Summary of articles (literature) — Water Politics and Governance (AM1192) [ERM]
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Course
AM1192 - Water Politics and Governance (AM1192)
Institution
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU)
The following articles are summarized:
Allan, J. A. (2003). Virtual Water - the Water, Food, and Trade Nexus. Useful Concept or Misleading Metaphor? Water International, 28(1), 106-113.
Barnaby, W. (2009, 2009/03/01). Do nations go to war over water? Nature, 458(7236), 282-283.
Boelens, R....
1DI WATER GOVERNANCE: THEORIES AND FOUNDATIONS
(Woodhouse & Muller, 2017)
“This paper examines the drivers that have informed different conceptualisations of water governance”.
“Water is a fugitive, unequally distributed, highly variable yet renewable natural resource which is
inherently part of the natural environment but whose use is essential to all social and economic
activity”. Water governance is defined as “ the range of political, institutional and administrative
rules, practices and processes (formal and informal) through which decisions are taken and
implemented, stakeholders can articulate their interests and have their concerns considered, and
decision-makers are held accountable for water management”.
Whereas water resource management focusses on “operational activities of monitoring and
regulating water resources and their use”, water governance is “the overarching framework sets
objectives, guides the strategies for their achievement and monitors the outcomes”.
Three questions are addressed in the article:
1. Who should participate in decision-making;
2. At what geographical and political scales should governance institutions operate;
3. What is the appropriate role of market or non-market criteria in allocation of water.
Wittfogel was one of the first to theorize management of water and social relations, proposing a
hierarchical state formation. Caponera emphasized that specific arrangements depended on many
factors. Recent narratives emphasize the role of water infrastructure development as a strategy of
the construction of 20th century modern nation states.
Today, developed countries focus on demand management and environmental protection as part of
ecological modernization, envisaging decoupling. Urbanizing and industrializing developing
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,Summary --- Literature Water Politics and
Governance (Woodhouse & Muller, 2017)
countries struggle to develop and manage water resources with increasing demands, forced to make
trade-offs. The development of infrastructure gives way to institutional and regulatory approaches.
1977 UN water conference in Mar del Plata steered from technical and functional approaches to
participatory environmental governance. Whereas on primarily scaled on watershed level, recent
research promotes problem-shed approaches, as water decisions are rarely separable from social
and economical decisions, which are rarely taken on watershed level. Only at large scale, however, (i)
internalization of environmental externalities is possible and (ii) ‘missing links’ in global policy
formulation can be done by norm-setting. However, these global initiatives are poorly ratified by MS.
Marked-based solutions, often in the form of privatization, require clear defined property rights
(right of access, exclusion, use and disposal). In practice, this is rather complex as water property
rights can be defined as a ‘web of interests’ and the fact that water is a moving resource. Therefore,
primarily use of marked-based instruments to achieve efficiency, equity and sustainability is weak.
Still, substantial policy and directives focus on price-tagging water.
Water is generally envisaged as a scarce resource, focusing governance efforts on management
(restriction) of demand rather than the increase of supply. The 1992 Dublin conference stressed
Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM), which prescribed that
1. water should be managed within the boundaries of natural hydrological units constituted by
river basins within which water was identified as renewable, but finite (scarce);
2. water should be treated as an economic good;
3. participative approaches had to be adopted within the boundaries of the river basin. This
mixture constrains strategies to increase supply.
Scarcity supports two ideological positions:
1. it demands efficiency in water allocation, leading to economic valuation of implicitly
competing uses of water in order to allocate water to the greatest economic advantage;
2. it promotes environmental conservation that minimizes departure from the ‘natural
hydrology’ as criterion for ‘sustainable’ water resource management. Danger to privilege
natural hydrological patterns and associated ecologies as benchmark for sustainability which
will make water scarce for all other societal goals.
Luks distinct between limits (= objective, empirically verifiable characteristics) and scarcity (=
individual or social subjective perception of what those limits signify).
Rhodes identified six distinct application of the term ‘concepts of governance’: (i) minimal state, (ii)
corporate governance, (iii) new public management, (iv) the Washington Consensus, (v) ‘good
governance’ and (vi) socio-cybernetic systems and self-organizing networks. Governance can mean
both governing without government and traditional state-based public administration. These are
linked when governance is defined as “governing with and through networks”, envisaging a ‘core
executive’ and ‘decentralised, steered networks’. This resonates with Ostrom’s common pool natural
resources, conceptualised as a series of ‘nested’/’polycentric’ institutions.
Global evolution of a universal paradigm:
1977 UN Conference on Water in Mar del Plata focusing on national planning, participation,
accountability, legal frameworks and coordination. It emphasized mitigating environmental impacts,
integration and multi-purpose approaches. Endorsed by 116 governments, it declared that “all
people, whatever their stage of development and their social and economic conditions, have the right
to have access to drinking water in quantity and of a quality equal to their basic needs”.
1992 ICWE in Dublin brought the Dublin Principles (as mentioned before). The outcomes of this
meeting had the greater impact in the 90s. The World Water Council (WWC) and the Global Water
Partnership (GWP) were both committed to the promotion of the Dublin Principles
1992 UNCED Rio conference sought to reconcile the divergent priorities of environmental
protection (north) and socio-economic development (south). Agenda 21 nuanced the Dublin
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, Summary --- Literature Water Politics and
Governance (Woodhouse & Muller, 2017)
Principles considering water as an integral part of the ecosystem, a natural resource and a social and
economic good. They stated that water resources would still be developed.
The WWC organed triennial World Water Fora (WWF). At the second forum in the Hague (2000), the
World Water Vision (WWV) was drafted and stated that the water crisis is a crisis of management. It
promoted (i) holistic management, (ii) participation, but also (iii) full cost pricing. It was rather
divided. Water was characterised as a scarce commodity. Many found the WWV promoting a
corporate vision of privatisation. The 7th WWF in Korea (2016) confirmed the lack of ambition or
impact and focused on the SDG for water. At the 7th forum, the 2013 Water Governance Initiative
(WGI) was drafted, which promotes “policies that will improve the economic and social well-being of
people around the world”. This policy is practitioner-oriented.
The GWP promoted the interpretation of IWRM and has only recently departed from this position.
Context specific experience of water governance in practice:
EU: Water Framework Directive (WDF, 2000) which mainly embodies the Dublin agenda. Based on
directives and mandatory participatory planning (MPP): (i) multi-level governance, (ii) participatory
governance and (iii) nested policy cycles. The WDF is described as non-rigorous;
USA: “Governance is moving from courts to formalised administrative systems in response to the
difficulty of adjudicating ad hoc claims in complex and changing circumstances”. Still, the equity of
distribution of costs and benefits between sectors is heavily debated. Current challenges include
proliferation of overlapping, state and local agencies; limited coordination and poor performance of
some agencies;
India: disputes with neighbours; pollution and overuse of rivers; unsustainable groundwater use,
hydrocracy dominated by water engineers;
Australia: marked based instruments prove to be successful, enabling to manage the drought;
South Africa: Little transnational conflicts, informal stakeholder management.
China: Transition from administrative command & control to regulatory mechanisms. Still,
deterioration of water quality;
Turkey: water management is highly centralised and politicised: Great Anatolian Project (GAP),
suppressing neighbouring countries like Syria and Iraq;
Chile: in the past privatisation and marketisation, therefore there is a dominance of economic actors.
Mexico and Brazil: Within the country there are perils between cities and districts.
Conclusions from the country-specific experience:
1. Water security for large urban areas remains a governance challenge;
2. The environmental outcomes are more difficult to assess;
3. Trade-offs between agriculture and other users are evident;
4. The governance of transboundary rivers and associated data generation and infrastructure
investments have been argued to be a force for international cooperation;
5. Few systematic conclusions can be drawn from the review.
The two main different perspectives/approaches to governance are: (i) normative literature:
protection of the aquatic environment; and (ii) specific/practitioner oriented literature: address role
of water in supporting growing societies. Five fundamental differences:
1. Scarcity: there is little water scarcity at global level; at local scales, demand for water exceeds
available supplies. In poor countries the challenge is economic rather than physical scarcity;
2. Participation: the link between participation and effectiveness is sporadic and ambiguous. It
is found to be unequal, weak and limited successful. Participative approaches often ignored
power structures and overstated potential benefits of devolving decision-making;
3. Scale: watershed vs. problem level. The basin is often not the operational, decision making
scale. Furthermore, there is a difference between global and local scale. As both seem
necessary, a ‘plurality’ of frameworks is the best result, as it presumes both theories that (i)
‘every situation is unique’ and (ii) that ‘the same mechanisms work everywhere’.
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