Development organizations are searching for concepts and methods that will enable impacts of development co-operation to be recorded and scientifically tenable, transparent and practicable conclusions to be drawn. They expect the cost of evaluations to be proportional to the project budget. While a standardized set of tools is available for the economic and technical evaluation of projects, methods of covering the social dimension - which are of prime importance for impact analysis - have yet to reach maturity.

Development organizations are searching for concepts and methods that will enable impacts of development co-operation to be recorded and scientifically tenable, transparent and practicable conclusions to be drawn. They expect the cost of evaluations to be proportional to the project budget. While a standardized set of tools is available for the economic and technical evaluation of projects, methods of covering the social dimension - which are of prime importance for impact analysis - have yet to reach maturity.

This statement in the most recent Human Development Report articulates a conv- tion that has increasingly gained ground in the water community over recent years: the key challenge in the water sector is not a lack of water, knowledge, nancial - sourcesortechnology.Ingeneral, itisthepoliticalspherethatdetermineswhetheror not water problems are solved, whether or not people have access to drinking water, irrigation water and sanitation, whether our natural resource base is developed s- tainable or overexploited, and whether new challenges for the water sector such as adaptation to climate...