Water governance indicators in theory and practice: applying the OECD’s water governance indicators in the North American Great Lakes region

ABSTRACT

In the past decade there has been growth in the use of water governance indicators to assess and deepen our understanding of water policy. This article presents research that applies the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) water governance indicators at the transboundary scale in the North American Great Lakes region. Findings reveal the OECD’s water governance indicators provide some diagnostic value, however there are some important limitations when adapting and applying the indicators at the transboundary scale. The article concludes with insights and outlines challenges of using water governance indicators in research and practice while at the same time embracing complexity in water governance.

KEYWORDS:

• Indicators
• water policy
• water governance
• adaptive governance
• transboundary
• assessment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Adaptive water governance has been defined by as the ‘range of political, social, economic and administrative systems that are in place to develop and manage water resources, and the delivery of water services at different levels of society’ (Edelenbos & Teisman, 2013, p. 92).

2. Another indicator set not included in the OECD’s inventory is the Transboundary Water Assessment Program(TWAP) from the Global Environment Facility (GEF) originally established in 1990s by World Bank funding in partnership with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) related to several UN Conventions. The TWAP consists of five independent indicator-based assessments and the linkages between them, including their socioeconomic and governance-related features.

3. Neto et al. (2018) applied the OECD’s 12 Water Governance Principles to assess national water policy frameworks in Australia, Brazil, New Zealand and South Africa, one transnational water policy framework, the EU’s Water Framework Directive, and one global guideline, the Lisbon Charter. Seijger et al. (2018) applied the 12 principles in the Netherlands to the Dutch Flood Protection Programme; Jetoo (2019) assessed the principles related to the Baltic Sea Action Plan; and Keller & Hartmann (2020) used key informant interviews to assess the applicability of the principles at the local scale in the Linge River basin related to Dutch water management.

4. The research design and methods were approved by the Ryerson Research Ethics Board and the Wilfrid Laurier University Research Ethics Board.

5. The OECD does have a temporal dimension as part of their methodology to allow for some reflections and analysis of expected progress over a three-year time frame. See conclusion section below for more details. These limitations are part of the methodology and were considered by the research team when adopting and adapting the OECD’s methodology for application in our transboundary cases.

6. This research project also applies the OECD’s water governance indicators in another transboundary water system in North America, the Rio Grande/Bravo region, allowing for comparison of transboundary lake and river systems, and a comparison across a system of abundance and a system of scarcity.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 435-2017-0994].