edited by Jayne M. Godfrey and Keryn Chalmers, Cheltenham, UK, Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, 2012, 318 pp., $150CAN (hardcover), ISBN 9781849807494
With competition for water growing, the need to account for how it is sourced and distributed will only increase. Water accounting has grown out of a demand for information to provide accountability and to assist in decision-making. It is important to acknowledge that in isolation, water accounting will not resolve any water crisis. It is a decision-making tool, not a solution. However, it can play a vital part in the resolution of economic, environmental, social and other issues. After all, good decisions are generally underpinned by good information. (12–13)
As an introduction and overview of the field of water accounting, Water Accounting: International Approaches to Policy and Decision-Making by Jayne M. Godfrey and Keryn Chambers makes an admirable contribution. It is an ambitious edited volume covering a lot of ground, both substantively and geographically. Substantively, the book focuses on four water accounting systems, with primary emphasis on two of them, the General Purpose Water Accounting (GPWA) system developed in Australia and the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting for Water (SEEAW) developed by the United Nations. These water accounting systems are analyzed from a variety of perspectives by academics and practitioners with natural sciences, social sciences, engineering and accounting backgrounds. The editors themselves are Australian-based professors of financial accounting who came to water accounting in the context of southeastern Australia’s recent 1-in-10,000-year drought. Geographically, the book is somewhat slanted toward water issues in the southern hemisphere, which is understandable given the editors’ backgrounds, but there are chapters on Spain, China, the western United States, and international water issues, giving the book a global flavour. However, there are no chapters on Canadian water issues and Canada is rarely mentioned.
The book is organized in three parts, providing a wide-ranging analysis of water accounting and water accounting issues. Part One provides a thorough description of the four water accounting systems that are the focus of the volume and provides a good introduction to water accounting in general. Part Two provides more of a technical analysis of the water accounting systems, narrowing the focus to the GPWA and SEEAW systems described above. The two systems are applied in various contexts for various purposes and their technical strengths and weaknesses are compared and contrasted. In Part Three the chapters become more critically oriented, analyzing the place of water accounting systems in managing water conflicts and highlighting the vulnerability of these systems to corruption and political manipulation. Overall, the three parts build well on each other and there is a substantial degree of coherence and unity, particularly for an edited volume. However, for many readers, some perseverance is needed to get through the technical chapters in Parts One and Two in order to enjoy the more engaging critical chapters in Part Three. Readers already familiar with the technical aspects of water accounting are unlikely to face this problem.
While the book is largely successful in what it sets out to accomplish, it is missing a clear justification for its predominant focus on the GPWA and SEEAW water accounting systems. There is no account of the history or development of the field of water accounting and where these two systems fit into this history. Likewise, there is little sense of how similar/different these water accounting systems are compared to other common water accounting systems that are not analyzed in the volume, so it is not entirely clear why these systems were worthy of analysis while others were not, apart from the editors’ experience with them. This sort of contextualization would have added a lot to the volume and provided its analysis with a greater sense of significance than is currently present.
Overall, Water Accounting: International Approaches to Policy and Decision-Making is a recommended read for any practitioner in the water accounting or water modeling fields and for any academics concerned with the role of information in water governance. It provides an effective entrée to developments in water accounting outside of Canada and highlights some of the challenges and vulnerabilities of water accounting in any context.
© 2013, B. Timothy Heinmiller