alleviation and local institutional development and vice versa.

Established in 2000, the BNWPP mission is to increase water security through the sponsorship of novel approaches in Integrated Water Resources Management, and thereby contribute to the reduction of poverty.

As such, the Government of the Netherlands and the World Bank joined their expertise in Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) as partners. The Government of the Netherlands has identified improved water management in all its aspects as one of the most pressing development issues today. With extensive water management experience themselves, the Dutch have a long history cultivating expertise in this domain. The World Bank backs water projects throughout the developing world, and it is well positioned to provide support for a variety of water activities, oversee the deployment of multi-disciplinary teams, and draw lessons from its experiences for broader applicability.