David Feldman reflects upon several changes in the direction of water resource policy over the past 25 years, in the United States and elsewhere. Like other experienced scholars in this field, he has witnessed the turn toward greater attention to the protection and recovery of aquatic species and habitat, the connections between water supply and water quality, the importance of public involvement in policy development and implementation, and the need to focus upon the environmental conditions of watersheds and river basins. The guideposts of this new turn in water policy are sustainability and adaptive management. Feldman's overall message has two parts: 1) Reorienting water policy toward adaptive management as a practice and sustainability as a goal will require new ways of thinking and interacting among the people involved, and 2) institutional arrangements can facilitate or impede the articulation and resolution of differences in values and interests that those people bring to the resource management situation.

The substantive core of Water Policy for Sustainable Development is a set of river basin cases—seven non-U.S. examples and five U.S. examples, plus the example of transboundary water issues along the U.S.-Mexico border. Despite this count, the book's primary focus is not international: The non-U.S. cases are presented briefly, and mainly to indicate that sustainability issues are worldwide and various institutional forms have been developed. The U.S. cases receive fuller treatment, and the book's primary focus is on U.S. water policy.

Political scientists and others who are new to water policy will likely find the basin case summaries a useful introduction. Most useful by far is the Appalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint (ACF) river basin case that captured headlines in 2007. Feldman has first-hand knowledge of this case, and his presentation of its complexity, intensity, and the frustrating pattern of hopes raised and dashed is more engaging and informative than the treatments of the other cases, which are based mainly on secondary sources.

The ACF case Feldman knows best is also the one about which he is least hopeful, characterizing the values and interests of the participants as fundamentally “incompatible” (p. 288). The same could undoubtedly be said about the differences over salmon recovery, hydropower production, and irrigation in the Columbia River basin, or over salinity, endangered species, and water deliveries for agricultural and urban uses in California's Sacramento-San Joaquin River basin, or about the other cases in the book, but Feldman's assessments of them are notably more sanguine. The good intentions behind efforts at basin-scale negotiations and decision making in those cases are enough to earn positive marks from him, although other (usually closer) observers are often as despairing about them as he is about the ACF.

By itself, this is an observation rather than a criticism, but there are valid criticisms to be made. First, the primary source material for all five U.S. cases comes from only 14 completed survey questionnaires, and most of the secondary source material relied upon (for cases other than the ACF) is 10 years old or older, even though the cases themselves are highly dynamic. An occasional endnote will offer an update, but most of the material forming the basis for Feldman's evaluation of the institutions in these cases is getting pretty dated. (Even the chronology of the ACF dispute [Table 3.2, p. 132] ends in 1997). In parts of the book where he uses the phrase “as of this writing,” the nearest references are to events that occurred in 2002, and some of the developments he describes in the future tense (such as the negotiated transfer of water rights from the Imperial Irrigation District to San Diego) are now a few years past. One does not expect works of political science to have the currency of a newspaper, but when the empirical core of a book is a set of rapidly evolving cases, the passage of a few years can undermine an author's conclusions.

Second, there is a recurring disjuncture between Feldman's observations about the U.S. cases and the lessons he draws for policymakers. He notes in several places that state governments have been the primary drivers in these cases, have proved more open to new ideas and alternative approaches, and have provided most of the initiative behind institutional innovations. Yet throughout the book his policy recommendations presume that water policy is primarily the responsibility of the federal government, and he expresses surprise (p. 290) at the minimal role and impact of federal policies and agencies in these cases. It is surprising that he is surprised: Water resource management in the United States for 220 years has been principally the work of state and local governments. Despite Feldman's awareness (surprised or not) of the states' central role and the federal government's marginal role, his recommendations concerning water quality regulations (pp. 180–99), water rights reform (pp. 215–16), planning and information development (p. 310), and even his application of principal-agent theory to water policy (p. 284) assume that federal officials are the principal makers of water policy in the United States. Whether a stronger federal role would be welcome and beneficial is an interesting question, but not one that Feldman engages—rather, he simply seems to see policymaking as coming from the federal government, despite the fact that his empirical cases repeatedly show otherwise.

Third, broad themes set out in the opening chapter are largely abandoned in the presentation of the cases and in the conclusions about them. In Chapter 1, Feldman proposes to explore the challenges that population growth and climate change pose to the sustainable management of water resources. These challenges are virtually absent from the case study presentations, except for the effects of population growth in the ACF-ACT (Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint Basin/Alabama-Coosa-Tallapoosa) case. Although climate change reappears in the concluding chapter, it is not connected with the cases that formed the heart of the book and is merely discussed at a general level as underscoring the need for adaptive management (which indeed it does), repeating what was asserted in Chapter 1.

Discontinuities such as these—as well as an inexcusable number of distracting typographical and grammatical errors for a university press of Johns Hopkins's name—detract unfortunately from the merits of a book from an experienced policy scholar with such an important subject to address.