The participation of the public, local communities, indigenous peoples, and various other stakeholders in natural resources policymaking, planning and/or management has been increasingly promoted in international and national policies. This book analyses and discusses how participation does - or does not - occur in the management of forest and water resources at various institutional levels in European contexts.

This issue of Environment and Urbanization includes three papers on community provision: the community-designed, built and managed toilet blocks in Indian cities; the WaterAid water and sanitation programme in Dhaka and Chittagong; and community tanks in Orangi, Karachi. It also has a review of experience to date with water privatization, and papers discussing women's and children's priorities for water and sanitation. There are case studies of water stress and their causes in Guadalajara and Beijing, and discussions and case studies of drainage and of how wastewater can be used for agriculture. A special supplement on the Millennium Development Goals has papers discussing the MDGs and urban poverty reduction, a Programme for Land Tenure Legalization on Public Land in São Paulo and financial frameworks to reduce 'slums' and support home improvements for low-income households.

This paper has two principal aims: first, to unravel some of the arguments mobilized in the controversial privatization debate, and second, to review the scale and nature of private sector provision of water and sanitation in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Despite being vigorously promoted in the policy arenaand having been implemented in several countries in the South in the 1990s, privatisation has achieved neither the scale nor benefits anticipated.

This publication documents good practices of water demand management in practice in five African cities namely; Cape Town, Durban, Hermanus, Johannesburg and Windhoek. The publication was supported by the Water for African Cities Programme, an initative developed to help African cities to take a fresh start at managing their most important resource, water more efficiently.