Governance and Management for Sustainable Water Systems
While it is easy to appreciate the need for infrastructure and the organizations that manage water, it is harder to appreciate the governance that is essential to overcome challenges across the spectrum of countries and conflict scenarios.
Whereas governance sounds like it has an emphasis on government, it includes more than laws and regulations. It must address broad issues that range from providing safe drinking water to protecting people from devastating floods, and it must do so in a spectrum of many cultural settings and countries. Given this broad variation in settings, effective water governance has high stakes and enormous challenges.
To do its job, water governance must be based on a comprehensive framework of principles and practices that address issues holistically. This is a goal of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) and the parallel concept of Total Water Management, but the important question is: “How to design governance and make it work (Grigg, 2008)?”
To strip away unnecessary clutter from the discussion, we must avoid overly-complex explanations of water governance and drill directly to its core attributes of policy, control, and empowerment. Policy includes government plans and strategies at all levels. Control embodies all regulatory functions that apply to water, whether for public health and safety, environmental quality, performance or cost-of-service. Empowerment provides carrots along with sticks, and it offers a helping hand to individuals and organizations to overcome the inherent obstacles in managing water responsibly.
Content Table
A model of water management
Governance goes hand-in-hand with water management, and the two must be based on coordinated physical assets, organizations, and controls to produce water benefits across the spectrum of requirements. Some water management functions provide water and services directly to customers. Others manage water in the environment and still others manage residual water that returns to it. Service categories include public and industrial supplies, irrigation, management of wastewater and stormwater, instream flow management, groundwater, and flood management. Instream flow services are critical to manage the water commons and balance water quality, hydropower, navigation, recreation, fish and wildlife, and water conveyance.
Massive infrastructure systems are required for the supply services (water supply and irrigation); managing residuals (wastewater, stormwater and farm drainage); and flood protection (for structural approaches). Functions that involve mostly program management are environmental water management (instream flows, water quality, groundwater, and floodplain management); areawide, river basin, or multipurpose organization management; and regulatory programs (allocation, public supply and discharges).
Special challenges to governance occur when water is managed in areawide, river basin, multipurpose, and trans-boundary settings. In some cases, these may require large-scale water management infrastructure.
Water regulatory programs represent a broad set of public concerns about safety, environment, and cost. Regulation of water allocation is the control that balances the allocation of water taken from natural systems. Regulation of public supply is the control of the quality of water provided by public systems and has a focus on public health. Regulation of discharges is the control of discharges into water bodies with a focus on health and environment.
Processes of water governance
Most definitions of governance focus on administrative authority to manage the affairs of nations at national, regional, and local levels. These definitions are adequate for the policy and control functions of governance, but they require amplification to ensure that the empowerment function is included. In any case, most explanations of governance focus on its control functions. This is illustrated, for example, by Rouse (2007), who offered a set of principles of governance that focus on regulation in terms of government organization and capacity; separation of powers; independence of regulators; monitoring and enforcement; transparency of operations; public participation; and empowerment of management.
Water policy breaks down into goals for the individual sectors, each of which has its own policies. Although groups call for “national” water policy and many papers and journals write about it, policy usually comes in pieces as legislative bodies deal with issues one at a time. The process ranges from those in democratic countries which may lack coherent strategic plans to those in authoritarian countries where five-year plans may drive policy.
Empowerment is the function of governance that enables and assists individuals and organizations to provide water-related services and regulatory controls. The assistance that water management organizations may receive can be financial, technical, or institutional. The empowerment of a water services organization might stem from authority in enabling legislation. At the national level, special legislation may enable a water agency’s program. Helpers and enablers are found across categories from government agencies to private companies to the non-profit and education sectors.
The main form of control is through regulatory mechanisms, but planning and coordination also serve as controls. In fact, empowerment is a kind of control.
As you would expect, there are many categories of water regulation, such as of:
water withdrawals; drinking water quality; environmental water quality; instream flows;
interstate flows; trans-basin diversions; self-regulation of irrigation; flood preparedness; point source dischargers; non-point dischargers ; hydrologic modifications ; and water uses. Usually, these categories of regulation are supported by the authority of statutory law.
Planning and coordination also offer examples of controls of water management. A few examples include: joint work on a river basin plan; bi-city negotiations to share water during emergencies; multi-stakeholder work in a watershed to develop best management practices; urban planning meetings to decide where to locate stormwater facilities; multi-stakeholder meetings to develop a water release schedule for a reservoir; shared vision planning to decide on water operations along a river; stakeholder meetings to develop a shared river or estuary restoration program; and meetings among land owners to obtain commitment to keep watershed clean for drinking water.
Conclusions
While the importance of water governance is not apparent to all citizens and water users, it takes its place alongside infrastructure and organizations as an essential input to sustainable water management systems. When water governance is effective, we can expect harmony in river basins, shared decisions about use water resources, and common action to respond to emergencies. When it is ineffective or even absent, we expect water conflicts, pollution, and more frequent water emergencies that lack coherent response mechanisms.
The elements of water governance—policy, control, and empowerment—must be applied at different levels in different places. The governance needed in a high-income country may look entirely different from that required in a low-income country that lacks basic institutions. However, certain attributes of water management and governance are valid across the spectrum of settings. These include government policy that recognizes needs for all water purposes and stakeholders and sets out mechanisms for control and empowerment to provide for them. They include appropriate control levers through regulation, planning, and coordination that respond the most urgent and important scenarios. Equally as important are the empowerment mechanisms provided through governance that respond to the needs of organizations and workforces to build the institutional, technical, and individual capacities needed for sustainable water management.
Resources
The issues discussed in this article are addressed in the book, Governance and Management for Sustainable Water Systems, by Neil Grigg.
Neil S. Grigg, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Colorado State University. neilg@engr.colostate.edu
This book is designed to be the introductory work in the new Governance and Management for Sustainable Water Systems Series. It introduces the subject of governance of water systems and illuminates relatively unexplored topics of water resources management.The material is practical but advanced in the sense that theories of industry organization, governance, and institutional analysis are applied in new ways.
New case study applications are provided in the book and help the reader to understand how their disciplines apply to water management. The case studies are drawn from each sector and region in the world, including cases from the U.S.A., Europe, the Middle East, South America and a global case to cover water system privatization.
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References
Grigg, Neil S. 2011. Governance and Management for Sustainable Water Systems. IWA Publishing. London
Grigg, Neil S. 2008. Total Water Management: practices for a sustainable future AWWA Press.
