Analyzing complex water governance regimes

Pahl-Wostl, Claudia; Holtz, Georg; Kastens, Britta; Knieper, Christian. (2010) Analyzing complex water governance regimes: the Management and Transition Framework. Environmental Science & Policy Volume 13, Issue 7, November 2010, Pages 571-581

Pahl-Wostl, Holtz, Kastens & Knieper presented a description of the Management and Transition Framework (MTF) which is proposed as a method for analyzing the development of watershed plans.  It could be used for a multitude of governance systems but was developed specifically for creating a database of coherent applications for watershed governance comparisons.  For example, they noted that "Folke et al. (2005) point[s] out that adaptive governance systems often self-organize as social networks with actor groups that draw on various knowledge systems and experiences for the development of a common understanding and policies."  Thus, a interdisciplinary system for context specific evaluations was needed as Pahl-Wostl et al. defined here:

Management and Transition Framework (MTF) that has been developed to support the analysis of water systems and management (Pahl-Wostl et al., 2007a,c).  The MTF is an interdisciplinary conceptual and methodological framework that supports the understanding of water systems and management regimes and transition processes towards more adaptive management.

The Pahl-Wostl et al. review of MTF summarized key thematic areas:

• adaptive management and characteristics of adaptive water management regimes,
• social learning and regime transitions,
• the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework analyse collective choice process.

Each of these areas were defined in context of water resource governance referring to literature for specific examples for setting the framework for the MTF analysis.  The actual framework for MTF evolved from the specific processes, structures and conditions for watershed governance which are represented in a graphical representation using a "unified modeling language."  Thus, every relationship and governance structure is represented in a formal diagram to show the activities and cycles used in the management processes.  Each step of the management process development would require more a detailed MTF to study related problems and analysis.

The MTF has specific classes and attributes which are used to define relationships.  Relationship diagrams are developed with defined terms for each component.  Here is an example Diagram (See Fig 1 at right) with some significant process terms used:

• ‘Water System’ which comprises all environmental and human
  components.
• ‘Ecological System’ class comprises abiotic and biotic
  components of the water system.
• ‘Environmental Services’ capture the function of an ecological system as provider of different kinds of services for
  human activities.
• ‘Environmental Hazards’ are the threats that an ecological system poses to a societal system.
• ‘Technical infrastructure’ refers to infrastructure of relevance for the water management issue under concern.
• ‘Action Arena’ is an issue specific political arena focused on a societal function.
• ‘Action Situation’ is a structured social interaction context that leads to specific outcomes.

This system provides a criteria for multiple situations to be documented and reviewed with through similar references to create a database of analysis.  Thus, with following a defined system the various management systems can be equally evaluated.  This defined systems includes: 1. Strategic goal setting, 2. Assess current state, 3. Policy formation, 4. Developing operational goals, 5. Developing measures, 6. Implementation, 7. Monitoring. 

Finally, the MTF allows for the collection of standard data on these processes to assess further developments.  Systems can be standardized and evaluated.  In conclusion Pahl-Wostl et al. "planned to further develop and implement a global database of river governance and management regimes and meanwhile evaluating and revising the framework."

Twin2Go’s Objectives

Objectives:
The failure of governance systems has been identified as being one of the most important reasons for increased vulnerability to water related disasters. Successful governance in river basin management depends on adaptive institutions able to cope with complexity and uncertainty. The EU has established a significant portfolio of research projects on issues of integrated water resources management (IWRM). However, to accelerate the pace at which water management practices and water policy move towards integrated approaches, more importance needs to be given to effective communication of research results and to constructive engagement with stakeholders from all levels, including political decision makers.
Against this background,

Twin2Go’s objectives are:

• to review, compare, synthesize and consolidate the outcomes of several EU-funded projects that undertook research on specific IWRM issues in basins around the world
• to draw context-sensitive but transferable approaches for improving adaptive water resources management with regards to adaptive water governance
• to formulate policy-relevant best practices and tools for implementing adaptive water governance and for improving the uptake of research results
• to disseminate outcomes effectively to relevant stakeholders at the policy level.

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USF+AppSysSc: Projects

USF+AppSysSc: Projekte: "ASEM Water resources management by focussing on the five main issues: river basin management, water use efficiency in agriculture, floods, pollution, governance.

	Aquaculture	Aquacultural concepts for Uzbekistan .
	Aquastress	Mitigation of Water Stress through new Approaches to Integrating Management, Technical, Economic and Institutional Instruments.
	ASEM	Water resources management by focussing on the five main issues: river basin management, water use efficiency in agriculture, floods, pollution, governance.
	Eco Campus	connects actors working or studying at universities who actively support the ecological design of  research, teaching, and administration at universities.
	Elbe-DSS	Sustainable management of fluvial systems.
	ELPOS	Criteria for persistence and long-range transport of pesticides and industrial chemicals.
<="" td="" width="75" height="45">	ETAPOS	A spreadsheet model for screening assessment of overall persistence, long-range transport and bioaccumulation potential
	For566	Veterinary medicines in soils: basic research for risk analysis.
	GREAT-ER	A GIS Assisted Model For Environmental Risk Assessment and Management of Chemicals in River Basins.
	GWSP	Global Water System Project
	Harmoni CA	Harmonised Modelling Tools for Integrated Basin Management.
	Harmoni COP	Harmonising Collaborative Planning; understanding of participatory river basin management and planning (RBMP) in Europe.
	SARISK	Development of a pollutant dispersal model for risk analysis and evaluation of extreme flood events exemplifying the town and district of Bitterfeld
	MaMBIES	Mathematical Modelling of Bioinvasions and Epidemic Spread
	MaMPFi	Mathematical Modelling of Plankton-Fish Dynamics
	Newater	New Approaches to Adaptive Water Management under Uncertainty.
	PartizipA	Participative Modelling, Actor and Ecosystem Analysis in Regions with Intensive Agriculture.
	Plastics	Plastics in the marine environment
	PSI-Connect	Policy Science Interactions - Connecting Science and Policy through Innovative Knowledge Brokering in the field of Water Management and Climate Change.
	Twin2Go	Coordinating twinning partnerships towards more adaptive governance in river basins.
	VOLAMOD	Field experiments in artificial streams to develop and evaluate a model approach for volatilization of hydrocarbons and other organic pollutants from natural rivers
	Wademed	WAter DEmand management knowledge base for the MEDiterranean.
	Wasamed	Establish a platform for an effective dialogue on water saving in agriculture in the Mediterranean region.

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XIVth IWRA World Water Congress

XIVth IWRA World Water Congress: "XIVth IWRA World Water Congress
DATE: September 25-29, 2011 - VENUE: Porto de Galinhas / Recife, PE, Brazil

Goals
The World Water Congress will highlight emerging drivers of water resources management including climate change; population growth, urban expansion and demographic changes; economic development; water quality degradation, and ecosystem water requirements including to mantain biodiversity. Each of these will alter the way water is managed; together, they will require fundamentally new priorities for technology and infrastructure, management and policy, allocation and pricing, laws and institutions, and above all a new future outlook for water resources professionals.

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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.

Adaptive Water Governance

Huitema, D., E. Mostert, W. Egas, S. Moellenkamp, C. Pahl-Wostl, and R. Yalcin. 2009.  Adaptive water governance: assessing the institutional prescriptions of adaptive (co-)management from a governance perspective and defining a research agenda. Ecology and Society 14(1): 26.

Huitema, et. al, included an analysis of literature reviewing watershed governance.  The review discussed the techniques used by professionals to create watershed management organizations which are becoming more and more prevalent in the industry of water systems.  This analysis explored the reviews published about different techniques for collaboration and governance..  The research centered on answering three main questions:

1. Do the institutional prescriptions of adaptive (co-)management resonate with the (water) governance literature?
2. Are these requirements feasible and effective —can they be adopted in practice, do they deliver environmental improvements, and why or why not?
3. What are the most salient questions for further research concerning these institutional requirements?

A clear issue that came up regarded the disparity between government boundaries and the associated watershed boundaries.  Watershed basin boundary lines often include multiple jurisdictions which may not agree or work together on existing issues already.  For example, one of the studies they reviewed (Conca et al. 2006:271–282) found that "many agreements do not include all states in a basin and that transboundary agreements are concentrated in basins with a tradition of cooperation."  Thus, they found very little evidence to support the "river-basin" approach for developing watershed management plans.

Fundamentally, the issue with new "watershed" focused plans, organizations and management is that the existing political structures already have established priorities and procedures.  These groups have a vested interest in their processes which provide security and comfort to those involved.  Adding another authority or requiring existing groups to agree to other priorities can create problems. 

The critical issues found for watershed management development include "collaboration in a polycentric governance system, public participation, an experimental approach to resource management, and management at the bioregional scale."  There is strong support of polycentric governance however, there is also high transactions costs and issues of true democratic processes beyond the existing political regimes.  Public participation has been shown to be very positive and supportive of the processes but not always feasible economically or politically.

The experimental approach has been shown to be sound in the literature, while usually only in small scale applications.  Thus, for watersheds this approach is not feasible, since these basins are usually so large.  The bioregional scale is appropriate and effective for water issues while the strong leadership necessary proves very challenging for these polycentric governance systems.  Huitema, et. al, defined a multitude of issues requiring further research were defined:

1. How to facilitate collaboration in polycentric governance settings, resolve or prevent coordination problems, foster trust, and keep transaction costs manageable, while ensuring democratic legitimacy?
2. How to organize practical public participation in polycentric settings, including participation in any experiments that may be undertaken or any other research, and how to organize a follow-up to the participation?
3. [How to establish] the effectiveness or the ineffectiveness of the different institutional prescriptions[?]
4. How to organize experiments in polycentric settings and promote an “experimental approach” to management that recognizes our limited understanding of socioecological systems and that maximizes learning from experience?
5. How to implement the bioregional approach for water management and cope with the multiplicity of relevant natural, social, and administrative boundaries?
6. How to manage transitions toward adaptive (co-)management and how to ensure that transitions are going in the right direction?
7. Moreover, we think that this theoretical work should not be undertaken as a stand-alone project, but in conjunction with empirical work on practical applications of adaptive management. This can improve the practical relevance of the theory and ensure that it does not remain only a theory.

Uncertainties in International Water Treaties

Drieschova, Alena; Fischhendler, Itay and Giordano, Mark (2011) The role of uncertainties in the design of international water treaties: an historical perspective. Climatic Change. 105:387–408 DOI 10.1007/s10584-010-9896-4

The initial point of disparity is the significant difference between political boundaries and watershed basin boundaries.  This included questions about watershed basin boundaries themselves.  The issue was more about the human interpretation beyond the factual science involved.  The problems with interpretation created issues for governance and operation beyond the political structures.   These uncertainties inbred in the system made agreements for management and future direction difficult.  Thus, progression to agreement for management over water systems that are naturally in flux became extremely difficult. 

More specifically,  "the dangers of resource degradation, water scarcity and of an inequitable distribution of the resource" create such a level of uncertainty where treaty design and implementation becomes questionable.  Thus, the final ratification and subsequent effectiveness of such a treaty becomes even more unlikely.