The need to put practice into policy: editors’ introduction to the special issue of papers from the IWRA XV World Water Congress

Water International is the official journal of the International Water Resources Association (IWRA), and like its parent is dedicated to collaborative advancement and dissemination of knowledge on water management, in particular linking science, policy and practice. One of the principal means by which the association promotes this advancement is through its World Water Congress, which has been held on average every three years in the 45-year history of the organization. The most recent one, the XV World Water Congress, was held in cooperation with the Scottish government in Edinburgh on 25–29 May 2015, with the theme of Global Water, A Resource for Development.

Another means through which the IWRA approaches its mission to advance knowledge is the present journal. We are pleased that the Edinburgh Congress has been especially fruitful in generating high-quality manuscripts and thematic issues for these pages. The Ven Te Chow Memorial Lecture on water and food security by Mohtar (2015) and the Crystal Drop Award speech on a unifying entropy theory for water modelling by Singh (2015) appeared in full article form in the 40th-anniversary issue of Water International in July 2015. Special issues arising from the Congress have subsequently been published on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam currently under construction (Yihdego, Rieu-Clarke, & Cascão, 2016) and on legal mechanisms for water resources in practice (Burchi, D’Andrea, Eckstein, & Nanni, 2016), the latter sponsored by the International Association for Water Law (AIDA).

Two of us (Tortajada as chair, Nickum as member) served on the Scientific Committee of the XV World Water Congress. One of the tasks of that committee was to review abstracts submitted to the Congress. Together with Wester, deputy editor-in-chief of Water International, we selected from among the accepted abstracts about 30 that were not aligned with a thematic panel but showed promise as topics for articles in this journal. We then invited the proposers to submit full-length manuscripts for our consideration in the present collection. Roughly two-thirds of these responded in the affirmative. In the end we received 13 papers, of which 6 passed external peer review. One of these, on water governance in the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals, was published separately for reasons of timeliness of the topic (Orme, Cuthbert, Sindico, Gibson, & Bostic, 2015). The remaining five are gathered here.

An underlying thread in these studies is the need to turn on its head the common prescription to turn policy into practice. While lip service is given to involving all stakeholders, in practice, policies are most commonly set without full consideration of actual practices. The ensuing and nearly inevitable ‘implementation failures’ could be mitigated by taking better account of actual practices in policy formation and modelling. Hence, the theme of this issue is the need to put practice into policy.

Jean and Davies consider why reservoir managers in Alberta behave differently from how operations theories would have them behave. Their approach was one that unfortunately is far too novel: they asked the managers. What they found is that in practice there are many objectives other than economic optimization, including adaptive management under drought conditions, and that the information used is more often that of experience, with all its uncertainties, because managers do not have the perfect foresight or consideration of options assumed in many models. The authors provide some suggestions for developing models to better address the situation and the concerns of frontline managers, such as providing risk assessments for a number of alternative release options.

In a similar vein, Yu went into the field and asked stakeholders in two water users’ associations in north-west China about why those organizations have not always been successful in promoting participatory governance. Part of the answer lies in their origin as mandatory mechanisms initiated by the government to offload its management burden and more effectively recover costs. Not surprisingly, villagers resort to a number of weapons of the weak, such as cutting deals, stealing water and overexploiting groundwater, in response to a lack of trust and perceived economic and political exploitation. Despite the consequent “bleak” outlook, the author suggests some directions for improvement.

Molden, Griffin, and Meehan also rely on interviews, but with an urban focus – with users of the traditional stone spouts used to deliver water to local groups in Kathmandu, and with other stakeholders, such as government officials. The authors find that the spout systems not only provide a secure supply to often marginalized and insecure populations, but also have considerable value as a living cultural heritage. The government is tangled up in conflicts between cultural heritage and drinking water mandates, however, putting the system and its revitalization at risk.

The international collaborative project reported by Speed et al. moves to an entirely different scale to develop a framework to address a thorny governance problem: river restoration. The first step was to collect the experiences to date in seven locations around the world, and to go from that practical empirical base to extrude key principles and “golden rules” that can be applied generally, but with focus on China. They conclude that China is well positioned to apply these rules.

Finally, also at a multinational scale, Möller-Gulland and Donoso ask why well-functioning water markets are rare, despite widespread recognition of their potential. They identify the underappreciated role of market intermediaries. By surveying markets around the world, they propose generic criteria that may indicate under what conditions such intermediaries will be successful.

Each of these contributions advances our understanding of water governance at various scales. We are grateful to all the authors presented herein, as well as to all others who responded to our call. The XVI World Water Congress is coming up soon, 29 May to 2 June 2017, in Cancun, Mexico, on the theme Bridging Science and Policy (www.worldwatercongress.com). We hope to see you there, and look forward to presenting new advancements in water knowledge that come out of that gathering in these pages!