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.

The importance of the political sphere for understanding and solving water sector problems is the basic rationale of this book, which is the outcome of the Fifth Dialogues on Water, organised at the German Development Institute, Bonn. These dialogues, unlike earlier ones, focused on the political processes of policy formulation and the strategic behaviour of the actors involved. Specific attention is devoted to implications for development cooperation.