The Watershed Approach

Cohen, A. and Davidson, S. 2011. An examination of the watershed approach: Challenges, antecedents, and the transition from technical tool to governance unit. Water Alternatives 4(1): 1-14

This article completed a review of the published research regarding watershed approaches to water governance.  Included here is the review of the five major challenges they identified as "boundary choice, accountability, public participation, and watersheds’ asymmetries with 'problem-sheds' and 'policy-sheds'" (Cohen & Davidson 2011, p. 1).  This article expands on this review to suggest the watershed approach to these problems have evolved from the watershed technical tool transition into a policy instrument.  They suggest the watershed should remain a tool for analysis of the water systems and not also a governance tool with Integrated Water Resource Management.

Beginning with the five major challenges, Cohen & Davidson define each with references to the related literature supporting their assertions.  Each will be listed here with the specific references they mentioned.  The first regards the problems with watershed boundaries being incongruent with:

• other natural systems boundaries (Griffin, 1999)
• ecosystems (Omernik and Bailey, 1997; Mollinga et al., 2007)
• airsheds (Jaworski et al., 1997; Paerl et al., 2002)/.
• groundwater flow (Winter et al., 2003)
• boundary defined as political act (Blomquist and Schlager, 2005)

Accountability issues become critical for decision making with regards to water permitting, regulations and other watershed basin specific issues.  Political jurisdictions rarely align with watersheds.  Thus, the issues and related references Cohen & Davidson define here included:

• government participants responding to their jurisdictionally defined electorate (Salles and Zelem, 1998; Sneddon 2002)
• failed democracy has "led to elitist policies that have benefits for only the few" (Fischer, 1993)

Public participation issues are equally as problematic as these articles noted these specific references:

• "One important political reality is that states do not much like sharing power" (Warner 2007)
• higher orders of government have not loosened their grip on their decision-making power and local groups have not been empowered through the devolution process (Norman and Bakker 2009)

The next critical issue discussed by Cohen & Davidson involved the "problem-sheds" which they defined as "geographic area that is large enough to encompass the issues but small enough to make implementation feasible (Griffin, 1999)."  Here they brought out the issues about how the "problem-shed" is often significantly different than the "watershed."  They referred to the many problems that might affect an area, including social and economical, which usually stretch far beyond the normal limits of a watershed.  "For example, individuals may not relate to or identify with a watershed boundary (Brun and Lasserre, 2006). Grigg (2008) argues that the watershed approach presents false boundaries for decision-making since watersheds are essentially non-economic or social units" (Cohen & Davidson 2011, p. 4).

This discussion similarly leads to the issues Cohen & Davidson define as the "Policy-shed."  Once again they claimed that regulation issues are not feasible within the watershed since these basins never match national or municipal jurisdictions.  Therefore, rules applied to one area are not equally applied to all the area.  Or more often, as they noted in their review "'regional, provincial, federal, and international bodies may have different authorities in a given watershed' (Hoover et al., 2007). This scalar mismatch results in policy implementation occurring in a largely fragmented and uncoordinated manner (Schlager and Blomquist, 2000)" (Cohen & Davidson 2011, p. 5).  Many of these issues can lead to turf-wars. land disputes and other issues.  They continue by claiming their are appropriate times and places for watershed  applications, specifically for technical analysis where this framework is suitable as in engineering and hydrology.

Cohen & Davidson then discuss the evolution of watersheds as a mapped area to explore flood control, irrigation and power development with dams.  This paradigm was later reframed in the 1950s to include more about human use with the development of the concept of a Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) also primarily based on watersheds.  Further, they presented the "reinvention and re-emergence of IWRM in the early 1990s included a broadened scope to include both natural and human components (Jønch-Clausen and Fugl, 2001), largely due to the increasing recognition of the need to integrate economic, social, and natural resources under a single framework (GWP, 2000)."

Thus the IWRM became more common in the governance and review of watersheds internationally.  This shift allowed IWRM to become more of a governance form beyond only the engineering and hydrology applications as a study tool.  This technical transition from engineering tool to governance was the critical issue Cohen & Davidson explored with their key points of "boundary choice, accountability, public participation, and watersheds’ asymmetries with 'problem-sheds' and 'policy-sheds'" become critical.  They give an example where IWRM encourage active involvement of stakeholders in the watershed, which complicates decisions which a single municipality might have made previously.

Thus Cohen & Davidson conclude with recommending that the selection or the watershed as a governance boundary should be a careful choice.  They encourage it whenever there is already a hydrologic challenge with a strong governance structure in place.