ABSTRACT
The term, governance, is sprinkled liberally amidst water policy discourse to a degree not found in other topics. We do not hear so much, for example, about agricultural governance, or health governance, or educational governance. Why water governance? What is different about water that we feel a need to refer not only to the way it is managed, but to how it is governed? Management has to do with directing, controlling, and guiding. The word
derives from the Latin, manus, meaning hand. We humans have been controlling things with our hands for a very long time, and it is our hands, as much as a our brains, that define us as a biological species. Governance is one step up from management. The word derives from the Latin gubernare, “to direct or steer,” i.e. to direct the managers. The implication is that management needs direction. If left to their own devices, managers might do an excellent job of managing their particular domain, but in a way that harms the greater good. This is why governance is so critical to the water sector. The water profession is full of very capable managers working inside their particular domains of water management – of city water supplies or irrigation systems or building flood control levees – but too often working at cross-purposes to the interests of the water sector as a whole. The reason the world is facing a water crisis is not because of bad management, so much as bad governance. But who “governs” the water sector? Now we come to a deeper and more
systemic problem. Often there is no single person or agency or even coalition of agencies responsible for water governance. That’s why we have such a hazy concept of what water governance means; it too often is a hazy concept! The confused status of water governance is not because the topic has been ignored. Some very smart people have devoted their careers to unraveling water governance. The 2009 Nobel laureate in economics, Elinor Ostrom, studied ground-
water governance in California for her dissertation work (Ostrom 1965) and the development of her later theories on how people make decisions about shared resources was very much oriented around water governance issues (Ostrom 1990, 1992). The focus of Ostrom and other political scientists and
institutional economists who studied water governance emphasized the institutional rules and organizational arrangements for responsive and sustainable governance systems. The role of values and ethics, in their models, was seen as affecting benefits and costs, and thereby affecting actual behavior indirectly. But the role of values and ethics in establishing the governance paradigm in the first place, of setting not just the “rules of the game” but choosing what game to play and how to think about the game, is not well elaborated in institutional economics. The issue of ethics comes into play at the initial stage of conce-
ptualizing water governance and identifying its boundaries. The fact that there is no specific institution responsible for water, or that a country has no overall management plan (or conversely, that it does) is evidence of how water is conceptualized. When the European Union introduced the Water Framework Directive in 2000, which covers issues from environmental flow to pollution standards to river basin councils, it was responding to a shared understanding about the integrated qualities of water (Steyaert and Ollivier 2007). In the United States there has been an ongoing discussion as to whether a national water strategy would be a good idea to try to develop, and so far the answer has been that it’s not! (Gleick and Christian-Smith 2012). In a sense, the Americans are saying that water is too complicated to deal
with in an orchestrated way, and in any case, water is a resource that is only useful when it’s being used, so we will let the states, cities, businesses, and individual people make their own decisions about how best to use the water. Water is viewed as private property, much as Odysseus viewed his slaves in Leopold’s essay. A water governance system that dares not infringe on private property rights is still a governance system, just as libertarianism is a form of political governance. To make sense of the governance system, we need to know something about the shared values – ethics – of the people who choose, or acquiesce, to be governed by that system.
