A counterfactual assessment for interagency collaboration on water quality: the case of the Geum River basin, South Korea

Abstract

Despite wide acceptance of ‘collaborative governance’ for addressing environmental issues, the existing studies focus on the process and often fail to produce ‘outcome-oriented targets’ necessary to get the process going. We address this dilemma by measuring the benefits from the ‘yet-to-be realized’ interagency collaboration in water quality management by identifying the value of savings from reservoir reallocation in the Geum River, South Korea. We took the institutional features of total pollution load management (TPLM) and ran the simulations on water quantity (HEC-ResSim) and quality (CE-QUAL-W2). We assessed that the value of savings from reservoir reallocation would be far larger than the opportunity cost of such collaboration.

Keywords:

• collaborative governance
• counterfactual
• integrated water quantity/quality management
• HEC-ResSim
• CE-QUAL-W2

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government [NRF-2013S1A5A8023429, NRF-2014S1A5B6037020].