Until the beginning of the 19th century, human water use was limited. Natural features and forces largely dictated river flow regimes, and natural biota were the primary water users. By the 20th century, a great remaking of river systems occurred as humans manipulated the natural hydrology to meet the domestic supply, sanitation, food, fiber, and industrial needs of growing populations and rising standards of living. Water resources in many river basins are fully committed to a variety of in-stream and remote purposes, degrading water quality, threatening river-dependent ecosystems, and intensifying competition and strife.
Integrated river basin management (RBM) systems bring fragmented water uses and users together (see Box). RBM creates a framework that deals with an entire basin or sub-basin, such as the Colombia, the Indus, or the Limpopo, not just a single water use or administrative jurisdiction. A river basin can be defined by the watershed limits of a system of waters, both ground and surface, flowing to a common terminus. RBM integrates this system of waters within its broader natural environment and its social, economic, and political contexts. Basin units cut across administrative divisions used to manage water. This is their strength and their challenge.
Water in a river basin is both renewable and reusable. The hydrologic cycle renews the resource annually; water within a basin can be reused many times on its way from headwaters to the sea. Some are in-stream uses, such as hydropower generation, navigation, recreation, or ecological sustenance. Other uses, such as municipal water supply, industrial cooling, or irrigation, extract water but return much of it downstream. As a result, a blend of water that has been used and reused comprises the lower reaches of most major river systems. This multiplier effect allows withdrawals to exceed by many times the natural flow in a river and provides a number of management options for optimizing the utility of water in a basin, but creates significant measurement and quality management problems.
Because of the large variability in river flows across seasons and years, flood protection works and artificial storage are important elements of river basin systems. The degree of control afforded by reservoirs varies enormously. The reservoirs on the Colorado River in the U.S. can store four times the annual flow of the river, whereas the Mekong River in Southeast Asia is largely unregulated. There are many more management options and the value of water in the Colorado River basin is higher, since regulated flows generally have much greater utility for human uses than unregulated ones.
INTEGRATED BASIN MANAGEMENT
Although the term “integrated” most commonly refers to integration across use sectors, such as agriculture and urban water supply, it can also encompass a num-ber of other divisions, including the following:
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This value comes at a cost to natural ecosystems, which have evolved from and adapted to natural cycles of flood and recession. Manipulating reservoir releases to mimic key portions of these natural cycles has increased, but much remains to be learned in this area.
As river basins approach full utilization, systems of specifying, quantifying, and assigning rights to the water become more formalized. Those affected try to protect, defend, and perhaps augment their rights; interact with other right holders, claimants, and aspirants; and sometimes conflict with them. RBM must therefore establish the rules of the game and mechanisms to govern these interactions, so that they take place in a productive and efficient way. All interests and stakeholders in the water affairs of the basin must have suitable protection and adequate representation, including the natural environment and less powerful water users. The most important decisions in RBM are made on the basis of contemporary social values, not on technical grounds. Effective RBM requires both good process and good science.
There are two archetypal organizational models for implementing RBM. The first is the authority model, in which a single unified organization is empowered to make decisions. The second is the coordinative model, in which existing administrative units work together to cover an entire river basin or subbasin. While new structures may be created, the bulk of routine work is done by existing organizations.
A strength of the authority model is that its operational span of control coincides with the boundaries of the basin. This internalizes upstream/downstream and other conflicts, making them easier to deal with. And it concentrates the decisionmaking authority needed to resolve disagreements. But there are disadvantages too. Since the authority will very likely deal only with water, water will be isolated from relevant policy sectors such as agriculture, the environment, and the economy. Authority is centralized rather than devolving to the lowest practicable level. And for international rivers, the authority model requires establishing a supranational authority, which is extremely difficult to do. Finally, governance of an RBM authority may not include broad-based stakeholder representation and accountability.
The coordinative model addresses some of these weaknesses. Because coordination involves voluntary agreement among participating jurisdictions, it provides a strong political base for action. Linkages between water and other types of policy remain, since states, nations, or other jurisdictions are jointly responsible for a range of policy sectors. Such a set-up also provides a natural base for decentralization of responsibilities. On the other hand, decisionmaking can be cumbersome, costs of coordination may be high, and political changes in participating jurisdictions can upset agreements. These two models represent polar extremes. Specific cases often blend the two. In Australia's Murray-Darling Basin, a cooperative Ministerial Council comprising representatives of the four involved states and the federal government, sets policy while an authority-like commission supports and executes the council's decisions. In France, a river commission made up of local and national government representatives and users sets water policy, which an associated water agency implements. Publicly held companies manage the distribution infrastructure and make bulk water deliveries to user associations. In the United States, there is generally no formal apex council in a river basin, and policymaking authority is distributed among federal and state agencies and departments.
Committees and working groups link stakeholders to discussion and decisionmaking fora. Legislation and legally binding negotiated agreements are important instruments for establishing policy and practices, and the court system resolves disagreements and disputes. In the state of California, a water plan that is updated every five years provides a rolling framework for managing the state's water resources.
The most prominent examples of authorities are those whose primary mandate is to develop a river basin, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in the U.S., the Rio São Francisco Development Agency in Brazil, and the Mahaweli Development Authority in Sri Lanka. When their primary development tasks are finished, authorities often transition to a broader resource management role, with varying degrees of success.
Most of these examples are from higher-income countries. But can RBM models from wealthy countries like Australia and the United States work in other contexts? River basins across the world are reaching full allocation and experiencing many of the problems outlined earlier. The TVA model has successfully developed water resources in places like Sri Lanka, but its record as an RBM model is checkered. Sri Lanka is struggling to transform the Mahaweli Authority into a basin management agency. Applying the TVA model to the Damodar Valley Authority in India in the 1950s was a resounding failure. Current attempts to use the Murray-Darling model in Vietnam and China are encountering fundamental problems. Experience with RBM in developing countries and in developed countries may differ because in developing countries:
- Dense populations live in upper watershed catchments and require access to water along with downstream urban populations;
- Water use is widely dispersed rather than concentrated and easily controlled;
- Administrative capacity to monitor and enforce regulations and standards is limited;
- Governance mechanisms to assign rights and regulate and enforce agreements and contracts are nonexistent or weak;
- Technical capacity to measure and monitor basin hydrology is limited;
- Civil society does not possess the internal structure of groups and associations needed to represent various stakeholder interests;
- Pressures for transparency in public decisionmaking and regulation, including independent, investigative media, are not strong.
These differences preclude the wholesale importation of developed-country models. RBM strategies must be adapted to the particular context. Building institutional capacity in critical areas may have to proceed simultaneously with the development of RBM organizations. In such cases, it may be necessary to defer assigning particular functions to these organizations until sufficient capacity has been developed.
Achieving effective basin management requires a strong knowledge base, suitable governance mechanisms, administrative capacity, adequate stakeholder representation, transparency, and political will. This challenging set of requirements is matched by equally rewarding potential outcomes, such as more efficient use of each drop of water, enhanced reuse of water, mitigation of past environmental damage, and redirection of water to uses that society values most highly. The overarching imperative is to accomplish these ends in a way that treats all stakeholders, particularly weaker and poorer stakeholders, fairly and equitably.
For further information see Abernethy, C. L., ed. Intersectoral Management of River Basins. Proceedings of an International Workshop on "Integrated Water Management in Water-Stressed River Basins in Developing Countries: Strategies for Poverty Alleviation and Agricultural Growth," Loskop Dam, South Africa, 1621 October 2000. Colombo, Sri Lanka: IWMI and German Foundation for International Development (DSE), 2001.; Mostert, E., ed. River Basin Management. Proceedings of the International Workshop, The Hague, 2729 October. UNESCO, 1999.
Mark Svendsen (msvendsen@compuserve.com) is an independent consultant in water resource management based in Oregon and a fellow with the International Water Management Institute (IWMI).