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CHAPTER 1
Governance and management for sustainable water services
Although the world is awash in water, only a tiny fraction of it is available as freshwater to society and the environment. Therefore, the possibility of a world water crisis is of deep international concern and vigilance is required to protect Earth's most valuable natural resource. The nature of the crisis will depend on your local situation, and it might involve water shortage and drought, rising sea levels, polluted water, floods, environmental degradation or other problems, but they all point to the same conclusion: water must be managed effectively, fairly and sustainably to support survival and prosperity for all people and living things.
Technical solutions for water problems are available and are improving all the time. The more serious problems lie in our governance and management systems. In a world with dramatically different situations and expectations, incentives work against sustainable water management. Although water law systems based on government regulation or economic incentives are in use, no system has been completely successful in addressing the many challenges of water management. What is required is a more complete and responsive system for water governance, one that includes water laws but goes much further to include the policies and support systems people need to manage water and care for the environment. That challenge forms the core topic of this book, which seeks to outline a responsive system for water governance that will apply to different problems in different places.
WATER GOVERNANCE AND SHARED RESPONSIBILITY
Water governance is about society's control levers that determine how the earth's most valuable natural resource is managed to meet human and environmental needs. It is the force behind water management, which sustains life support systems at many levels. It is a shared responsibility that spans the levels of government and the many uses to which water is applied.
In some ways, there is a fine line between water management and water governance. The distinction between them lies in the control function. Water management controls the resource to meet the needs of society and the environment. Water governance controls water management to make sure it does its job. If the two work perfectly together, it is possible to provide water to meet human and environmental needs at the same time on a sustainable basis (Figure 1.1).
Providing safe water for all and managing water for a sustainable environment are shared goals around the world, but they present daunting challenges. The only route to achievement of these goals is to apply effective water governance systems, which are the key to integration of policy, regulation, and capacity-building to coordinate the many competing purposes of water management.
Simply stated, a broad view of water governance is like parenting in a family. The parents make and enforce the rules, but they also provide the support the children need to succeed and comply with the rules. If they only focused on rules, what kind of family would it be?
While it is one thing to have elaborate laws on the books, implementing them can be another story. Passing and enforcing laws are only the starting points to water governance, which must address broad issues that range from providing safe drinking water to protecting people from devastating floods, and 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.
This book outlines a framework for water governance that should be valid in any political or economic setting. The framework offers processes for policy, empowerment, and control that can be adapted within different political, economic and cultural systems. The structure of the framework is comprehensive and can provide guidance for any water management scenario, and it offers choices for how the elements of policy, empowerment, and control can be applied.
The framework offers a way to govern water management that takes into account the world's many regions, cultures and levels of economic development. It also provides for integration across the purposes of water management, and it shows how to balance economic, social and environmental uses of water.
IMPORTANCE OF WATER GOVERNANCE
It is probably not necessary to explain the importance of water to the readers of this book. It has been my experience that once people become immersed in the subject of water, they become interested in how it is managed and how important it is.
Your perception of how critical water is depends on your situation. While many people have safe and reliable water services, billions of people still lack access to it and this leads to societal breakdowns, sickness, disorder, and environmental degradation. A range of examples can illustrate our shared deep dependence on water for life and prosperity and how water management and its governance apply to a range of situations. In rural Africa, you might have to walk long distances to fetch scarce but polluted water that will make you sick even while it is your only option. In Asia, you might experience a decline in fisheries or irrigation water that threatens your livelihood. If you live in a large western city, your problem may be caused by drought and your risk may be that your water utility depletes its reserves and imposes severe restrictions on water use.
While water governance is a critical input to sustainable societies, it needs improvement in many places. As the World Water Assessment Programme (2007) explained, in many countries water governance is in a state of confusion with a lack of water institutions or fragmentation of authorities and decision-making structures that result in many unsolved water problems that cause misery and poor living conditions.
Water governance can work towards solutions to these problems, but it cannot operate in an institutional vacuum. It requires help to address water needs that range across a broad spectrum, from survival requirements, such as access to safe drinking water, to discretionary water uses that raise the quality of life. In between are many economic, social, and environmental uses such as irrigation, energy production, and landscaping, among others.
Approaching water management as a shared responsibility is the only way to meet these needs sustainably because water systems are limited in capacity and balancing their many uses requires us to cooperate in managing common resources. This challenge is captured by the paradigm of the "Tragedy of the Commons," which explains why the public's resources are often neglected (see Chapter 8).
Managing water as a shared responsibility does not just happen, but it requires orchestration through systems that lie behind the scenes and are not as apparent as the front-line infrastructure and organizations that are required to meet water needs.
Water governance operates like the invisible atomic forces that hold elements and materials together. You may not see these forces but their effects are powerful and without them, everything would fall apart. In the same way, water governance provides both the empowerment and the control to keep divergent water interests from colliding with disastrous results. How the magic of water governance should work is introduced in the subsequent chapters.
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 control sticks, and it also offers a helping hand to individuals and organizations to overcome the inherent obstacles in managing water responsibly.
THE NEXUS BETWEEN WATER AND OTHER SECTORS
Water governance must be inter-sectoral to address its multiple purposes, apply across cultures and from low-income to high-income settings and have an institutional framework that stresses policy, empowerment, and control. This inter-sectoral attribute of water makes it unique among policy issues. In a practical sense, it creates linkages such as these:
• Water supply to poverty, health, and social policy
• Wastewater to housing, health, social policy, and environment
• Irrigation to food policy
• Flood to disaster and emergency management
• Hydroelectricity to energy
• Navigation to transportation
• Instream flows to environment
These linkages mean that you might be discussing water policy, but people in other sectors are discussing the same issues, but from a different slant. People see things differently. Say the topic is health of low income people in public housing. You see their safe water as a water issue, but other officials may see it as a housing and social issue. These different perspectives create the need for a lot of coordination.
A number of writers (including this one) have tried to create a model to explain the water sector, but we fall short because water defies a simple classification scheme. For example, Maxwell (2010) studied how water is organized and claimed that there is no such thing as a water industry, but instead it is a balkanized bazaar of quite different businesses, all of which have something to with delivery of clean water. As problems, he pointed to: untreated sewage, lack of access to safe drinking water and sanitation, water loss and decayed infrastructure, polluted rivers, endocrine disruptors, displaced people from new dams and obsolescence of old dams and, loss of wetlands, and depleted aquifers.
We can move past this dilemma by classifying the water sector as comprising organizations that actually handle water. The water-handling is the production side of the business, and it has also suppliers, customers and regulators, so it can be explained as a business.
By characterizing water as a business, you can explain its linkages to other sectors as producer-customer relationships. This is explained by a diagram of water sector links (Figure 1.2). In the diagram, you see how water and wastewater are linked to housing, how hydropower is linked to energy, and so on. Each of these linkages creates a nexus itself. For example, the water-energy nexus has been studied extensively, and you see many connections that go beyond the one shown for hydropower.
GOVERNANCE FOR INTEGRATED WATER MANAGEMENT
To achieve success across the diverse purposes of water management, the inputs of effective governance, management systems, and infrastructure must be applied in scenarios involving different levels and sectors. Just as atomic forces hold diverse particles and elements together, the integrating force of water governance works with management and stakeholders to hold complex systems together. In particular, governance and management work together to pursue the goal of stewardship of water for the greatest good of society and environment, which is the definition of "Total Water Management" (TWM), as well as the concept behind Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) (Grigg, 2008).
Conceptual systems for integration in water management are needed from the global scale to the village level and for all uses, whether for economic, social, or environmental. The overarching goal of water governance is to enable these to work, but the difficult question is: "How to design water governance and make it effective?" To answer this question, we begin by probing what is to be governed and how the processes of water management should work.
To explain how the ideals of TWM and IWRM offer comprehensive frameworks for water management, you must drill down into the details of the physical assets, organizations, and controls that support the spectrum of water uses. These details are explained in Chapter 2.
How can the ideals of IWRM be met in spite of daunting political and social challenges? Clearly, technical inputs such as effective infrastructure systems are required, but without resources, good policies, and capable organizations and workforces, water management cannot succeed. The organizing principle of this book is to use the conceptual framework of water governance to show how these elements can be made to work. This conceptual framework is introduced in Chapter 3 and discussed for each water sector and issue in subsequent chapters.
Water governance links the inputs of resources, Rule of Law, and management to create the environment for sustainable water management (Figure 1.3). Resources represent a range of inputs that include finance, infrastructure and human resources capacity. The Rule of Law represents all institutions that are required for society to function successfully, such as a willingness of people to comply with laws and regulations. Management represents organizations and the application of knowledge to decisions required for sustainable water management.
It is important to have a clear definition of water governance, but we must acknowledge that because it deals with complex issues, people will inevitably see it differently. The starting point is, "governance is the process of governing," but many questions about what this means must be answered and the subject goes a lot further than this simple statement.
Definitions of governance usually focus on administrative authority to manage public affairs at national, regional, and local levels. As an example, the Global Water Partnership defined governance as: "the range of political, social, economic and administrative systems that are in place to develop and manage water resources, and the delivery of water services, at different levels of society (Rogers and Hall, 2003).
The governance processes that apply most directly to water management are policy, empowerment, and control. While policy and control are recognized functions of government, empowerment is essential to build capacity so that all societies can meet water management objectives. Inclusion of empowerment as a legitimate function of water governance affirms that in today's complex societies, government must do more than simply control private activity. It also has a range of roles in meeting social needs and controlling environmental quality.
This broadening of the definition of governance is widely-recognized now. It was summed up this way: "Therefore, with regard to water, the focus of governance is the human and institutional resource capacities for the sustainable development and operation of water resources and management systems" (Osinde, 2008).
To see how policy, empowerment and control should work as the basic elements of water governance, imagine how they apply at the local level of government where most water management takes place. Here, governance is applied most directly by boards of directors (which could be called boards of governors). Imagine the situation if these local boards only thought they had a regulatory function and had no responsibility to help the water managers get resources or solve their organizational problems! This same logic applies at higher levels of government, so that at the national level, policy, empowerment, and control must be applied to enable success across-the-board for water management.
The regulatory programs of water governance respond to public concerns about safety, environment, and cost. Regulation of water allocation balances the allocation of water taken from natural systems. Regulation of public supply has a focus on public health. Regulation of discharges is the control of discharges into water bodies with a focus on health and environment.
Regulatory controls alone will not meet all water goals, and stewardship at all levels is required. That is, governance must go beyond top-down imposition of rules and controls to inspire individuals and organizations to care for water and its management systems and to work together with others in a shared approach to stewardship.
Special challenges to governance occur when water is managed in areawide, river basin, multipurpose, and trans-boundary settings. How these challenges require special coordination mechanisms and institutions is explained in Chapter 10.
A FRAMEWORK FOR WATER GOVERNANCE
Each element of the framework for governance has options, such as choices between the appropriation and riparian doctrines of water allocation law, regulatory versus economic incentive systems to control discharges of wastewater, or national versus state control of water permit systems. In other words, the required processes of water governance are generic and apply across-the-board, but cultural differences can be accommodated with choices among the elements of governance.
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Excerpted from "Governance and Management for Sustainable Water Systems"
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