The Ebro basin: An example of the evolution of polycentric governance arrangements

October 14th, 2014

Dr. Lucia De Stefano, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain

The Ebro river (85 362 km2 or 17% of Spain) is located in the north-east of Spain and provides an interesting example of the evolution of competences and strategies to manage water in a changing institutional context. The Ebro river crosses nine autonomous regions and is managed by the Spanish government through the Ebro River Basin Authority (RBA). Its evolution during the past century shows that polycentric governance arrangements in federal rivers (or quasi-federal, as it is the case of Spain) are not static and instead have adapted by renegotiating the balance of devolved decision-making and federal coordination1.

Although relatively wet, the Ebro shows declining trends in historic runoff (average natural runoff is 14.62 billion m3 yr?1, with a decrease of 11% during the past two decades) and faces large projected reductions in mean annual runoff (up to a 27% decrease)2. A large percentage of the basin’s area is being irrigated, which magnifies the effects of projected reductions in future runoff. The Ebro’s water resources support the irrigation of about 800,000 hectares, livestock breeding, energy production and water supplies for a sparsely populated territory (32.3 inhabitants per km2). Most users withdraw water from 135 reservoirs having a total capacity of 8 billion m3, while groundwater – a key source for river base flows – is still rather scarcely exploited. The Ebro delta hosts a high-value ecosystem that is affected by the decrease in water and sediment flows due to upstream water development and is threatened by projected climate change impacts on coastal dynamics3. Persistent pollutants from historical mining and industrial activities, and organic pollution from agricultural and urban areas are also sources of concern in the basin.

From an institutional point of view, the Ebro basin was the cradle of one of the oldest river-wide water authorities, when in 1926 the Spanish government created the Ebro RBA to manage the river with the participation of irrigators. Water allocation systems and strategies to achieve water security evolved with time, mirroring the changing power balance between the central government and regional governments. During Franco’s dictatorship (1939-1975), the powerful central government had a very centralized approach to water management. It determined water allocation to users (individual or collective water rights) and executed it through the construction of large water infrastructure. The 1978 democratic Constitution, however, established the creation of 17 regions having broad powers and their own parliament (autonomous regions are roughly equivalent to ‘states’ in federal contexts). In relation to water resources, the Constitution established that while intraregional rivers would be managed by regions, interregional rivers like the Ebro would remain under the jurisdiction of the central government through its RBAs, with little involvement of the regions.

In 1985 the Water Act for the first time admitted representatives of regions into some of the RBA boards and committees, with participation quotas proportional to the regions’ territory and population shares in the basin. According to the Water Act, water uses should be regulated through River Basin Management Plans (RBMPs), which allocate water volumes to basin subsystems sharing regulation and distribution networks (‘exploitation systems’) and to specific user groups (irrigators, industries, etc.) within each subsystem. Individual or collective water rights are nested in these subsystems, where annual allocation quotas to rights holders are defined in user-based RBA bodies based on annual precipitation and available water volumes.

Although since 1985 autonomous regions are represented in the RBA boards, allocation decisions are still largely controlled by a rather closed community of users and developers4. This inertia helps to explain the unrest of increasingly powerful regions, which progressively started claiming a larger control over water flowing within their borders.

In 1992, Aragon, which has a large share of the Ebro basin, was the first region to make its claims over water explicit through the Aragon Water Pact (AWP). The AWP included a list of more than 20 new hydraulic works that would allow for doubling Aragon’s irrigated surface. In 1998, the RBMPs of all the Spanish basinsincluding the Ebrowere approved. Three years later, the central government approved the National Hydrological Plan (NHP) to address interbasin issues. Both the Ebro RBMP and the NHP incorporate the AWP water works.

The NHP, however, also proposed the transfer of 1 billion m3 yr?1 from the Ebro to other basins along the Mediterranean coast, which triggered fierce opposition in the donor regions, mainly Aragon and Catalonia, and fueled regional expectations over the Ebro waters in the recipient regions. Even though the transfer was repealed in 2004 after a political shift in the central government, it marked a tipping point in the evolution of the power balance between regions and the Spanish State. Since then, regions have engaged in intense political negotiations and in legal actions – with the Spanish government or amongst themselves – to gain larger control over water and earmark additional resources, within or outside of their territorial boundaries.

The 2000 European Union Water Framework Directive set new challenges that the Spanish government began facing only in 2004, after the repeal of the Ebro transfer. In terms of water allocation, the WFD entailed opening a new 6-year planning cycle and adding a new layer of complexity to allocation, as water uses should be compatible with the achievement of good status of all waters. The new RBMP, approved in February 2014, still includes Aragon’s water claims and ‘water reserves’ for other regions in the Ebro, to be executed through new hydraulic works. The plan was passed after strenuous negotiations over the in-stream flows in the Ebro delta (in Catalonia), whose maintenance is considered by many to be at odds with the current and planned upstream regulation.

A glance at the history of interstate relationships in the Ebro basin shows that water allocation reforms have evolved from a centralized system to a complex web of sensitive political relationships, where the central government manages to approve basin-wide plans only through political and economic concessions (e.g. via financing of public water works) to the regional powers. The strengthening of the decentralization model is mirrored by a request for more competences by regions and attempts to ‘earmark’ water reserves for their own development.

In the most recent RBMP new environmental requirements and old territorial claims coexist on paper, while the viability of their coexistence in practice still needs to be proven. Planning of supra-regional infrastructure (the NHP and its controversial Ebro transfer) first, and EU-driven environmental demands later have been catalysts for changes in institutional balances. Federal-state relationships are not static, but evolve as drivers and institutions interact and change; and the balance between levels shifts and is increasingly impacted by politics and by policy changes at very different levels.

References:

Garrick D, De Stefano L, Fung F, Pittock J, Schlager E, New M, Connell D. 2013 Managing hydroclimatic risks in federal rivers: a diagnostic assessment. Phil Trans R Soc A 371: 20120415. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2012.0415 Quiroga S, Garrote L, Iglesias A, Fernández-Haddad Z, Schlickenrieder J, de Lama C, Sánchez-Arcilla A. 2011 The economic value of drought information for water management under climate change: a case study in the Ebro basin. Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci. 11, 643-657. (doi:10.5194/nhess-11-643-2011) Sánchez-Arcilla A, Jiménez JA, Valdemoro HI, Gracia V. 2008 Implications of climatic change on Spanish Mediterranean low-lying coasts: the Ebro delta case. J. Coastal Res. 24, 306-316. (doi:10.2112/07A-0005.1) Hernández-Mora N, del Moral L, La Roca F, La Calle A, Schmidt G. 2013 Interbasin water transfers in Spain. Interregional conflicts and governance responses. In Globalized water (ed. G Schneier-Madanes). Dordrecht, Germany: Springer.

Dr. Lucia De Stefano is Associate Professor at Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain) and international consultant on water management. Previously she has worked on different facets of water management for the Water Observatory of the Botín Foundation, USAID, Oregon State University (USA), the World Wide Fund for Nature and the Spanish private sector.

The views expressed in this article 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.