Abstract: Implementation of total water consumption control and key watershed management over the inland river basins in the Northwest China can promote sustainable utilization of water resources and improve ecosystem and environment. This paper describes an index system for evaluating the total water consumption control and basin governance effects, and presents a comprehensive assessment that uses the weighted average method and quantifies index scoring values and index weights. This method is tested via applications to the Heihe River basin and Shiyang River basin in the Hexi Corridor. The results show that it can reflect the implementation conditions of total water consumption control and governance over the two basins comprehensively and reveal problems through quantitative analysis of the system structure, so that it will help strengthen the construction of total water consumption control system and improve river basin governance. For these two basins, our assessment demonstrates that most of the total water consumption control targets have been achieved and most of the river basin governance tasks have been done, and that the established system is overall successful.

Key words: Heihe River, Shiyang River, total water consumption control, governance effect, assessment, index system