Water Crises and Institutions: Inventing and Reinventing Governance in an Era of Uncertainty

Ensuring sufficient availability of water for human and environmental needs is one of today’s most pressing global challenges. The demand for water—for human consumption, sanitation, power, industry, agriculture and livestock, and other uses—has accelerated more than twice as fast as the rate of population growth over the last century (United Nations [UN] 2013). Efforts to secure and manage water supplies with more than 45,000 major dams and diversions and through unsustainable pumping of groundwater threaten or degrade ecological habitats in the world’s rivers, lakes, and wetlands (Postel 2010).

Today’s challenge of providing and governing water supplies in sufficient quantity and quality, and across diverse temporal and spatial contexts and scales, involves multiple, interrelated water crises (Linton 2010; Bakker 2014). These crises likely will continue to deepen in complex and unpredictable ways, exacerbated by dramatic shifts in population, demand for water, droughts, severe weather events, and other changes associated with global climate change (Pahl-Wostl 2015).

An extensive and growing literature examines the role that governance plays in unintentionally creating water crises, as well as in shaping responses to the uncertainties of societies’ water futures. Governance moves beyond government regulation to extend decision-making roles and responsibilities to nonstate actors with a stake in the environment, including formal and informal organizations and practices (Agrawal and Lemos 2007; Eberhard et al. this issue).

Water crises are events in social–ecological systems that are “perceived as significant threats to core social values and structures and to life-sustaining systems (ecological, economic, political or technological) that require urgent responses under conditions of significant uncertainty” (Bellamy et al. this issue, citing Galaz et al. 2011; Homer-Dixon et al. 2015). Resource problems are confronted at specific historical moments and in specific contexts. Multiple, interrelated water crises challenge water users’, managers’, policymakers’, and interest groups’ assumptions and accepted practices of managing the resource. Yet crises also provide opportunities for experimentation with new approaches to problems that may generate lessons relevant elsewhere (Ison, Collins, and Wallis 2015; Bellamy et al. this issue).

Aims of this Issue

This special issue of Society & Natural Resources brings together original studies exploring water crises around the world, with important implications for environmental governance in the context of uncertainty and change. Contributions examine water crises and governance in the developed world (Australia, France, New Zealand, the United States), the Global South (Cameroon, Nicaragua, and Uganda), and the semiperiphery (China and South Africa), respectively, from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.

The cases in these studies involve social actors’ responses to interrelated water crises triggered by four sets of factors: (1) ecological problems; (2) material and technical infrastructure issues; (3) significant state policy and legal changes; and (4) asymmetrical power exercised by social actors (see Figure 1). In all the cases, governance actors struggle simultaneously with more than one of these crises, though one may dominate. In developing countries, access to safe, secure, and affordable water remains paramount. Problems of coordination of complementary and competing water uses across multiple scales more often take center stage in developed countries.

Figure 1. The thematic foci for this special issue: four interrelated sets of global crises in water quality, provision, and governance. Source: Authors.

These studies focus on four sets of cross-cutting governance challenges: (1) struggles to redefine relations between the state and other social actors around water; (2) efforts to manage and coordinate water management across scales; (3) narrowing of access and participation because of actors’ inequality; and (4) conflicts over how to ascribe value to water and shape the purpose of governance.

As demonstrated convincingly by the contributions to this special issue, water crises weaken effective governance with respect to both natural resources and the social conditions that sustain effective collaboration. At the same time, such crises also provide opportunities, albeit difficult, even painful ones, for participants to approach water governance with coherent visions of more ecologically and socially sustainable futures.

The Collaborative Turn in Water Governance

Until the 1970s, water resources management was shaped by a “hydraulic paradigm” that approached water management mainly as a technical and scientific problem to be managed by experts. The top-down nature of this approach, according to critics, gave insufficient attention to complex, multiscalar interrelationships among material and technical factors on the one hand, and the political, economic, and social institutions that shape human behavior (Molle 2009; Pahl-Wostl et al. 2012). A paradigm shift emerged (Pahl-Wostl 2015) that aimed to better handle water’s complex technical and human interconnections.

Integrated water resources management (IWRM) appeared as a new governance approach in the late 1980s and early 1990s, widely promoted by major global development institutions. IWRM aimed to manage water at the level of ecological units such as river basins and watersheds and to effectively coordinate across diverse scales of water needs. Pahl-Wostl (2015, 4) remarks that IWRM’s progress has been slow and has not yet led to major transformations in water governance. Critics have suggested that despite IWRM’s emphasis on integration and coordination of diverse water uses, it remains significantly expert driven (Graefe 2011, 24–25). Molle and colleagues remark that IWRM

implies a degree of centralization of data, water allocation decisions and decision-making power in order to address interactions between users across the basin. This reinforces state control and may militate against the integration of the values and interests of all stakeholders. (Molle, Wester, and Hirsch 2010, 574–575)

Because of IWRM’s highlighting of the importance of coordinating diverse water needs across scales, criticisms of its shortcomings, and a broader move in natural resource management toward decentralization, devolution, and greater inclusivity of water users (Ribot, Agrawal, and Larson 2006), a more collaborative turn in water governance has emerged that recognizes the political nature of water and seeks to more effectively include and empower previously excluded non-state actors (Bakker 2012). These collaborative approaches have explicitly acknowledged the varying roles and potential contributions of state and nonstate actors and interests across scales, from more and less centralized water management institutions at national, regional, and basin levels, to nonstate water management and advocacy organizations, to local communities.

Multiple Crises and Cross-Cutting Governance Challenges

The studies in this collection explore recent experiences with interrelated water crises and their impacts on governance arrangements that, consistent with the historical move toward greater inclusivity and cooperation, seek effective collaboration across scales of state and non-state actors. Crises generated by ecological degradation, material or technical problems of basic water access, rapid state policy and legal changes, and the exercise of asymmetrical power have triggered critical reflection on existing assumptions and arrangements by researchers and governance actors alike. In responding to cross-cutting problems (see Figure 1), governance actors redefined relationships between state and other social actors. They strived to manage and coordinate effectively across scales. They struggled with the consequences of unequal power among participants. And they confronted differences over how value is ascribed to water and the purpose of water governance.

Ecological Crises

Ecological crises were the predominant drivers of institutional change in the first three studies in this special issue. In these cases, governance actors responded to environmental degradation even while confronting related shifts in state policy and legal frameworks.

Bellamy and colleagues’ historical study of cross-border governance in Australia’s Lake Eyre Basin analyzes the relationships at different historical moments between social–ecological and political–administrative crises on the one hand, and institutional change in water governance on the other. Concern within the basin and at the national level with environmental degradation led to a proposal for World Heritage listing of critical wetlands within the basin—a response to a perceived ecological crisis that led to self-organizing advocacy coalitions and strengthened local participation in water governance. Subsequently, plans by powerful external public and private interests to introduce irrigated cotton production in the basin sparked new community-based collaborations among scientists, community members, and other stakeholders in opposition to the development. In parallel, it also led to the creation of a basin-wide, multijurisdictional, cross-border cooperative water governance body, the Lake Eyre Basin Inter-Governmental Agreement (LEBIA). Significantly, later national government natural resource management policy shifts introduced at the regional level eventually undermined self-organized, community-based catchment management arrangements. Nevertheless, the authors argue that in general, these interrelated crises led to the emergence of cross-border water governance, with related shifts in the relative weight and power of local, basin-wide, and government stakeholders and overall, increased basin-wide capacity for self-organized collaboration that could help avoid future major crises.

Huang and Xu’s study employs an organizational analysis framework to study multilevel, cross-jurisdictional efforts in China from central government to municipal levels to coordinate responses to water pollution problems in the Yangtze River Basin near Shanghai. In addition to environmental crisis created by pollution, national policy decentralized water quality management to lower administrative levels, including basin and subbasin entities, while simultaneously maintaining key aspects of regulatory control at the central level. Water managers and regulators in the Yangtze River Basin confront wide asymmetries in organizational power as they struggle to manage both endemic pollution sources and extraordinary pollution events. Huang and Xu’s analysis responds to two trends in Chinese water governance scholarship that see either a vertical distribution of power that is “strong at two ends (the State Council and local governments) and weak at a middle point (basin commissions),” or alternatively, the obstruction of horizontal flows of power at both the national and local levels. Huang and Xu argue, by contrast, that “scalar configurations of power” among government officials at local, basin, and central administrative levels allow local jurisdictions under certain circumstances to address transjurisdictional pollution by “jumping scale” to exercise regulation across bureaucratic boundaries.

In her article, Duncan focuses on collaborative efforts in the Canterbury region of New Zealand to negotiate and reorganize governance in response to ecological degradation caused by agricultural water pollution. Negotiation and reorganization around water pollution also evolved in contexts of significant changes in national water policy and of problems of scale in involving communities in water governance. Duncan employs an interpretive co-production policy analysis framework that studies the role of science and modeling in “rescaling environmental governance” to involve local communities in design of catchment-level pollution load limits. Scientists and communities worked together to develop water pollution limits. Communities developed their own, value-based water quality objectives, and scientists employed modeling to quantify locally appropriate threshold limits. Duncan argues that a discourse of limits relevant from local to national levels played a key role in rescaling knowledge and governance in New Zealand’s national and regional policy realms in ways that are more robust than relying solely on the often legally vulnerable authority of science.

Crises of State Policy and Law

The next two articles in this collection focus on crises generated by changes in state policy, legal, and regulatory frameworks. In these cases, governance actors struggled, as well, with problems posed by environmental degradation and unequal power among participants in water management.

Eberhard and colleagues develop an international comparative study of water policy governance networks, examining “new” networked arrangements encouraged by state water policy changes that involve multiple stakeholders in policy development, negotiation, and implementation. Their governmentality theory approach explores the rationalities and practices of governance, the exercise of power, and outcomes in six large-scale water policy cases in Australia (the Murray–Darling Basin and Great Barrier Reef), the United States (the California CALFED Bay Delta and the Florida Everglades), and France (the Rhone River and Loire River Basin). Case studies examine state and nonstate stakeholders’ concerns with interrelated crises triggered by important shifts in state policies and legal frameworks, as well as deteriorating environmental conditions and intense political competition to shape policy outcomes. The authors ask whether the state actually relinquishes control to nonstate actors in governance networks or whether mixed forms develop in which the state remains important. They find that while the purpose of governance is sometimes renegotiated and the scope of responsibilities redistributed, in general, the state has rarely ceded significant power to nonstate governance participants.

Romano’s contribution focuses on the impact of a major change in Nicaraguan national policy to “ex post facto” devolve responsibility for drinking-water management to local rural communities, a move that formally recognized a role many rural communities had played for years. Romano writes that the state for many years had not provided adequate financial and technical support to maintain those decentralized systems. In an important sense, this study is also one of cross-scale problems of sustainable water governance in a context of inadequate access to drinking water in rural areas. Romano draws on scholarship at the intersection of common property regime theory and decentralized natural resource management to study cases in which local water committees built local legitimacy by managing small-scale water delivery effectively with little or no state support. She argues that local water committees achieved an “organic empowerment” by organizing together and building on grass-roots legitimacy to act across local and national scales, succeeding in reshaping top-down water policy discourse and developing a more formal role for local water committees in designing new national water legislation.

Crises of Access

Crises shaped by problems involving access to water resources in Africa are the focus of the third set of articles in this collection. In these cases, as governance actors sought to improve access to water, they also had to confront crucial conflicts over who should hold the power and responsibility to manage the resource.

Fonjong and Fokum’s study of water crisis and water provision in peri-urban Cameroon analyzes a crisis of basic access to drinking water by low-income populations, a technical crisis nevertheless, closely related to a change in state policy that privatized drinking-water delivery. Fonjong and Fokum report that Cameroon’s state-led water system prior to privatization suffered from insufficient delivery capacity, weak bureaucratic institutions, and inadequate capital investment. Privatization, widely promoted by international aid and lending institutions in the 1990s, aimed to solve these problems of efficiency and ensure regular water supplies. The authors argue that in Cameroon’s peri-urban areas, because of privatization’s valuing of water principally as a commodity, problems of poor coverage, rationing, shortages, and inadequate investment have continued and are now accompanied by higher water rates. Significantly, Fonjong and Fokum observe, study participants report that they place responsibility for their water system’s shortcomings on the national government instead of the private firm with formal responsibilities. The authors suggest that in this context, a public–private partnership may provide better results for peri-urban Cameroon by building on the strengths of both state and private institutions.

In their article on drinking-water infrastructure in rural Uganda, Naiga et al. unpack the gendered distribution of local financial and labor resources for operation and maintenance (O&M) of local water systems. The rural communities in their study lack adequate access to safe drinking water, a technical crisis closely linked to the state’s decentralization of water management and encouragement of local collaboration. Naiga and colleagues’ study develops a gender-sensitive collective action framework to examine how women bear the brunt of water scarcity in rural Uganda. By law women should participate equally in decentralized water governance, yet they are not granted formal recognition of their actual role in maintaining water infrastructure. The study responds to research that emphasizes the difficulty of convincing local community members to contribute financially in support of decentralized water systems. The authors’ work highlights that in rural Uganda, women do contribute significant financial and labor resources to O&M. Sociocultural norms and stereotypes combine with technical barriers to adequate water access and weaknesses in state policy implementation to block recognition of women’s current contributions and their potential to play a more direct and effective role in drinking water delivery.

Crises of Power

The final two articles in this collection examine crises of asymmetrical power in South Africa and the United States, respectively, both highly racialized settings. In these cases, struggles over control of water management and the distribution of its benefits occurred in the context of state policy and legal frameworks that, formally at least, sought to place greater governance responsibility in local hands.

Förster et al. analyze the implementation of a new post-Apartheid water governance framework in South Africa that aimed to overcome past racial inequalities in basic access to water via international IWRM principles of devolution and collaborative governance. The authors draw on social theories of structure, agency, and power to critically assess how local water user associations are established under the new water governance framework. In their case study of the creation of a water user association in the Northwest province, Förster et al. argue that the reality of local elites’ power undermined the institutionalization of local stakeholder collaboration and equitable access to water by non-elite farmers and other water users. While national policy and law are crucial for establishing structures supportive of collaborative water governance, agentic factors at the local level largely shape outcomes in practice. Förster and colleagues suggest that prior to establishment of new governance institutions, conditions must be created to enable local actors to meet on a more equal footing.

Norman’s study of indigenous peoples’ struggles off the northwest coast of the United States focuses on the problem of defending tribes’ rights to access and use of waterways that have historically been part of their communities. This problem of basic access to the water resource is simultaneously a problem of unequal power, as outsiders seek to use or control waterways in ways that undermine indigenous peoples’ ability to preserve their traditional livelihoods and ways of life. Despite the Point Elliott Treaty of 1855 between the United States and Coast Salish tribes, fragmented governance systems involving federal, state, tribal, county, and municipal actors have left the burden of maintaining their rights on the tribes themselves. Norman employs an ethnographic approach and storytelling, informed by standpoint theory. She looks at the role of indigenous collective action at different scales from individual and tribal to the national and international, to build coalitions to defend their water access rights and communities. Norman develops vignettes of indigenous resistance in defense of individual fishing rights, historical treaty rights in the face of large-scale development proposals in traditional fishing areas, and mobilization against polar oil drilling that threatened their way of life via its contribution to climate change.

Innovations, Reinventions, and Lessons

As poignantly illustrated by all contributions to this special issue, water crises in the contemporary world often produce or exacerbate social conflict, place untenable burdens on water stakeholders, and weaken governance with negative impacts on environments and people. At the same time, they may contribute to conditions conducive to institutional change that “resets” governance systems as participants respond to crises to protect and advance what they value in water. The cases examined here provide strong evidence that such resets have important implications for the technical effectiveness of water management, for how complexity is handled across scales, and for relations between state and nonstate actors and between participants with unequal power.

A number of the responses to water crises analyzed in this special issue were particularly unusual and innovative. Examples include the community-based catchment limits and the extension of water governance beyond spatial spaces to include the temporal (Duncan); the newly recognized identity for a river basin based on a broader understanding of value-based conflicts around water (Bellamy et al.); the possibility of “empowerment across scales” from the grass roots up for a more genuinely collaborative state–nonstate relationship (Romano); and the bureaucratic strategy of “jumping scale” to invent new kinds of coordination within an existing governance system (Huang and Xu). Nevertheless, all of the cases presented here entail important independent and creative responses that are new to their contexts, such as shifts to more centralized state control or, alternatively, toward collaboration involving greater inclusion of local expertise, interests, and values. These “reinventions” tell us that governance actors confront their crises and make changes, a hopeful sign of agency in the face of larger forces of change.

This collection of studies suggests important new lessons about water crises and the governance of natural resources: That crises are moments when existing assumptions and practices are called into question and previously unthinkable alternatives may be considered (Bellamy et al.). That uncertainty is inevitable but not a reason not to make decisions and move forward (Duncan). That rethinking public–private partnerships might serve as a way out of polarized situations (Fonjong and Fokum). That more sophisticated understanding of the power dimension of governance is needed (Eberhard et al.). That legitimacy and empowerment may emerge from diverse sources, calling for more effective negotiation across scales (Romano). That culture matters because it is inextricably linked with power; gender, race and ethnicity, and identity can create and reproduce inequality and provide rich resources for more sustainable governance (Naiga et al., Norman, Förster et al.).

Water is embedded in all aspects of human existence, natural and social. It is nothing less than the “source of life,” as Pahl-Wostl (2015, 1) put it recently. Water crises are also crises of sustainability in the larger relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world. We have much to learn about how to create a more sustainable future in the face of unprecedented uncertainty from how states, agencies, communities, and others respond to water crises to pursue healthy environments, technical effectiveness, greater equity, and inclusivity, flexibility, and adaptiveness.