Many water related problems can be attributed to governance failure at multiple levels of governance rather than to the resource base itself. This is particularly worrying in the light of increasing uncertainties and increasing pressures on resources management due to global and climate change. At the same time our knowledge on water governance systems and conditions for success of water governance reform is still quite limited. For a long time, research and policy have been dominated by the futile search for simplistic panaceas to solve complex water governance problems