Indonesia'€™s water supply regulatory framework: Between commercialisation and public service?

Wijanto Hadipuro
Post Graduate Programme on Environment and Urban Studies, Soegijapranata Catholic University, Semarang, Indonesia; hadipuro@yahoo.com

ABSTRACT: Due to financial and operational problems faced by local Indonesian water supply companies (Perusahaan Daerah Air Minum -€“ PDAMs), people depend for their domestic water on many private providers, who use groundwater as their source. Within this context, this article interrogates the current water supply regulatory framework and its implications. Indonesia is at the crossroads of treating water supply as a public service or commercialising it through market or market proxy mechanisms. Through content analysis and a literature study on the impacts of such regulations in the past, this article shows that Indonesia'€™s regulatory framework lends itself to the commercialisation option. Some findings on the current regulations and their impacts indicate that awarding commercial water rights has the potential to marginalise traditional users as well as create administrative problems; adopting the full cost recovery concept has made PDAMs reluctant to expand their services, especially to the poor; inviting the private sector to manage water supply is surely not in the best interests of the provision of public services; assigning an Indonesian National Standard (SNI) has resulted in bottled water becoming the most reliable drinking water; and allowing groundwater extraction to take place without sufficient regulation and law enforcement has resulted in excessive extraction at a detriment to the environment.

Govind Gopakumar
Assistant Professor, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada; govind@encs.concordia.ca

ABSTRACT: Public-private partnerships (PPP) are an important governance strategy that has recently emerged as a solution to enhance the access of marginalised residents to urban infrastructures. With the inception of neo-liberal economic reforms in India, in Indian cities too PPP has emerged as an innovative approach to expand coverage of water supply and sanitation infrastructures. However, there has been little study of the dynamics of partnership efforts in different urban contexts: What role do they play in transforming existing infrastructure regimes? Do reform strategies such as partnerships result in increased privatisation or do they make the governance of infrastructures more participative? Reviewing some of the recent literature on urban political analysis, this article develops the concept of water supply regime to describe the context of water provision in three metropolitan cities in India. To further our understanding of the role of PPP within regimes, this article sketches five cases of water supply and sanitation partnerships located within these three metropolitan cities. From these empirical studies, the article arrives at the conclusion that while PPP are always products of the regime-context they are inserted within, quite often strategic actors in the partnership use the PPP to further their interests by initiating a shift in the regime pathway. This leads us to conclude that PPPs do play a role in making water supply regimes more participative but that depends on the nature of the regime as well as the actions of partners.

Peter P. Mollinga
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK; pm35@soas.ac.uk

ABSTRACT: This introductory article of the special section introduces the central question that the section addresses: do water policy dynamics in (semi-)authoritarian states have specific features as compared to other state forms? The article situates the question in the post-Cold War global water governance dynamics, argues that the state is a useful and required entry point for water policy analysis, explores the meaning of (semi-) authoritarian as a category, and finally introduces the three papers, which are on China, South Africa and Vietnam.

The state and water resources development through the lens of history: A South African case study

Larry A. Swatuk
University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada; lswatuk@uwaterloo.ca

ABSTRACT: This article sets contemporary challenges to good water governance in South Africa within an important historical context. While it is correct to say that 'the world water crisis is a crisis of governance', it is problematic to assume that all states can follow a similar path toward environmentally sustainable, economically efficient and socially equitable water resources governance and management. The nexus of decision-making power varies within and beyond states, and over time. Gramsci (1971) describes this as the "constellation of social forces". Where this constellation of social forces achieves consensus, a 'historic bloc' is said to emerge giving rise to a particular state form. The South African state form has varied greatly over several centuries, giving rise to various historic blocs. The resulting body of laws and policies and the varied forms of infrastructure that were developed to harness water for multiple social practices over time constitute a complex political ecological terrain not easily amenable to oversimplified frameworks for good water governance. This article outlines the role of water in the history of South Africa'€™s multiple state forms. It shows that over time, water policy, law and institutions came to reflect the increasingly complex needs of multiple actors (agriculture, mining, industry, cities, the newly enfranchised) represented by different state forms and their characteristic political regimes: the Dutch East India Company; the British Empire; the Union of South Africa; the apartheid and post-apartheid republics. Authoritarian, semi-authoritarian and democratic state forms have all used central-state power to serve particular interests. Through time, this constellation of social forces has widened until, today, the state has taken upon itself the task of providing "some water for all forever" (slogan of the Department of Water Affairs). As this article suggests, despite the difficult challenges presented by a mostly arid climate, this means 'adding in' the water demand of millions of people, but not 'allocating out' those privileged under other constellations of social forces as they contribute most substantially to economic growth. The implication, therefore, is a modified hydraulic mission involving significant new infrastructure and, in all likelihood, inter-basin transfers from beyond South Africa'€™s borders.

James Nickum
Tokyo Jogakkan College, Japan; nickum.water@yahoo.com

ABSTRACT: This essay explores the nature of China'€™s unique decentralised 'authoritarian' regime and its various origins; the continuous dialectic between state-directed and market-directed approaches to the economy (including water); the economic and budgetary drivers of water policy change; whether the concept of integrated water resources management (IWRM) is overly 'loaded' with liberal ideas or even if not, whether it provides any insights beyond concepts more widely accepted in China; whether the state-society dichotomy makes sense in China'€™s guanxi (personal relations) culture; and the course of the World Bank-sponsored Self-funded/managed Irrigation and Drainage District (SIDD) reforms.

Vietnam: Water policy dynamics under a post-Cold War communism

Adam Fforde
Chairman, Adam Fforde and Assoc p/l; Asia Institute, University of Melbourne; Centre for Strategic Economic Studies, Victoria University; adam@aduki.com.au

ABSTRACT: Vietnam is widely seen as a development success, with rather rapid economic growth and a reported reduced role of the state, yet presents many paradoxes to conventional analytical frameworks. Two of relevance are accounts that stress a combination of a strongly hegemonic regime with weak internal sovereignty in terms of both the internal coherence of the apparat and its interactions with the rest of Vietnamese society, and also associated accounts that deny much role to intentionality in explaining apparent development success. This article will contextualise accounts of political intention and policy development towards water issues in Vietnam through an examination of two main empirics: the evolution of formal policy, understood as documents of the state, as well as of political intention, understood as documents of the ruling Party; and the by now extensive series of 'active' case studies that have examined donor as well as other projects in the sector. It will examine the notion, in the contexts suggested by the Vietnamese experience, that attempts to explain Vietnamese water policy, which have shown a tendency to shift away from assumptions that an analytical framework's categories may easily and without too much risk be extended across different contexts. Rather, comparisons of Vietnamese experience across contexts will tend, if they are to be persuasive, to shift to the use of languages that reflect ontological fluidity, in that what things mean is expected to change over time, without reference to an imagined transcendental and universal 'real'. In this sense, Vietnamese water policy may be usefully understood as an example of how 'success gives voice to the local'.

David Groenfeldt
Water-Culture Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA; dgroenfeldt@waterculture.org

ABSTRACT: Water policies are based on ethical assumptions, and efforts to promote more sustainable policies need to address those underlying values. The history of water policies from 'command-and-control' to more ecological approaches reveals an ethical evolution, but adaptation to climate change will require further ethical shifts. The case of the Santa Fe river in New Mexico (USA) illustrates how values that go unrecognised interfere with sustainable management. Exploring the underlying value dynamics is an essential step in the policy reform process and takes on added urgency in the face of climate change and the need to formulate adaptive water strategies. Bringing the topic of values and ethics into the water policy discourse can help clarify management goals and promote more sustainable practices.

The watershed approach: Challenges, antecedents, and the transition from technical tool to governance unit

Alice Cohen
Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada; cohena@interchange.ubc.ca
Seanna Davidson
Department of Geography and Environmental Management, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada; seannadavidson@gmail.com

ABSTRACT: Watersheds are a widely accepted scale for water governance activities. This paper makes three contributions to current understandings of watersheds as governance units. First, the paper collects recent research identifying some of the challenges associated with the policy framework understood as the watershed approach. These challenges are boundary choice, accountability, public participation, and watersheds'€™ asymmetries with 'problem-sheds' and 'policy-sheds'. Second, the paper draws upon this synthesis and on a review of the development and evolution of the concept of watersheds to suggest that the challenges associated with the watershed approach are symptoms of a broader issue: that the concept of watersheds was developed as a technical tool but has been taken up as a policy framework. The result of this transition from tool to framework, the paper argues, has been the conflation of governance tools, hydrologic boundaries, and Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM). Third, the paper calls for an analysis of watersheds as separate from the governance tools with which they have been conflated, and presents three entry points into such an analysis.

Sharing water with nature: Insights on environmental water allocation from a case study of the Murrumbidgee catchment, Australia

Becky Swainson
Department of Geography, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, Canada; becky.swainson@gmail.com
Rob de Loë
Department of Environment and Resource Studies, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada; rdeloe@uwaterloo.ca
Reid Kreutzwiser
Department of Geography, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, Canada; reidk@uoguelph.ca

ABSTRACT: Human use of freshwater resources has placed enormous stress on aquatic ecosystems in many regions of the world. At one time, this was considered an acceptable price to pay for economic growth and development. Nowadays, however, many societies are seeking a better balance between healthy aquatic ecosystems and viable economies. Unfortunately, historically, water allocation systems have privileged human uses over the environment. Thus, jurisdictions seeking to ensure that adequate water is available for the environment must typically deal with the fact that economies and communities have become dependent on water. Additionally, they must often layer institutions for environmental water allocation (EWA) on top of already complex institutional systems. This paper explores EWA in a jurisdiction - New South Wales (NSW), Australia -€“ where water scarcity has become a priority. Using an in-depth case study of EWA in the Murrumbidgee catchment, NSW, we characterise the NSW approach to EWA with the goal of highlighting the myriad challenges encountered in EWA planning and implementation. Sharing water between people and the environment, we conclude, is much more than just a scientific and technical challenge. EWA in water-scarce regions involves reshaping regional economies and societies. Thus, political and socio-economic considerations must be identified and accounted for from the outset of planning and decision-making processes.

Deluges of grandeur: Water, territory, and power on Northwest Mexico'€™s Rio Mayo, 1880-1910

Jeffrey M. Banister
Southwest Center and School of Geography and Development, University of Arizona, Tucson, USA; banister@email.arizona.edu

ABSTRACT: Northwest Mexico'€™s irrigation landscape, known today as El Distrito de Riego 038, or El Valle del Mayo, issues from historical struggles to build an official order out of a diverse world of signs, symbols, processes, places, and peoples. It is the ancestral home of the Yoreme (Mayo), an indigenous group for whom colonisation and agricultural development have meant the loss of autonomy and of the seasonal mobility required to subsist in an arid land. It is also the birthplace of President Álvaro Obregón, a one-time chickpea farmer who transformed late-19th century irrigation praxis into the laws and institutions of 20th century water management. Reshaping territory for the ends of centralising ('federalising') water resources has always proved exceedingly difficult in the Mayo. But this was particularly so in the beginning of the federalisation process, a time of aggressive modernisation under the direction of President Porfirio Diaz (1876-1910). Research on Mexican hydraulic politics and policy, with some important exceptions, has tended to focus on the scale and scope of centralisation. Scholars have paid less attention to the moments and places where water escapes officials'€™ otherwise ironclad grasp. This paper explores water governance (and state formation more broadly) in the late 19th century, on the eve of Mexico'€™s 1910 Revolution, as an ongoing, ever-inchoate series of territorial claims and projects. Understanding the weaknesses and incompleteness of such projects offers critical insight into post-revolutionary and/or contemporary hydraulic politics.

Participation as citizenship or payment? A case study of rural drinking water governance in Mali

Stephen Jones
Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK; stephen.jones.2009@live.rhul.ac.uk

ABSTRACT: Community participation in water governance in developing countries is considered important for increasing sustainable access to drinking water and improving broader local governance. The promotion of participation has therefore become a key aim of non-governmental organisations (NGOs). This paper explores community participation in water governance in the rural municipality of Yélékébougou, Mali, and how it is influenced by 'capacity-development' initiatives of the international NGO WaterAid. WaterAid supports communities by helping to set up new institutions intended to manage water supplies and to promote 'participation as citizenship', the idea that community members are empowered to take part in decisions made on water access. However, the paper finds that the institutions created to promote 'participation as citizenship' focus more on promoting paying for water i.e. 'participation as payment', because lack of payment for maintenance of handpumps appears to be the critical obstacle to sustainable water access. However, 'participation as payment' as a means of pursuing cost recovery from communities is not working, and also detracts from the possibility of promoting 'participation as citizenship' and the associated potential longer-term benefits to water access and democratisation. The immediate outcome is that access to drinking water is neither sustainable nor equitable.

Indus basin floods of 2010: Souring of a Faustian bargain?

Daanish Mustafa
Department of Geography, King'€™s College, London; daanish.mustafa@kcl.ac.uk
David Wrathall
Department of Geography, King'€™s College, London; david.wrathall@kcl.ac.uk

ABSTRACT: The great flood of 2010 in Pakistan was not an accidental, unpredictable and random episode in the hydrologic development of the Indus basin, but rather a by-product of national decisions on water use, integrally linked, as well, to the design of the social landscape. In immediate and mid terms, acute impacts are expected to be concentrated among households with fragile and sensitive livelihoods. To attenuate an evolving low-level humanitarian, social and political crisis, and to prevent backsliding to Pakistan'€™s development progress, attention should focus on water drainage and rapid rehabilitation of farmland. Local government structures can be engaged in the distribution and implementation of recovery programs. In Pakistan, the hydrological priorities have always been irrigation and power generation, but in the interest of preventing a costly recurrence, Pakistani flood management and early alert systems require structural revision.

Perceived power resources in situations of collective action

Insa Theesfeld
Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Central and Eastern Europe (IAMO), Halle; theesfeld@iamo.de

ABSTRACT: This paper discusses various concepts of power. Its goal is to shed light on a better method for implementing the power concept. The case of Bulgaria'€™s water user associations'€™ failure shows the abuse of power by local actors who fear they will lose their influence and the private benefits that they have enjoyed under the former system. The paper provides an empirical study of power resources verified by actors' perceptions rather than having resource endowments quantified. It also illustrates the contrast between empirically revealed perceived power resources in a local context and their theoretical examination in the Distributional Theory of Institutional Change. Studies that set power resources in relation to one another are scarce. Therefore, in this study an innovative, interactive method is used that leads to a ranking of perceived power resources, which is robust against the impact of belonging to different territorial, social, and agricultural producer groups: 1) unrestricted access to information, 2) personal relationships, 3) trustworthiness, 4) cash resources for bribing, 5) menace, and 6) physical power and violence. The implication of this gradation of power resources on collective action solutions addresses complementary measures to disseminate information and compensation measures for those who fear losing their benefits and may therefore oppose the new institutions.

The impact of decentralization on large scale irrigation: Evidence from the Philippines

Eduardo K. Araral, Jr.
Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, Singapore; sppaej@nus.edu.sg

ABSTRACT: Decentralization has often been prescribed as an institutional panacea for a wide range of problems facing developing countries. This study investigates the impacts of decentralization on the ability of individuals to solve collective action problems in a large-scale common pool resource. Using econometric analyses of a data set from the largest (83,000 hectares [ha]) irrigation system in the Philippines, the study finds that decentralized subsystems are more likely to solve collective action problems such as free-riding, conflict resolution and rule enforcement. These findings are consistent with the theoretical and empirical literature but they highlight the importance of credible enforcement. These preliminary findings offer insights for the design of institutions for collective action in situations of large-scale collective action.

The World Court'€™s ongoing contribution to international water law: The Pulp Mills Case between Argentina and Uruguay

Owen McIntyre
Faculty of Law, University College Cork, Ireland; o.mcintyre@ucc.ie

ABSTRACT: The judgment of the International Court of Justice in the Pulp Mills (Argentina v. Uruguay) case makes a very important contribution to international law relating to shared international water resources and to international environmental law more generally. It does much to clarify the relationship between procedural and substantive rules of international environmental law. The Court linked interstate notification of new projects to the satisfaction of the customary due diligence obligation to prevent significant transboundary harm. It found that environmental impact assessment (EIA) is an essential requirement of customary international law in respect of activities having potential transboundary effects. The real significance of the judgment is that it held that the duty to notify, and the related duty to conduct an EIA taking account of transboundary impacts, exist in customary international law and thus apply to all states, not just those that have concluded international agreements containing such obligations. The Court confirmed that for shared international water resources, the principle of equitable and reasonable utilisation, universally accepted as the cardinal rule of international water law, is virtually synonymous with the concept of sustainable development, and suggests that considerations of environmental protection are absolutely integral to the equitable balancing of interests involved. The judgment makes it clear that the principle of equitable utilisation ought to be understood as a process, rather than a normatively determinative rule. This ought to help to address widespread confusion about the nature of the key rules and principles of international water resources law and its role in the resolution of water resources disputes and in environmental diplomacy more generally.

Valuing soft components in agricultural water management interventions in meso-scale watersheds: A review and synthesis

Jennie Barron
Stockholm Environment Institute, University of York, UK; and Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Sweden; jennie.barron@sei.se
Stacey Noel
Stockholm Environment Institute, University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; stacey.noel@sei.se

ABSTRACT: Meso-scale watershed management (1-10,000 km2) is receiving growing attention as the spatial scale where policy in integrated water resource management (IWRM) goes into operational mode. This is also where aggregated field-level agricultural water management (AWM) interventions may result in externalities. But there is little synthesised 'lessons learned' on the costs and benefits of interventions at this scale. Here we synthesise selected cases and meta-analyses on the investment cost in 'soft components' accompanying AWM interventions. The focus is on meso-scale watersheds in Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. We found very few cases with benefit-to-cost evaluation at full project level, or separate costing of hard and soft components. The synthesis suggests higher development success rates in communities with an initial level of social capital, where projects were implemented with cost- and knowledge-sharing between involved stakeholders, and where one or more 'agents of change' were present to facilitate leadership and communications. There is a need to monitor and evaluate both the external and the internal gains and losses in a more systematic manner to help development agents and other investors to ensure wiser and more effective investments in AWM interventions and watershed management.

Paradox of the moving boundary: Legal heredity of river accretion and avulsion

John W. Donaldson
Department of Geography, Durham University, Durham, UK; w.donaldson@durham.ac.uk

ABSTRACT: International boundaries -€“ the divisions between state jurisdictions -€“ are characterised in law by their inherent rigidity. Yet recent research has revealed that well over one-third of the total length of international boundaries follow rivers or streams that are inherently dynamic natural features. The tension between legal staticity and fluid dynamism manifests along international river boundaries both in terms of the problematic definition of the line itself and the disparity in water management regulations. The actions of accretion and avulsion have been used to resolve disputes over river boundary movement since Roman times, but they contain an inherent paradox. Tracing the heredity of these two legal mechanisms, this paper will expose that paradox by focusing on the relationship between boundary and water. State practice will reveal how the continued application of these mechanisms is reinforcing a land bias in international law that becomes problematic when addressing a dynamic fluid resource that is concurrently divided and shared. Rather than emphasising the rigidity of jurisdictional division, this paper will suggest that deterring the risks inherent in the definition of river boundaries requires challenging some of the foundational legal tenets of territorial sovereignty; tenets that continue to influence the development of international water law.

Sharing water on the Iberian peninsula: A Europeanisation approach to explaining transboundary cooperation

Jeanie J. Bukowski
Institute of International Studies, Bradley University, Peoria, IL, USA; jbukow@bradley.edu

ABSTRACT: This paper applies the Europeanisation perspective to the policy change evident in the 1998 Convention on Cooperation for the Protection and Sustainable Use of the Waters of the Spanish-Portuguese Basins (Albufeira convention). The 'top-down' Europeanisation framework is applied here to a case involving simultaneous, joint adaptation to European Union (EU) policy in terms of two states negotiating a transborder agreement that encompasses institutional changes required by that policy. This study provides an analysis of transnational policy change in an area of vital importance in international relations, namely, shared freshwater resources. It finds that while the Europeanisation framework may be applied effectively to transboundary adaptation (not just cross-country comparison) and goes a long way in explaining cooperation on the Iberian Peninsula, it is incomplete in its consideration of other influences within and beyond 'Europe', from the global to the local levels.

Understanding the emergence and functioning of river committees in a catchment of the Pangani basin, Tanzania

Hans C. Komakech
UNESCO-IHE, Delft, the Netherlands; and Department of Water Resources, Delft University of Technology, Delft, the Netherlands; h.komakech@unesco-ihe.org
Pieter van der Zaag
UNESCO-IHE, Delft, the Netherlands; and Department of Water Resources, Delft University of Technology, Delft, the Netherlands; p.vanderzaag@unesco-ihe.org

ABSTRACT: In this paper we explore the emergence and functioning of river committees (RCs) in Tanzania, which are local water management structures that allocate and solve water conflict between different water users (smallholder irrigators, large commercial farmers, municipalities, etc) along one river. The paper is based on empirical research of three committees in the Themi sub-catchment. The committees mostly emerged in response to drought-induced competition and conflict over water, rapid urbanisation around Arusha town, and the presence of markets for agricultural produce. The RCs are mainly active during dry seasons when water is scarce. We find that the emergence of the RCs can be understood by using the concept of institutional bricolage. We then assess their effective functioning with the help of the eight design principles proposed by Ostrom and find that the best performing RC largely complied with five of them, which indicates that not all principles are necessary for a water institution to be effective and to endure over time. The other two studied RCs complied with only three of these principles. All RCs leave the resource boundary open to negotiation, which lowers the transaction cost of controlling the boundaries and also allows future demands to be met in the face of increasing resource variability. All RCs do not fully comply with the principle that all affected must take part in rule creation and modification. In all three cases, finally, the 'nesting' of lower-level institutional arrangements within higher-level ones is inconsistent. To explain the difference in the performance of the three RCs we need to consider factors related to heterogeneity. We find that the functioning of RCs is strongly influenced by group size, spatial distance, heterogeneity of users and uses, and market forces.