Panel 1.3. Water Governance Working Group Panel on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Exploring Water Governance and Irrigation

In the 1990s several counties in California adopted policies prohibiting the export of groundwater outside the county. County policymakers’ declared rationale was protecting local water resources – and local water users – from water speculators and water marketers who might seek financial gains from moving water to other locations where it might command a higher price. Looking back at this period of local policy-making, we pursue three goals in this paper. First, we examine how these local ordinances came about and spread across the state, using the analytical tools of the IAD framework plus Elinor Ostrom’s design principles for sustained management of common-pool resources. Second, we reexamine those ordinances in light of the groundwater policy changes in California over the past ten years – the enactment of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), the formation of local Groundwater Sustainability Agencies and the development of Groundwater Sustainability Plans – and assess whether and in what ways the export-restriction ordinances will aid or hinder basin-scale efforts to attain groundwater sustainability as defined in SGMA. Third, we compare the California experience with county water export bans with an effort newly underway in Indiana to block the extraction and transfer of groundwater outside a county there. The overall aim of the paper is to offer insights and analysis about the intentions and effects of these types of policies on the management of groundwater as a common-pool resource.

Conceptualising irrigation command as a socio-technical system, this research traces the change in irrigation infrastructure and water use practices in the last three decades in the command area of Nira Right Bank Canal in Sangola, Maharashtra, India. The evidence suggests that the canal command area is dynamic in nature in terms of irrigation sources, infrastructure, and water use practices. In the 1990s, after introducing borewell technology and pomegranate crop, the command witnessed a considerable shift in farming and irrigation practices. The drought-prone nature of the region, scarce and unreliable groundwater, increasing competition for groundwater use, the use of micro-irrigation, and the mismatch between canal water rotation schedules and the irrigation needs of pomegranate crop and soil texture led to the adoption of individually owned farm ponds as intermediary storage. Using pumps and a network of underground pipes connecting farm ponds, wells, and multiple farm plots, within and outside the command area, individual farmers are tapping multiple water sources and carrying water in multiple directions. Documenting the complex and dynamic nature of irrigation sources, infrastructure, and water use practices, the paper reveals the several institutional challenges associated with governing water in canal command and demands a reconceptualisation of canal command. The interdisciplinary STS approach adopted for this research facilitates examining biophysical aspects of irrigation (e.g. sources, infrastructure, soil texture, crop water requirements) and its relation to water use practices and irrigation governance.

Groundwater is a vital resource for domestic, irrigation, and industrial water supply in most countries. But it is one of the most difficult common pool resources to govern due to mobility, invisibility, conflicting interests, large numbers of stakeholders, and limitations of available institutions. While groundwater may seem like a typical example of a common pool resource, conventional solutions based on controlling extraction through regulatory sanctions or financial incentives usually fail. Framing the problem in terms tragic overexploitation or sustainable yield can leave out or misconstrue many of the complexities, dynamics, and tradeoffs of multiple uses and users, including groundwater quality and environment. Approaches emphasizing only top-down or bottom-up approaches are not so helpful for finding combinations of institutions for effective agency in governing groundwater commons.
This presentation draws from work on groundwater governance in Punjab Province, Pakistan, particularly Rahim Yar Khan District, where a recently-developed Groundwater Management Information System (GMIS) highlighted hot spots of groundwater depletion and contamination. This case illustrates how addressing wicked problems requires tailored approaches, starting with the understanding and involvement of the key actors. As a contribution towards finding comprehensive and lasting solutions, we apply a framework to identify the key actors and consider what can provide them with the knowledge, motivation, and agency to act together to address the groundwater problems. Experiences of a recently-convened multistakeholder platform for water governance in the district provide examples of the scope and limits of existing approaches, and the need for more attention to the narratives and power dynamics that might move or constrain action to address critical groundwater problems.

Supporting the sustainable management of commons in the face of rapidly evolving and complex challenges calls for systemic changes. For instance, addressing over-extraction of groundwater in India, with profound implications for food security, livelihoods, and economic development, depends in improved coordination among various stakeholders at different scales. Strengthening this coordination through governance mechanisms requires a good understanding of the factors driving individual and collective behavior. We offer a behavioral perspective to system transformation and apply it to the design of an intervention strategy for supporting sustainable water management and governance in India. The starting point was the question who needs to take which actions in order to improve groundwater management. In a second step, we inquired about what drives actors’ behavior paying special attention to their knowledge, motivation and agency. Based on this assessment, we co-designed and applied interventions in collaboration with NGOs, academic and government partners. At the local level, these interventions include groundwater monitoring and crop water budgeting, combined with experiential learning tools such as games for demand management, and supply side interventions to support water harvesting and recharge. At the regional level, we strengthened multi-actor platforms, built coalitions and developed the capacity of government, civil society and private sector actors to support groundwater governance. By combining these approaches, we aimed to influence water governance and management on a larger scale. Our experience illustrates how conceptual thinking can inform multi-method approaches which consider that sustainably improving groundwater management requires inter-linked behavioral changes of diverse actors. Our approach constitutes critical reflection and conceptualization, based on situated knowledge which contributes to designing better adapted and more powerful intervention strategies through informed arguments.

This article undertakes a comparative analysis of water pollution abatement policies in the Ganges
River, focusing on the effects of different regulatory models. It examines two distinct models: Model 1, characterized by technocratic, top-down approaches with formalized actors and institutionalized bodies, and Model 2, marked by socio-technocratic, bottom-up strategies prioritizing blended actors and institutions. The central research question explores the enabling and constraining effects of these modes on policy outcomes related to pollution abatement in the Ganges.
The article explores how institutions shape policy processes and outcomes, considering both formal and informal rules, norms, and organizational structures. Emphasis is placed on understanding the historical and social institutional contexts within which these policies operate, including the role of norms, values, and beliefs. Historical and social institutionalism serve as major theoretical frameworks for this research, examining how past decisions and critical events shape current policy outcomes.
This article also highlights two case studies analyzing cross-cutting path dependencies, whereby past decisions influence current policy outcomes, and highlights the gradual endogenous changes within the system. A mixed-methods approach is employed, combining qualitative methods such as analysis of grey literature (government reports, publications, press releases) with quantitative methods utilizing water quality monitoring data.

Water governance at the basin scale requires collaboration between a diversity of actors with very different interests. To address this challenge, water basin committees and similar groups have been promoted as the institutional arrangement to facilitate finding common ground and better governance. However, not all territories may be prepared for such an endeavor, especially if there is no previous history of collaboration, or the adequate institutional mechanisms in place. In Chile, despite the private and productively based water governance system, water basin committees have been promoted by an interministerial group for social ecological transition. Although these have not been implemented yet, learning from similar water group experiences is important to identify challenges that may require policy change. This study presents an evaluation of 7 water users’ organizations in Chile using a Context-Mechanism-Outcome approach (Carr Kelman et al., 2023). The 7 cases identified represent different geographical, historical and management capacities. The analysis shows contexts and mechanisms that may have influenced different collective action in each case. Preliminary analysis uncovers the importance of distinguishing nuances in variables that may intuitively be assessed as similar as they may plan in different ways depending on the context (e.g. users rights established by law). Understanding the mechanisms that may affect water management where water users’ organizations exist, can help preparing for territories where there is no history of collaboration.

References
Carr Kelman, C., Brady, U., Raschke, B. A. & Schoon, M. L., 2023. A Systematic Review of Key Factors of Effective Collaborative Governance of Social-Ecological Systems In: Society and Natural Resources. 36, 11, p. 1452-1470 19

Water is one of the most studied common pool resources (CPR) with concerns for access to safe drinking water especially in rural, arid and Semi-arid regions (ASALS) regions that remain vulnerable to climate change and variability. The allocation and access to water across Kenya has been managed locally with state and non-state actors engaging communities towards attainment of SDG 6 and ensure regular and adequate supply of safe drinking water. Water as a common pool resource (CPR) is defined largely by the actions on the part of the individuals who use it to maintain its productivity. Communities and individuals can take water management and governance actions variously. The actions can fall into the category of contribution of real resources like money, time, or physical capital, or in the restriction of the use of the common-pool resource associated activities for sustainability. An exploratory study that anchored on an ethnographic approach utilised participant observation complemented by in-depth interviews (IDIs) and focus group discussions (FGDs) to interrogate the emic perspectives informed by attitudes, perceptions and practices regarding informal norms and formal rules that enable diverse forms of cooperation for water management in a Rural community in Kenya. Water initiatives often overlook community participation in the design and management of water projects. The paper argues that emic perspective that include community attitudes, perceptions and practices influence water co-management as a common pool resource to enable sustainable access to safe drinking water by rural communities in resource limited settings. For sustainable water governance, community empowerment through participatory establishment an institutional arrangement, with formal and informal rules, norms and practices is necessary for collective management of water.

Sustainable groundwater management is an important and challenging issue. It is challenging since groundwater continues to be treated as private property regardless of its Common Pool Resource (CPR) nature. Establishing the collective property rights for groundwater is one way of managing this precious resource. Proposals for groundwater governance have taken many approaches, including market-based (Nsoh 2022), government regulation, privatisation, self-governance (Cosens 2018) and polycentric (Ostrom 1990).

The current study is based on the Groundwater Collectivisation agreements conceptualised by the Hyderabad (India) based non-profit Watershed Support Services and Activities Network (WASSAN) and operationalised since 2007 through its partner NGOs across the rainfed regions of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana in India. The collective facilitates the sharing of groundwater for critical irrigation in the hitherto unirrigated patches of land of borewell-owning and rainfed farmers via a piped network. The water-sharing mechanism is enforced via a formal agreement between the parties signed before the land revenue officer. From polycentric, the sharing arrangement is expected to shift to self-governed following the cessation of the agreement period of 10 years. What drives these potential shifts and sustaining collective sharing has been the core of Elinor Ostrom’s works on commons and the central question posed in this study.

Through farmer surveys, group discussions, interviews and mapping of change in cultivation/cropping patterns,, this study locates the following outcomes from the sampled collectivisation locations across Andhra Pradesh: 1) Establishment of new norms and governance structures related to groundwater management, 2) Dynamics of the decision-making processes, and 3) Impact on groundwater level, cropping pattern, income and livelihood.

Small-scale irrigation in India have complex institutional and resource structures. These systems serve as adaptive strategies for vulnerable communities during droughts when large-scale irrigation fails, while also enabling collectivization and representation. To establish this finding, the paper uses a polycentric framework to study a traditional community-owned small-scale irrigation system called Gonchi in Anantapur District of Andhra Pradesh, India. This study employs a case study methodology, utilizing qualitative tools to analyze discourses and narratives about this small-scale irrigation system within the prevailing policy push for large-scale state driven irrigation. The findings reveal that Gonchi serves as a collective platform for advocacy and representation for small farmers. However, insufficient attention is given to ensuring justice for women and farm labour.

In 1990, the government of Punjab, Pakistan introduced community-based water governance in dual water zone areas (sweet and brackish). The jointly completed rural water supply (RWS) was handed over to a community-based organization (CBO), accompanied by CBO members' training and signing of the agreement for adherence to rules by the CBOs and the government. The study is framed in the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) Framework and collaborative policy design to comprehend the self-organizing capabilities of CBOs in ensuring compliance with institutions in a collaborative process for RWS governance. There has been little investigation as to why and how the CBOs tend to comply with rules-in-form and how the informal rules influence the operation & maintenance (O&M) of RWS. The results of focused group interviews with CBO members, community, and government officials reveal that the formal institutions partially adhered. Still, the self-organizing capabilities of the CBOs sustain the RWS. Some households are unwilling to get a water connection and pay charges. At the same time, others with water connections are unwilling to pay. These are some of the challenges in the O&M of RWS and reasons for the CBO's financial deficit, which are covered through philanthropic donations, a predominant local value. The study proposes a water metering system, payment for consumption, and mandatory water connections for the RWS.

Keywords: Rural Water Supply, Institutional Analysis and Development Framework, Collective Action, Collaborative Design, Collaborative Compliance

Inequalities in access are a major concern in the management of common pool resources. In the case of irrigation water, inequalities in access are mainly produced by various actors, power relations, institutions, and infrastructures. Launched in the 1970s, Turkey’s Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP) aims to address the Kurdish question through economic development. The project involves 22 dams and 19 hydroelectric power plants on the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, with the goal of irrigating 1.8 million hectares of land. This ongoing initiative seeks to cover 46% of the planned irrigation canal areas. Ample scholarship exists on GAP’s adverse effects, such as village inundation, water deprivation for small farmers, and soil/nutrient loss. Examining the Qoser/Kızıltepe plain, we discuss impacts in areas where GAP is anticipated but not yet implemented, and where laws issued in the name of environmental protection overlap with infrastructures that monopolize access to water and energy. By focusing on farmer-built and farmer-managed irrigation infrastructures, such as boreholes, transformers, and solar panels, we unveil how farmers access water ‘illicitly’ in areas where the state did not build irrigation canals. Additionally, we explore how farmers resist not only state authority but also the climate crisis through self-built and self-governed irrigation infrastructures.

In recent years, studies have analyzed governance dynamics taking in weakly institutionalized contexts, for example, by focusing on how stakeholders develop different strategies to participate in policy venues within polycentric systems. Other studies have also shown how collaborative decision-making venues in weakly institutionalized settings face challenges in emerging as the go-to spaces for addressing policy crises. This is particularly salient in the context of environmental governance, where multiple stakeholders with varying degrees of authority and power coexist. However, the empirical evidence surrounding these claims has been limited largely to cross-sectional analysis, with limited work paying attention to the role of participatory venues in facilitating discussions, fostering dialogue, and building consensus regarding policy problems. In this manuscript, we assess the role of one of such venues, the Santa Lucia River Basin committee in Uruguay, from a longitudinal perspective. The Santa Lucia River Basin committee was created in 2013 to foster collaboration and dialogue among a variety of stakeholders involved in water governance related issues in the basin that provides drinking water to 60% of the population of Uruguay. Over the last decade, the basin committee served as a space for debating water governance issues (including, most recently, one of the country’s most intense water crisis in history) and large infrastructure works. Using data from 22 meeting minutes covering a span of ten years, we apply social network analysis techniques to assess hypotheses regarding the interactions among stakeholders participating in the basin committee’s meetings, as well as the role of the committee as a venue for facilitating such interactions. Our study is among the first to provide a longitudinal and quantitative analysis of discursive dynamics within a basin committee in a weakly institutionalized setting. In doing so, we highlight the challenges and opportunities for the development of long-lasting participatory venues for the governance of water resources in weakly institutionalized settings.

This paper models cooperation in self-governing irrigation systems as a repeated game. Asymmetries arise as the headenders have first mover advantage in appropriating water. However, the need for cooperation in provision (maintaining the irrigation system) can incentivise the headenders to leave water for the tailenders.

We first analyze symmetric cooperation where the headenders and tailenders share the water equally and exert equal effort in maintenance. Symmetric cooperation can be sustainable when maintaining the irrigation system is difficult/costly. Costly maintenance reduces the value of the relationship but the dominant effect is the reduced temptation to deviate so that overall incentives to cooperate are improved.

If maintenance is less costly, the headenders do not have incentives for symmetric cooperation. Their incentives can be restored by asymmetric cooperation where the headenders get more than their equal share of the water. However, asymmetric cooperation in the sense that tailenders put more than equal effort in maintenance weakens the headenders’ incentives because it is more tempting to expropriate tailenders’ large maintenance effort.

This study examines the role of trust and reciprocity in the effectiveness of collective governance systems in hydrosocial territories, focusing on water associations managed by indigenous Aymara communities in the Bolivian Altiplano. Using path analysis and experimental economics, we measure the interaction between trust and reciprocity and cooperative behavior among 100 Aymara community members. Our results suggest that while trust is a critical factor in fostering cooperation, reciprocity is equally important in supporting the cooperation required for effective collective governance in hydrosocial territories. We find that reciprocity is particularly low in the associations studied. Our results show that the initial acts of trust were not reciprocated, making cooperation within the governance system difficult. Although communities exhibited prosocial behavior, this lack of reciprocity affected trust between members of different communities, leading to ineffective functioning of collective water resources management. More generally, our results show the vulnerability of collective governance in hydrosocial territories when collaboration is strongly based on negative reciprocal paradigms and increasingly dependent on extrinsic motivations. To address the internal causes of ineffective collective governance, a nuanced exploration of ways to foster intrinsic motivation and positive reciprocal interactions is needed and seems to require joint efforts by communities and political actors.