Designing water abstraction regimes for an ever-changing and ever-varying future – a review
Young, M.D. 2014,‘Designing water abstraction regimes for an ever-changing and ever-varying future’,Agricultural Water Management vol. 145 pp. 32-38.
Water is essential to human life. Not only it is needed to fulfil water demand for basic human needs as part of human rights, but also for production of food through agricultural means or animal feed and for industrial use. Hence, the need of fast growing population compete with other needs, has put more pressure on water resources that leads to water scarcity.
When dealing with water resources, the water regime that was applied by most countries was designed in a condition where access to water is not yet a problem. But the current situation is not the same anymore. With the global environmental change, be it social, politic, economy, biophysics and climate changes, the supply and demand for access to water will surely change. Therefore a framework for water entitlement and allocation needs to be designed to fit with the global environmental change, to ensure a sustainable access to water resources. Considering the fact that water system is still underdeveloped in many developing countries, this article will discuss a framework of water reform developed by Young (2014) from developing countries perspectives.
In his paper, Young proposes the need to revisit regulation on ‘water entitlement, water allocations, use permits’ etc. for most countries if they want to manage the future challenge of water supply and demand. He argues that changing to a new ‘abstraction management regimes’ that is designed based on the growing concern on the increasing problems of water scarcity will achieve a better outcome. Several examples are given of countries that reform their water system that include social, economic and environemnt aspect, in order to addressed the many issues that challenging the water systemmanagement.
In designing a regulation on water system that determine licence, and assign and control the use of water, Young suggests ‘six design clues’ to be used collectively as a guiding framework. The first clue is ‘unbundle’, where there are many different instruments used to achieve many different purpose. By using this theory on water system management means that separation of access to water disposition into their sections is required. The second one is ‘certainty’, can be seen as continuation of the first clue. This clue comes from the Assignment Principle, wherean instrumentdesigned purposefuly to acieve a certain objective and not be used for other objectives simultaneously.The third one is ‘hydrological integrity’, which means that any water system arrangement needs to be done in accordance to ‘the way water is stored and how it flows through and across landscape’. The forth clue is ‘facilitate trading’ based on Coase Theorem, with interest in keeping low transaction cost in every aspect of water arrangement. In the fifth clue, ‘efficient investment’, deals with designation of full risk to certain group of interest. And the last clue, ‘robustness’, aims at ensuring the designed water system is sturdy enough to sustain any challenge that might appear in the future.
By accepting the above design clues collectively as a guideline structure, Young indicates the need for detail and careful consideration of instruments to govern the whole water system, how water entitlement is specified and shared to users or shareholders, and ways to manage impact and consequences of the arrangement, or problems that may arise. He also raises the issue of the way in sequencing the water reform which yet to be answered, that also need to be considered carefully when starting the redesigning plan. Furthermore, without restriction of where and how water is used, water share can be transferred freely to other users, thus, according to Young, water entitlement can be rewarded to users who manage water efficiently through market mechanism.
Young also points out the importance of keeping the water system arrangement at a low cost. The trading cost can be kept low, by way of standardising each part of water shares and allocation structure. In addition, in order to keep a low transaction cost in developing a ‘centralized entitlement’ record and ‘water accounting’ system, it is essential to start all the work and investment be made right from the beginning.
Although the suggested framework by Young seems complete that covers the multiple aspects based on the six design clues, aspect of equity and fairness is not properlyaddressed in the framework. This is important to consider when applying the framework to reform the water system in developing countries where potential of conflict and dispute due to disparity over water access among regions or states and over water share among users or group of users exist. Vasconcelos, Koontanakulvong, Martin Junior & Hadad (2015) for instance, provide good example how Thailand manage the water conflict through ‘inter-sectorial negotiation’ on ‘water allocation priorities’. This, however, may incur high transaction cost in the end.
In addressing the issue of equity and fairness, Neil Patrick, Lukasiewicz & Syme (2014) suggest ‘water justice’ approach. Based on various case studies in several countries, they highlight the need to incorporating justice in reforming the water regime explicitly, especially where ‘social change’ emerges due to the change in water allocation and institutional arrangement. Considering the social change that is expected to occur when redesigning the whole water system instead of improving some parts of water system as proposed by Young, it is even more important to take into account the water justice in his guiding framework.
Another challenge to be addressed by Young’s water framework is the role of ‘participative water management’ that is mentioned by Vasconcelos et al (2015) to be ‘an important trend’ in developing countries when transforming water management. In general, participatory can be define as ‘processes that actively involve not only water managers and government officials, but also other interested parties’ (Von Korff, Daniell, Moellenkamp, Bots, &. Bijlsma, 2012). Despite many stories of success and failure, participatory approach in water management still valued by many as indicated by Von Korff et al (2012). A research which was done in Cambodia for example, shows that participation brings a positive impact on irrigation system performance (Asthana, 2014). The nature of participative water management can take many different forms in different countries, states or communities, which mostly discuss when dealing with water irrigation for agricultural production as can be found in many developing countries (Sjah & Baldwin 2014, Asthana 2014). But this again may cause higher transaction cost in contrast to Young’s framework.
In Young’s guiding framework, participative water management, in one sense, is actually addressed through water allocation and entitlement to users or shareholders that responsible with investment and risk that associated with the entitlement. However, when the entitlement is freely transferable trough market mechanism to create efficiency in water use, access to water use for poor people or marginal groups might be cut off (Asthana, 2014). Hence the form of participative water management needs to take into account the interest of different group of users to ensure fairness and equity which has been discussed earlier.
Whether or not Young’s guiding framework can be applied in restructuring water regimes in developing countries, will depend on the degree of complexity of water arrangement derived from the framework and the financial resources to support that. One of the problem faced by many developing countries in designing a good water regimes, like for example Brazil and Thailand, is the lack of financial resources (Vasconcelos et al. 2015). Therefore, rather than redesign the whole water system in sequence as suggested by Young that will require a lot of resources and institutional changes, it is better to improve the existing water arrangement while bearing in mind the future challenge of water supply and demand. Moreover, while the best way of sequencing the water reform is not yet clear as pointed out by Young and coupling with problem of financial resources, makes the chance of success of implementing this framework for water reform in developing countries might be even lower. Without supporting evidence of the implementation of this framework so far, it is hard to tell if the framework is workable to design a sound water regimes, let alone in developing countries. Thus, as Young suggests, further research and implementation of the framework is needed.
Finally, with the problem of water scarcity and the challenging water supply and demand that changing overtime, reforming water system management as suggested by Young can not be avoided. Drawing from six design clues, Young offers his new guiding framework that covers various aspects regarding water abstraction system. After examining Young’s guiding framework from the perspective of reforming water regulation in developing countries, the aspect of equity and fairness need to be included more explicitly. Participative water management is also need to be considered if the framework meant to be applied in developing countries. Furthermore, whether the framework appropriate for water reform in developing countries will depend on how complex the arrangement will be and the availability of financial resources to support this.
References
Asthana, A.N. 2014, ‘Is participatory water management effective?’ Water Policy, vol. 12, pp. 149-165.
Neal-Patric, M., A. Lukasiewicz & G.J. Syme, 2014, ‘Why justice matters in water governance: some idea for a water justice framework’, Water Policy, vol. 16, pp. 1-18.
Syah, T., C. Baldwin 2014, ‘Option for future effective management water in Lombok; A multi-level nested framework’, Journal of Hydrology vol. 159, pp. 2448-2455.
Vanconcelos, V.V., S. Koontanakulvong, P.P. Martin Junior & R.M. Hadad, 2015, ‘Public policies for negotiated water allocation: a dialogue between Thailand and Brazil’, Water Policy, vol. 17, pp. 887-901.
Von Korff, Y., K. A. Daniell, S. Moellenkamp, P. Bots, and R. M. Bijlsma 2012,‘Implementing participatory water management: recent advances in theory, practice, and evaluation’, Ecology and Society, vol. 17, issue 1, doi:10.5751/ES-04733-170130.
Young, M.D. 2014,‘Designing water abstraction regimes for an ever-changing and ever-varying future. Agricultural Water Management, vol. 145, pp. 32-38.
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Review above was an assignment during Introductory Academic Program (IAP) upon commencing in the University of Adelaide in February 2016.