Millennial water management paradigms:

making Integrated Water Resources Management [IWRM] work

 

Tony Allan, SOAS[1]

 

Exclusive mafhoum

Abstract

 

The last year of the twentieth century witnessed an unprecedented level of international discourse involving the world's water users, managers and policy makers. They engaged  in intense consultative activities. They reviewed the global water predicament and identified ways to secure regional water environments and the societies and economies which depend on them. The preparatory process produced numerous reports for the Second World Water Forum in The Hague in March 2000 (WWC 2000, GWP 2000, World Water Commission 2000). During the consultations for the report writing attention was drawn to the fundamental political nature of the pre-Hague process (Allan 1999). But the authors of the numerous reports were unable to escape their assumptions that water was a narrow hydrological phenomenon rather than a multi-dimensional resource enmeshed in nested political economies. Nor could they think or write outside the technical and economic ideologies that would lead the sensible water users and wise policy makers to the virtues of technical and economic efficiency and environmental consideration. There was talk of civil society, governance and stakeholders, even of political commitment. But the discourse ducked the challenge of recognising that innovative outsider scientific information as well as outsiders principles of economy, equity and the environment are subordinate to local political milieux into which they would have to be introduced. At The Hague the political reaction to advocating that water is an economic resource rather than a social resource was strongly contended. Water pricing instruments and privatisation were also very loudly contested from the first moments of the Forum. The purpose of this study is to draw attention to the necessity of starting with the political contexts in which water resources are allocated and managed. It will include a narrative on the paradigms that have determined the way that water resources have been perceived and managed during the twentieth century including those that influenced the authors of The Hague Forum reports and those that contested them. The paradigm that Nature could be controlled was one of the ideas that dominated both capitalist and socialist versions of industrial modernity during the first 75 years of the century. A paradigm based on the notion that environmental resources such as water were being damaged rather than controlled by the impact of the alliance of science, engineering and national investment gained currency in the North and Northern donors by the mid-1970s. This paradigm reflecting environmental concern has only achieved very limited purchase on water policy making in the South.  In the 1990s a further set of principles gained currency.  That water is an economic resource seized the Northern professional water community. The approach has been resoundingly rejected in the South. A fifth paradigm has emerged in the last years of the 1990s – that of integrated water resource management (IWRM). IWRM requires a new holistic approach and an unprecedented level of political cooperation. It will be argued water users and policy makers operate in political systems which determine or not whether new paradigms can be assimilated. The political systems make sense to those who live in them. They have a political rationale. The next essential water resource management paradigm is that water users can assimilate IWRM if the innovation of ‘integration’ is appreciated as a political process and not just as a technical, investment or information sharing process. Water policy will be transformed if it is politically feasible. Influencing political feasibility is the next essential water resource paradigm. Such innovation will be achieved by taking an inclusive approach and emphasising the institutional dimension of the inescapably political integrated water resource management.

 

 

Introduction

 

Give us grace to accept the things that cannot be changed,

Courage to change the things that should be changed,

And the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

            The serenity prayer, Reinhold Niebuhr, c1940, and oft quoted by Hillel Shuval.

 

The purposes of the paper are first to draw attention the political nature of the Vision and Action processes associated with the Second Global Water Forum held in The Hague in March 2000 . The Vision and the Framework  required the construction and re-construction of perceptions of water and water environments. Without such preliminaries the technical and institutional reforms envisaged in the Vision and the Framework will not be implemented. Secondly it will be emphasised that the water allocating and managing communities world-wide are diverse. They are variously endowed and differentially developed socially, politically and economically. The economies of the plural North are relatively rich and deeply integrated into global information and trading systems. Those of the plural South are diverse, are frequently poor and not globalised and where global systems have impinged they have often been  damaging.  Thirdly, it will be argued that different approaches will be necessary to address the information rich and risk aware North from approaches which can impact poor isolated rural communities of the South. Fourthly, it will be shown that those concerned to communicate new knowledge and to promote innovatory water policy reform must be clear about the phase of innovation with which they are concerned. The assumption that the unrevealed benefits of innovation will prevail over the valuation of traditional practice has no substance. Water users and communities must want as well as know about new methods before new systems can be introduced and operated effectively. Fifthly, it will be emphasised that poverty is the main impediment to the adoption of economically and environmentally sound water using practice. Ameliorating poverty is fundamental to the capacity of a community to change its perception of water and its use. Further socio-economic development is an inescapable preliminary to the adoption of  politically stressful allocative principles being advocated by very recent Northern converts to the causes of environmentally considerate and economically efficient water use.

 

 

Beliefs, knowledge and action

 

We are in the knowledge construction business and the belief making game.

 

Identifying the trajectories to which the Vision/Action process is subordinate

Those involved in the Vision/Action awareness raising processes at the millennium as well as the billions who are targeted by the knowledge that is being constructed are involved in political processes. These political processes have determined the directions that water managing policies have taken in the past. Attempting to set new directions in an area so fundamental to existence, traditional livelihoods and social relations as water is to struggle with core politics.

The Vision/Action process has to be situated historically; this aspect has not been given enough attention. The process of constructing NEW ideas [knowledge] about the economic and environmental values of water gained currency among water specialists only a short time ago; in the mid 1970s. This newly constructed knowledge is being disseminated throughout the world, and whilst this is a relatively simple process in the plural North it is more difficult in the plural South. In the North the new knowledge may be better known but there is still a need to disseminate the sound principles comprehensively. In the South long evolved beliefs are entrenched. Such beliefs contradict the new knowledge. Ownership of the new water knowledge has scarcely been taken on by water professionals in the South. New water knowledge has had no impact on most water using communities world-wide.

Making the Vision politically credible to the South is an unavoidable preliminary challenge; the acquisition of ownership of the new knowledge highlighted in the Vision is a political process. It is the crux of the challenge for those attempting to identify facilitating Actions. Achieving widespread awareness, at all levels of the water using and water policy-making communities, that water’s role in livelihood futures is as important as its current role in securing existing livelihoods, is essential. Such a shift in perception is politically counter-intuitive. Those who have a stake in the status quo will effectively resist the economically and environmentally inspired innovations of water use efficiency and the newest concepts of environmental sustainability. Fortunately sustainability is no longer just an ecological concept. Economic and social dimensions are recognised to be as integral to the definition of sustainability as are the environmental priorities that were constructed by the green movement from the 1950s and 1960s. (Carson 1965)

In the Vision/FFA process water specialists are trying to export their perceptions of the risk of a global water deficit to peoples who have overwhelming local anxieties resulting from extreme poverty and to politicians fearful of social instability. Water poverty is just one of their deficits. The Vision/FFA process must attempt:

 

•          to show why an impending water crisis seems more urgent now. This issue of ‘why now’ has been addressed to some extent in what has been written in the initial Vision documentation and many publications since Dublin/Rio.

 

•          to explain what experiences and events caused the Water Visioneers to feel that the issues  - water use regulation, water use efficiency, environmentally sound water management - are so important and why such a Vision and Actions need to be spread world-wide to both North and South.

 

 

‘New knowledge’ about approaches to water and water management

The following section provides an account of water relevant events in the North. These events in the North are recounted not because they are more important than events in the South. The narrative is provided to help understand where and when in the North its recently adopted economic and environmental wisdom on water emerged. 

The political economies of the industrialised countries have been inspired for just over a century by the belief that nature, including water resources, could be controlled. Since the late nineteenth century the entrepreneurs and state agencies involved in delivering water for economic and social purposes believed that Nature, including water, could, and should, be subject to the mastery of science and industry. This high phase of industrial modernity was possible because of the revolutions in science and industry in the early nineteenth century and the achievements of capitalist organisation in marshaling the resources of labour, the environment and capital.

Unsatisfactory outcomes of this unprecedented synergy had become evident by the mid-nineteenth century. In the 1840s Marx drew attention to the dangerous tendency of this capitalist inspired system to ignore the interests of the other contributors to the capitalist mission and especially the contribution of labour. In the event, capitalism and the polities in which it was embedded, addressed this ‘first failure of capitalism’.  The message of the philosophers and critics was heard. The extreme risks to political stability of the grotesque and rapidly expanding urban poverty of the second half of the nineteenth century were avoided. Over the next century various forms of redistributive social democracy emerged to reshape the capitalist mode and confound the predictions of Marx. Capitalist interests were made aware of the social necessity of addressing the concerns of labour. Post-modernists might see a version of ‘reflexiveness’ in the way the ideologies – liberal, social democrat and even conservative – adjusted  in the industrialising Northern polities.

The second fundamental problem, some would say the second failure of capitalism, resulting from the drive for progress, whether in the economies of Europe and North America or of the Former Soviet Union, became evident just over a century after the first. The negative pressures on environmental resources of progressive industrial modernity with its assumption that Nature could be controlled began to be evident by the 1950s. Classic analyses by environmentalists such as Rachel Carson (1965) drew attention to the carelessness of what others (Beck 1992 & 1995 and Giddens 1990) have identified as a century of industrial modernity which damaged rather than controlled Nature. Two decades of discourse later certainties had been replaced by uncertainty; environmentalist principles had entered Washington politics via President Jimmy Carter’s presidency – 1976-1979. (See Carter 1982 and Allan 1999) Carter became a champion for water and the environment challenging the institutions and political networks put in place by his predecessors to dam and control the wild waters of the United States. He was unsuccessful but he did accelerate widespread recognition that the approaches of supposedly progressive industrial modernity, “harnessing the forces of nature for the benefit of mankind”, were full of risks and no longer viable. He emphasised also that they were not cost effective. By the mid-1970s - the progressive Nature controlling -ends 'had ceased to charm’ (after Mill, J. S.) at least in the North. But note the mid-1970s was a very short time ago.

The recognition that the mismanagement of water resources requires new attitudes amongst those at the commanding heights of the rich economies of the North is just one of many signals that there has been a significant shift in approach to the use and husbanding of environmental resources. The lesson from the North, however, is that the two or three decade long environmental discourse and especially the water discourse did not start in the corridors of power in Washington, nor in those of the multi-national corporations, nor in those of the Corps of Engineers or the United States Bureau of Reclamation (USBR). Water gained a place on the agenda of those allocating national budgets relating to water only after the argument had been made by individuals and activists, mainly ecologists and scientists (and the hippies of the sixties who have come into power). Economists remind us that Ricardo valued the environment at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but they cannot explain their century and a half of neglect of the subject thereafter. Their recent unconvincing attempts to ‘value’ the environment was a response to the questioning by the green community of what the latter regards as an environmentally charmless outcome of industrial modernity. The economist’s role was a reflexive one as has been that of engineers.

By 1992 a suite of environmental issues had become global concerns; global warming, species diversity and water. Each had attracted activists and champions. In the event the environmentalists gained what for many was intuitively impossible. At Rio priority was achieved for the issues of global warming and of biodiversity. Global warming is scientifically controversial, especially when it is used to suggest that there are associated more general climatic trends for example in rainfall levels. Biodiversity is a complex topic hardly understandable by non-specialists. Despite the unsteady scientific foundations of the climate change and biodiversity arguments they were the major issues at Rio. Even the unstable concept of desertification was constructed to more political effect than water at Rio. These unlikely causes squeezed out the predicament of the hydrosphere. Water was given relatively little attention at Rio, but the commendable preparations in Dublin in January 1992, resulted in a detailed chapter 18 on freshwater, the longest in Agenda 21. The lessons from the UNCED meeting in Rio appear to be that abstract issues can gain the attention of policy makers and their influential political leaders if they are cleverly and effectively constructed. Such a tendency fits the risk society theory of Beck (1999) on how individuals and communities in the North respond to risk after such emblematic shocks as Chernobyl. People stopped trusting progress.

 

‘The discourse of risk begins where the unbroken trust in safety (‘progress’) ends and applies so long as the catastrophe has not (yet) occurred. The perception of threatening risks determines thought and action.’  (Beck 1999:75)

 

The disaster of Aids and then of BSE and other food scares has further broken the trust that communities in the North had in science and the industries that could impact on public health. They became especially fearful that science and industry could neither control Nature nor be trusted to understand its potential. These events accelerated the process of mind changing which environmentalists had laboured for three decades to achieve. With an awful lot of help from the globalising media Northern societies are beginning to force their governments to become more environmentally aware and industry to adopt precautionary principles. The risk theorists call the condition in which the North finds itself ‘reflexive modernity’. Responses are being made to more and more risks as they are identified and awareness is quickly and widely diffused by the globalising media. The susceptibility of the risk-aware North to ‘new knowledge’ about water resource poverty and water resource stress is thus high. The globalising media instruments of awareness-raising are to hand. However, evidence shows that this awareness alone does not lead to changes in attitude - pressures and incentives are needed.

The Vision process is the first major attempt to construct knowledge about global and local water since 1992, and the most serious attempt yet to include all interested stakeholders in a world wide consultation process. Its goal is to provide the pressure that leads to changed attitudes and changed and most important - funded - water policy priorities.

 

Getting the vision across

The North

In the Northern milieu it should not be a major challenge to ‘construct knowledge’ about the risk of water shortages, impaired water quality and to project such knowledge deeply into the North. Nor should it be difficult to make the case for water as a priority for the multi-lateral and bi-lateral donors. They have already got their minds around the notion that water is an economic and social good and a vulnerable natural resource. All that is needed is some good copy and some skilled public relations consultancy. The World Bank and the World Water Council short awareness raising clips in between other programmes and advertising currently (April 1999 - ...) being broadcast on CNN prove the point.

 

The South

Getting the message across to the communities, professionals and governments in the South is a different challenge. The condition of community-wide ‘reflexiveness’ has not emerged. Responsiveness to risk awareness in the sense that whole populations can be alerted almost overnight to a newly perceived threat such as the recent example of genetically modified food in Europe is not in place. The local media in the South do not entertain, inform and educate ‘risk aware societies’. The North’s global media with their global reach and their risk-aware material have little impact on two billion people living in poverty. Yet it is this massive population that must be one of the major targets of the Vision’s new knowledge, and of the Framework for Action’s initiatives. Perceptions of poor communities need to be influenced if their political leaders are to be able to adopt the ‘new water knowledge’ being recommended in the Vision.

 

The poor

For many reasons it will be very difficult to get those living in poverty and their political leaders to be responsive to a single Vision message. First, they have deeply held beliefs and expectations about water that contradict the message of the Vision. Secondly, they are not susceptible to the notions of environmental risk in which the message from the North is couched. Thirdly, they do not have the political, social, economic and technical capacities to respond to the message. Fourthly, officials and government ministers in the policy making institutions are aware of the economic and technical impediments to making an effective response to the message. More important they are even more aware of the political prices that would have to be paid if the principles of water use efficiency and the recognition of the environmental value of water were to be imposed via tough water policy reform.

 

The activists

The Vision message is prepared by concerned activists: scientists, technical and economist professionals, policy makers and policy implementers. It must be plural. It can be principled insofar it is directed at the type of people recruited on to the regional TACS and other specialist advisory groups. They have links through education and professional experience with the same epistemic groups to which the authors of the Vision belong. Activist scientists and the committed, neo-liberal and green-aware, engineers and economist proponents in the donor agencies are also part of the wide professional community who have embraced what Giddens (1984) calls ‘mutual knowledge’. In this case the ‘mutual knowledge’ is the suite of principles being advocated by the Northern, and some Southern, water professionals - water use efficiency and environmental sustainability; such ‘mutual knowledge’ is not readily assimilated by the poor billions in the South.

How should the Vision and the Framework for Action processes approach the challenge of communicating with the numerous poor?  There is no space here to provide detail. Key activists and champions have to be found who have the essential appreciation of the political dimensions of innovation. Here are the major generic local circumstances that have to be known about if new knowledge is to have an impact:

 

1.         Knowledge of the deeply held beliefs and expectations about water that may contradict the message of the Vision must be identified

 

2. Notions of ‘environmental [water resource] risk’ must be expressed in a language which is locally relevant.

 

3. The ‘social adaptive capacity’ – socio-political, economic and technical capacities to respond to the challenges must be evaluated. [Ohlsson 1998, Turton 1999]

 

4. The political prices that would have to be paid if the principles of water use efficiency and the recognition of the environmental value of water were to be imposed via insensitive water policy reform have to be evaluated.

 

 

 

Water management policy – where have we been, where are we going: some paradigms?

The problems facing arid and semi-arid regions of the world with respect to the availability of sufficient good quality freshwater have been highlighted during the last three decades of the twentieth century. The hydrological capacity of such regions to meet regional needs and of the global hydrological system to meet global needs has been debated. The debate has been inconclusive.

Shifts in perception reflecting awareness of water resource scarcity have influenced the discourse on water. As discussed above, it was the green movement which proved to be the main agent of innovation with respect to paradigmatic shifts in water management policy after 1980. Figure 1 uses trends in levels of use of freshwater for agriculture as an indicator of the inspirations which influenced water management policy since the late nineteenth century.

Five water management paradigms are identified. First, the paradigm associated with of pre-modern communities with limited technical or organisational capacity. The second paradigm is that of industrial modernity. In the water sector the ideas of the Enlightenment, engineering capacity, science and investment initiatives of the state and the private sector characterised industrial modernity. Industrial modernity was manifest as the hydraulic mission of the mid-twentieth century. This project seized both liberal western economies, especially the United States federal government, as well as the centrally planned economies of the Soviet Union. The hydraulic mission proved to be readily exportable to the South in the second half of the twentieth century.

 

 

According to social theory the ideas underpinning industrial modernity were challenged during the 1960s and the 1970s. The questioning led to reflexive responses and a phase which has come to be known as 'reflexive modernity'.  In the North in the water sector the reflexive response is evident in a three water management paradigms. (Beck 1990) This phase witnessed a reduction of water use in agriculture in a number of semi-arid industrialised economies – Australia, California, Arizona and Israel. [See Figure 1a]

This reflexive phase can be shown to have three sub-phases. The third paradigm is the change of water allocation and management priorities inspired by the environmental awareness of the green movement. These activists succeeded in persuading governments and voters in industrialised semi-arid regions to allocate water to the environment and reduce allocations to agriculture. Their campaigns started in the 1960s but it was not until the 1980s that evidence of the influence on policy became evident in water use figures [Figure 1a].

The fourth paradigm was inspired by economists who began to draw the attention of water users in the North to the economic value of water and its importance as a scarce economic input. These ideas gained currency in the early 1990s. There has been an attempt to export them to the South via such agencies as the World Bank and through the energies of such institutions as UNCED, the World Water Council and the Global Water Partnership and the associated Global Water Forum in The Hague in March 2000.

The environmental and economic phases are still in train. It is argued here that they are being supplemented by a new fifth paradigm which is based on the notion that water allocation and management are political processes. Environmental fundamentals such as the hydrological logic of the river basin and economic fundamentals relating to the value of water are central to the concept of integrated water resource management - IWRM. But IWRM demands much more than the mere recognition of the environmental and economic value of water and planning engineering and economic interventions. IWRM is an intensely political process because water users have interests and they do not want them to be diminished by such interventions. Prioritising water allocation with an eye on the economy and prioritising investment to reduce environmental impacts will conflict with the interests of current water using practice. The fifth paradigm is bringing forward approaches which include participation, consultation and inclusive political institutions to enable the mediation of the conflicting interests of water users and the agencies which manage water. The inclusive political process of the fifth paradigm requires that the interests of civil society, hierarchy (government), social movements (NGOs) and the private sector are included in the policy making discourse. (Thompson et al 1990)

 

 

Evolving perspectives on sustainability and their special relevance to water management

The concept of sustainability has been useful in emphasising the role of environmental services. It was one of the notions used by green activists to raise the profile of the importance of the environment. But the notion proved to be impossible to operationalise in a narrow environmental sense. This was because the environment was conceptualised as not being integrated with the social and economic users of environmental resources.

Figure 2 shows the way in which sustainability has been viewed in the second half of the 1990s. Sustainability has three dimensions – for society, for the economy and for the environment. Voices reflecting the priorities associated with these three dimensions play a role in the political processes which mediate the water using and water policy outcomes in a particular political economy. The strength of the voices change according to the capacity of the different interests to construct and articulate their wishes. It will be shown in subsequent sections that social theory throws light on the reasons why the paradigms have been sequenced as they have.

For water to be managed to sustain the environment water management policies have to prioritise interventions and resource allocation so that society and the economy, as well as the environment, are also sustainable. This 'balance' is achieved, or not, via political processes. Managing water is a political process and 'integrated water resource management' – IWRM, is particularly political.

It is possible to map the five paradigms on to the conceptualised space of the sustainability triangle with its hydropolitical core

 

 

Contrasting water policy paradigms in the North and the South

The semi-arid North can be shown to have partially adopted all five water management paradigms. The professional community associated with the water sector can easily recognise the first four paradigms. The fifth paradigm is gaining currency – albeit slowly. Water users and politicians in the North have been much slower to change their ways of perceiving water.

In the South, by contrast, the professional community generally, and all water users and politicians have resisted the adoption of the last three reflexive paradigms. Exceptions exist in the South at the local level where small communities manage their water via transparent institutions tested over time.

The South is still very much involved in its hydraulic mission. It has much economic development ground to make up. Socio-economic development priorities are urgent; environmental priorities are recognised but for the moment their voice is less powerful in the policy discourse than those of society and the economy.  

The water policy discourses in the North and the South are different. Those 'outsiders' from the North who insist on preaching the environmental and economic values of water have little impact on the 'insider' Southern water management discourses.

 

 

Some important exceptions

The social theory used in the preceding sections to underpin the notion of water management paradigms cannot be used beyond the semi-arid realm. The experience of France in managing its water sector shows that as early as the mid-1960s it was possible to install an inclusive and a decentralised and democratic political and management structure. (Roche 1999, Seine-Normandy Water Agency 1999 and 2000) France legislated into existence in 1966 regional Water Parliaments based on the geographical river basins of the country. These parliaments enabled the diverse interests, through representation in the regional water parliaments, to be taken into account. These structures reflect all the virtues of the fifth paradigm. The concerns of water users in agriculture and industry/services, of municipal authorities responsible for providing water services and related engineering, social  and public health services, and more recently of those responsible for environmental services, were all represented. These institutional developments anticipated those in the world more generally by over forty years. That the utility of the institutions was being questioned at the millennium by the central government of France, anxious to bring back to the centre the control of the expanding budgets of France's decentralised Water Agencies, is a predictable reflection of the constant tension between the political centre and decentralised political institutions. (Water Academy 1999)

 

 

Water policy reform: a classic case of the political challenge of innovation

 

Water policy reform: unavoidable phases and vital conditions

Water policy reforms are shaped by the discourses that precede their formulation. The outcomes of such discourses reflect the interests of the participants and the absence of the interests of any that might have been excluded. Some participants in the discourse might introduce new knowledge; others might contend old beliefs. Current politically correct procedures urge that no stakeholder be excluded if the consultative process is to be socially and politically safe. The consultation process is one in which there is a potential for local approaches to be understood by those wanting to introduce innovations based on newly constructed knowledge.

Water policy reform, like all innovation is a political process. It has recognised phases. Those attempting to understand, and intervene in innovative processes must be aware of the cycle if they are to make any analytical progress or have a substantive impact. In addition the frustration of those recommending radical water policy reforms will be reduced if they recognise that the benefits of the adoption of new socio-political approaches and new economic instruments are always retrospective rather than prospective for those stakeholders who have to adapt to an externally inspired innovation.

 

 

Water policy reform reduces transactional costs

Recent analysis of water policy reform by economists (Saleth and Dinar 2000) has rediscovered the powerful idea of Coase (1937) that institutions are transaction cost reducing. New institutional economists have been developing the idea for over a decade with reference to both the North and thew South (North 19xx, XXX 19xx).

Although policy reform reduces transaction costs it may not be perceived in this way by either the policy makers or those whom a policy reform might impact. This is unfortunate for the innovator because it takes little observation and analysis to detect the transaction cost savings in legally defined water management systems. For example the domestic water reticulation systems in cities across the world massively reduce the transaction costs of accessing safe water. The distribution of water to agriculture throughout the world in irrigation systems is also very successful indeed in reducing transaction costs. Would-be reformers at the millennium want to introduce legally defined water allocating and managing instruments at local, national and international/river basin levels which will reduce even further the transactional costs of making water available to user. All this is intellectually worthy but not politically feasible.

Understanding the notion of reducing transaction costs is best achieved by considering the role of the familiar instrument of money. (Coase 1937 and 1960) The adoption of money to reflect mutually agreed values for diverse commodities and services required unprecedented levels of trust. Trust was essential in the socio-political domain. The progressive formal legitimising of the instrument was also essential via legal frameworks with regulatory capacities in the socio-economic domain. Money is a spectacular example of how legally contextualised instruments can reduce transaction costs. Imagine gaining access to commodities and services as diverse as food, transport services and information without trusted and legal monetary instruments.

In the water sector new instruments based on principles of water-use efficiency and the need to protect the water resource will also be transaction cost reducing, but the nature and scale of the benefits of cost reduction are impossible to define and quantify at the level of the community and the nation. This inability to define and quantify future benefits is one of the most serious impediments to water policy reform and the implementation of such reform. Unfortunately it is not enough to cite the impressive benefits of the current water systems and institutions because the benefits are intangible and difficult to value in quantitative terms. Potential beneficiaries will resist any attempt to argue that the current systems should be reformed to reflect economic and environmental values which would lead to reductions in the quantity of water used or the increase in price of water to users. The resistance is explained by the politics of the contention of existing interests and not by awareness of the benefits of potential innovation.

 

 

The unavoidable phases of innovation - KWHOE

If water policy reform innovators are to have any impact on water using stakeholders they have to recognise that such stakeholders have to know about the proposed innovation. They next have to want the proposed innovation. When the innovation is wanted it will be possible for them to have the new system or institution. With the innovation in place it will then be possible to operate it, or comply with it if it is a regulatory instrument. Operation of the new system may not at first be effective. The final stage, therefore is to achieve effectively operation of  the system or achieve effective compliance. Knowing about, wanting, having, operating and effectively operating [KWHOE] water reforming policy and practice can be conceptualised in a sentence but the process can take decades.

The KWHOE process is relevant to the professionals involved in water policy reform in the North and the South. It is particularly relevant to the knowledge construction, information dissemination and general innovation central to developing the Vision and Framework for Action for global water.

 

•          Knowing about the benefits of new [water reform] instruments which will reflect the environmental and economic values of water

•          Wanting the new instruments which will reflect the environmental and economic values of water

•          Having the new instruments which will reflect the environmental and economic values of water

•          Operating/complying with the new instruments which will reflect the environmental and economic values of water

•          Effectively operating/complying with the new instruments which will reflect the environmental and economic values of water

 

[The innovation process has been developed and elaborated in the paper prepared during the FFA process – 'Facilitating remedies to water scarcity'  GWP, July 1999]

 

 

Conclusion

Water management has been shown to be a political process inspired by constantly changing social priorities. Approaches to water management in semi-arid economies differ in the plural North from those in the plural South. Cultural, social, political and economic circumstances determine such differences. Hydro-political processes mediate the interests of the social and economic users of water and the interests of the environment given voice by environmental activists. Ideally sustainability is the outcome.

A major purpose of this study is to show that political contention associated with water policy making is dynamic and that in industrialised political economies in the semi-arid North five water management paradigms can be identified from pre-modernity to the present.

The plural South is very much engaged in its industrialising mode which involves the control of water resources to increase agricultural output and to generate power. The contention between newly informed Northern outsiders arguing for the inclusion of environmental and economic priorities into water policy anticipates by some decades the politically feasible circumstances which will facilitate the new approaches.

 

 

 

 

 

Figures

Figure 1   Five water  management  paradigms - 1850 – 2000

 

Figure 1a  Agricultural water use trajectories in some semi-arid industrialised economies

 

Figure 2   The concept of sustainability and the water sector; water management as a political process and determining perceptions of the diverse values of water in the North and the South

           

Figure  3  Sectoral growth in water demand and the perception of the consequences in the North and the South - pre 1950 to 2000. Perceptions of the social significance of water in the South and of its economic significance in the North.

 

Figure 4: An analysis of the water security of some  MENA economies in relation to water deficits and  shortages of social adaptive capacity

 

[Figure]  b  Water  security  trajectories of some MENA economies -  1950-2000

 

[Figure]  c  Description  of the water adaptive  capacity nexus

 

 

THESE FIGURES TO FOLLOW

 

Figure 1a  Agricultural water use trajectories in some semi-arid industrialised economies

 

Figure 5 The group/grid theory and the five water  management paradigms

 

Figure 6 Trajectories of water use in Israel – 1947-1999 – showing three phases of risk awareness and how risk can be foregrounded and backgrounded.

 

Figure 7 Water levels in some wells in the West Bank showing the declines from the 1970s and the rapid recovery after the rainfall event of 1992

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 3 An analysis of the water security of some MENA economies in relation to water deficits and shortages of social capacity

 

 

 

References 

Allan, J. A., 1996, The political economy of water, in Allan, J. A., Water and peace in the Middle East: the negotiation of resources in the Jordan Basin, London: Tauris Academic Publications,

Allan, J. A., 1999, Productive efficiency and allocative efficiency: why better water management may not solve the problem, Agricultural Water Management, Vol 40, pp 71-75, ISSN 0378-3774. , see also http://www.soas.ac.uk/geography/waterissues/OccasionalPapers/ look at Paper 10)

Allan, J. A., 2000, The water question in the Middle East, London: Tauris Academic Publications.

Arlosoroff, S, 1996,   Managing scarce water: recent Israeli experience, in Allan, J. A., Water, peace and the Middle East,  London: Tauris Academic Studies, pp 21-48.

Arlosoroff, S, 1997, Report to the Water Commissioner of Israel on the Israeli water sector, Tel Aviv: Office of the Water Commissioner

Beck, U., 1995, Ecological politics in an age of risk, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Beck, U., 1992, From industrial to risk society, Theory, Culture and Society, Vol 9, pp 97-123.

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