It is significant that an integrated approach was adopted. This catered well to the 3E's in IWRM: economic efficiency (tourism industry), social equity (livelihood dependence), and environmental sustainability (protection of the ecosystem at this ecologically sensitive Ramsar site).
It is also important to appreciate the potential of local, integrated interventions for scaling up to national and international transboundary levels, when the right institutions are involved, and when they understand the value of (and thus own) integrated, multi-level IWRM actions. The national IWRM-WE planning process purposely emphasised local interventions to demonstrate the benefits of IWRM.
Although this was just one local action in Botswana's part of the Okavango basin, it influenced changes to national legislation. It also had an impact at the international basin level: two other basin initiatives (the GEF-funded Biokavango and the USAID-funded Southern African Regional Environmental Programme) and their cooperating Partners were brought in and supported development in the basin context. This has had implications for the upstream riparian states, Angola and Namibia.