Dear readers,
We are happy to be back for our first summer issue with a collection of articles from the open submissions. It has been half a year since we produced an open issue. In the interim, we hope you have appreciated our two special issues, on the greatly underappreciated complexities of irrigation in urban areas of Africa and South Asia (49.2) and the wide-ranging double issue on the lessons of the past 30 years for water management in basins (49.3–4). The latter, with 30 contributions, was prepared with the International Network of Basin Organizations to mark its 30th anniversary of engaging with facilitating integrated water resources management in river, lake and aquifer basins.
As in the previous open issues, we have grouped the articles under some of our recurring themes: Water governance, Water coping in African communities and Transboundary waters.
Under Water governance we offer two examples from the far north and the far south of Spain, each addressing a different aspect of water management.
The first article by Riu covers the usual issue of managing a river at the basin level, which does not coincide with the administrative boundaries. Spain embraced the ‘principle of basin unity’ quite early, in the beginning of the 20th century. Until recently, this entailed a centralized, state-led approach to water. With the introduction of decentralization, a transfer of powers for water management to the regions, the Autonomous Communities assumed oversight of internal basins. Rivers such as the Ebro which straddle several regions are managed by an intraregional body. In this article, Riu focuses on the Catalan portion of the Ebro river, which is governed by the Ebro River Basin Confederation. Basing himself on this case, the author aims at analysing the dysfunction in water management resulting from incompatibilities of centralization and decentralization for regional rivers. He concludes by defining a general framework that could be useful for reordering priorities for policymakers, and contributing to a better representation of the regional governments and environmental groups, as well as giving greater consideration to adopt more local measures at the level of the sub-basin.
In the following article Martinez-Martinez et al. analyse the environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting of 38 local public water companies in Andalusia. These companies are considered to be hybrid organizations, because they provide a public service, but they also follow the market logic. The authors find that factors such as size are positively associated with ESG reporting, but that in general, reporting tends to be far less than could be desired and is of poor quality. This article is our Editors’ choice for this issue. Thanks to our publisher, it will be free for a limited period of time, so don’t miss this opportunity to read it.
Under Water coping in African communities, we have two articles that differ in location (west and east) and in focus (farm level versus local government). Katic examines farmer-led irrigated agriculture through interviews with irrigating and non-irrigating farmers in the White Volta Basin of Ghana. She focuses on some gaps in the extensive literature on farmer-led irrigation, in particular examining actual impacts on farmer livelihoods, the specific effects of irrigation development on women and youth and providing empirical substance to studies linking irrigation and livelihoods that seeks to account for selectivity bias. It is worth reading her article to discover her findings on these matters and the different impacts on women and youth. The result is a nuanced insight into the differential impacts of irrigation on local society in its broader context – for example, young women benefit from irrigation more than adult women. For the reasons why, read the article.
Cochrane et al. take us to Ethiopia and share with us the results of a collaboration between a zonal administration in Ethiopia (Wolaita) and two universities (Hawassa University in Ethiopia and Hamad Bin Khalifa University, in Qatar) to create tailored solutions that are appropriate to the context and designed for sustainable management. It is now well established that water projects have a high rate of failure, especially in resource-constrained contexts, when their design does not consider the specific context and align with existing informational systems and is not suited to available resources for institutionalization. The project presented here aims to be tailored to the specific resource-constrained context of Wolaita, an ethnic minority administrative zone with a population of over 6 million. It offers the concerned government the possibility to collaborate and essentially to take ownership of the project for continued benefit in the long term. Its initiators believe the project has potential for adapting and scaling in similar, resource-constrained, contexts. Moreover, it is the collaboration between the zonal administration and the two universities that may serve as an example for policymakers, within Ethiopia and beyond, not only for regular data collection and monitoring but also its usability.
We close this issue with a Transboundary waters examination of the important Helmand/Hirmand River Basin shared by Afghanistan and Iran. Ghoreishi et al. introduce the Power–Interests–Identity Nexus (PIIN) framework to elucidate the factors that led to the transformation of the water conflict between Afghanistan and Iran, the signing of the Treaty between the two countries in 1973 Treaty and its maintenance in the 2020s. The PIIN framework is valuable for identifying the influential latent factors of transboundary water arrangements.
We hope that you will enjoy reading these varied contributions to understanding the complexities of water management at various scale and in numerous localities, and that you find them of interest. We certainly did and are pleased to bring them to you in this issue. We will be back in the next issue, which will follow soon in the summer. Stay cool (if you are in the northern hemisphere) and stay tuned!