How should we compare?

May 24th, 2013

How should we compare?

Dr. Daniel Connell, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

This article is part of an 11-part series titled ‘International Water Politics’. The series homepage can be accessed here.

The support of water management researchers and practitioners globally for integrated water resource management has been rhetorically dominant for two or three decades but there are very few successful examples of implementation. This discrepancy is highlighted by the lack of obvious alternatives. No one seems to be arguing for another approach. It is hard to even frame alternatives let alone agree with them. But success in making the transition to better management remains elusive. Surely it is time to ask critical questions about the discrepancy between reality and practice?

Comparisons between water management systems are a major component of the international research literature promoting and analysing water reform. The purpose of these comparisons is to highlight common problems in order to promote cooperation and to publicize successes so that they can be implemented elsewhere. However the water reform debate and literature has been strongly influenced by the inclusion of other goals such as public participation, transparent decision making, human rights and democratization.

Policy coalitions

In part this reflects the unavoidable process of developing the policy coalitions that are needed to get major reforms approved. It may be that these other goals are a fundamental pre-requisite to achieving effective water reform and sustainability. However that assumption has been largely assumed and not really tested. This creates a number of risks. It introduces other layers of complexity into an already very challenging discussion, namely what is sustainable water management and how can it be best achieved? In addition, the involvement of a number of policy goals, linked perhaps but significantly different, increases the potential for lip service to ideals while doing something else in practice.

The pressures to link these goals are both subtle and crude. There are attractive reasons to think that core ideas about how to make a more sustainable and just world are integral to each other. Together they make a powerful narrative that is inclusive and capable of mobilizing large numbers of people. The integrated package approach also fits well with the argument that water reform is a cultural program requiring changed relationships between people and their environment and between each other, and not just a technological managerial project. At the same time support for these goals as a single package is an essential requirement of nearly every application for funding whether to the World Bank or to the many research funding bodies operating in this field. The pressure to conform at the rhetorical level at least is very strong.

Cultural context of reform proposals

The linkage of these goals is a strong theme of major water reform programs such as that put forward in chapter eighteen of Agenda 21 (a policy agenda for the twenty first century developed by the Rio Earth Summit). Similar values are emphasized in the European Union’s Water Framework Directive. Many if not most discussions about what this means in practice argue for a package that is in effect the summary of liberal democracy in its ideal form. An example of this approach is provided by Bruce Hooper in his introduction to the special issue on Integrated Water Resource Management – New Governance Tools and Challenges published in the Journal of Contemporary Water Research and Education in December 2006.1 Hooper lists twenty benchmarks of ‘mature, auto-adaptive river basin organisations implementing effective integrated river basin management’.

Decision making

1. Decision making by the river basin organisation occurs within a national framework of natural resources management objectives and investments

2. Decision making is consensual and coordinates across sectors in the basin

3. Decision making is reflected in the river basin’s organisations business plan, is prioritized, focuses on efficiency, links vertically to governments and provides stakeholder access to government

Goals

4. An IWRM approach is agreed to and practiced by the basin organisation

5. Objectives are specified in and articulated through feasible options in a river basin management plan.

Financing

6. River basin management is financed through cost sharing

7. Financing is on-going, guaranteed, adequate, linked to national and state priorities

8. Ex-ante and ex-post economic assessments of management are practiced

9. Water pricing and alternative demand management are practiced

River basin commission functions

10. Stable democratic conventions exist to provide stability to the institutional setting

11. The river basin organisation’s functions are co-ordination driven and realistic

Law

12. Ongoing laws exist to enact natural resources management relevant to basin management

13. The roles and responsibilities of the river basin organisation are clearly specified in both national water policy and law

Staff training

14. The river basin organisation has a program in place to improve staff quality for management skills, leadership and communication

Information and monitoring

15. The river basin organisation has its own, or joint access to, well developed, accurate, up-to-date, information and monitoring system

16. Science informs the river basin organisation through modelling and spatial representations of options, which are costed and linked to the river basin organisation’s decision system and are delivered through strategic planning and decision-making processes

17. The information management system reports on how the basin is being managed and resources are consumed and protected

Coordinated management with stakeholders

18. Public involvement processes are effective, providing for joint decision making and conflict resolution

19. The roles and responsibilities of stakeholders are specified and understood

20. The river basin organisation uses joint ventures and coordinates strategic decisions between partners.

This list is an excellent guide for anyone setting up such an organisation or reforming an existing one. However it is clearly built on a number of cultural values that are not universal (or invariably present in those societies that claim to be liberal democracies). Many of the benchmarks explicitly or implicitly promote pluralist, participatory, democratic values. It may be that this is the only way to manage a river basin successfully but should that be assumed?

The approach being proposed here does not question the value of these characteristics for water management organisations. Instead it proposes that they be assessed from the perspective of outcomes rather than features such as those listed above. There would be no surprise if the twenty listed features figured prominently in the makeup of organisations judged successful from an outcomes perspective. However it should not assumed that building an organisation with those features will necessarily lead to success. The argument is that an outcomes perspective would focus attention more systematically on the factors that leads to optimum performance.

Assessment criteria

What should be the key outcomes that would be used for assessment? The draft list of outcomes being suggested as assessment criteria was outlined in an earlier contribution to this blog describing the characteristics of integrated water resource management. This involves the capacity to:

 Manage across political and institutional borders

 Respond expeditiously to crisis

 Base policy on good science

 Integrate river planning with wider planning processes

 Negotiate/adjudicate between competing uses

 Achieve compliance

 Adapt to novel and emerging issues

In developing this list an effort has been made to make the criteria as culturally neutral as possible. Arguably all water management systems, no matter what political system provides the wider context, need to be able to achieve these goals.

Value of stress as a truth test

Typically the management of large cross-border rivers and groundwater aquifers in federal political systems is characterized by considerable intergovernmental and interagency conflict, low decision making transparency and accountability, high transaction costs and ad hoc deals between competing sub-national governments that undermine best practice water management. Public relations rhetoric often makes such management systems quite opaque to the outsider. Hopefully a focus on outcomes will make it easier to penetrate the fog. An additional sharpness can be added to the analysis by focussing on their performance under stress. Extreme events such as drought reveal the strengths and weaknesses of water management systems in ways that are often obscured in less demanding times. Technical, organizational and systemic capacities and constraints, political priorities and fundamental cultural values shaping society-wide thinking about appropriate goals and methods for managing such crisis, are most evident when difficult and contentious policies have to be implemented and choices made between competing demands. Pressure from drought strips away the rhetoric of water management vision statements and exposes underlying priorities, strengths and weaknesses. An analysis based on this perspective will also give a useful indication of how water managers will confront climate change in the future. During the next few years the process of adapting to take account of climate change will draw heavily on previous experience with the management of droughts. Similarly if the challenge is flooding: the ability of the management system to deal with flooding under current conditions will be a good indication of potential performance in future under more extreme conditions.

References:

1. United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (1992), Agenda 21. United Nations Environment Program. Available online: http://www.unep.org/documents.multilingual/default.asp?documentid=52

2. Hooper, B. (2006), ‘Integrated Water Resources Management: Governance, Best Practice, and Research Challenges’, Journal of Contemporary Water Research and Education, Vol. 135: 1-7.

This article is part of an 11-part series titled ‘International Water Politics’. The series homepage can be accessed here.

The views expressed in this article and the associated discussion forum belong to the individual authors and do not represent the views of the Global Water Forum, the UNESCO Chair in Water Economics and Transboundary Water Governance, UNESCO, the Australian National University, or any of the institutions to which the authors are associated. Please see the Global Water Forum terms and conditions here.