Earth Day 2023: Empowering local communities as stewards of Earth’s freshwater resources

Freshwater resources such as rivers, lakes, and wetlands are central to ecosystems and sustain the lives and livelihoods of human beings everywhere, and are an integral part of the culture, spirituality, and way of life of local communities.

Unfortunately, freshwater resources are under a multitude of stresses around the world—from climate change, environmental degradation, population growth, to infrastructure development. They also have unique features that make them more challenging to manage than terrestrial resources: Many span large areas, their boundaries are often unclear and move around, they are difficult to observe, and the actions of one user may unintentionally affect others.

As we observe Earth Day 2023 (April 22) it’s not an understatement to say that addressing these challenges is key to sustaining life on Earth in the coming decades. One promising approach to managing freshwater resources is community-based conservation (CBC). Enabled by the trend of government devolution of rights to communities, CBC offers a powerful mechanism for protecting and ensuring sustainable utilization of freshwater resources. Applying CBC to the unique challenges of freshwater resource governance also helps generate more diverse ideas and holistic strategies for CBC.

Recognizing the critical role of local communities in managing natural resources, a recent collaborative study by IFPRI and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) makes recommendations for conservation practitioners on ways to strengthen facilitation and support community empowerment in CBC for freshwater resources. The study critically reviewed and synthesized existing research, adapting TNC’s Voice, Choice and Action framework to a freshwater resource context to unlock CBC’s potential in achieving environmental and developmental impacts in freshwater contexts.

The adapted framework for freshwater resource CBC is organized around six interlinked themes, four pillars and two cross-cutting elements (Figure 1):

Figure 1

Four pillars

1. Secure rights and fair externality consideration: Just as secure rights to land are critical for safeguarding livelihoods and sustainable land management, CBC requires secure rights to freshwater resources by local communities. However, this is not straightforward because of the dynamic and mobile characteristics of freshwater resources. The high costs of monitoring and enforcement can challenge communities’ capacity to defend freshwater resource rights, making it difficult to regulate use equitably and in ways consistent with community and cultural values. In the multi-use, multi-user context of freshwater resources, it is essential to recognize that users may have diverse claims of different and overlapping “bundles of rights” to water. In addition, rights alone are not enough: The ability to benefit from the resources is also important. Freshwater resource rights are often over-allocated, or the water is of unsuitable quality for the intended uses. Finally, rights come with responsibilities for how resources are used. Both withdrawals and return flows can impose costs and benefits—externalities—on others, with vital equity implications. Since externalities are inherently linked to how rights and responsibilities are defined and enforced, both state and local institutions are needed for sustainable management of freshwater resources. Institutional involvement must go hand-in-hand with technological improvements to lower the costs of monitoring.
    
2. Effective multi-stakeholder platforms (MSPs) bring together different stakeholders in resource management representatives to discuss and agree on actions for solving problems. Thus they are platforms for conflict resolution, adaptive management, democratization, and inclusion. Compared to terrestrial resources, freshwater resource governance often involves a greater number and diversity of stakeholders because of its essential nature, multiple overlapping claims, and large geographic spans, making inclusive and participatory decision-making even more important and challenging than for many terrestrial CBC programs. One solution is to work at multiple, connected scales by nesting village-level micro-watershed platforms into larger-scale macro-watershed management platforms to bridge sectoral and institutional boundaries. This allows local communities to operate at their scale of social organization. State recognition and support of various MSPs is key in this case to ensure that governance decisions of one MSP feed into the higher-scale ones. MSPs must be inclusive, regarding both who is involved and how they are engaged, or risk being ineffectual, and consider power differentials among stakeholders related to authority, ethnicity, caste, status, wealth, or simply the spatial distribution of freshwater resources.
    
3. Strong community capacity is essential to govern freshwater resources. Communities must manage resources to which they hold rights, advocate for their own interests and needs, build "counterpower" for accountability in the MSPs through which those rights are continually renegotiated and reinforced, and pursue opportunities for economic development. Because of the complexity of freshwater resources and the need for solutions to emerge from within communities, capacity building for CBC should support community leadership and the preservation and interweaving of Indigenous knowledge.
    
4. Sustainable livelihood and development opportunities: The success of CBC hinges on viable and managed use of freshwater resources that sustains well-being and development. Because freshwater resources are essential for economic and material well-being and non-material aspects such as health, spiritual values, and cultural connection, a holistic perspective is required to systematically assess possible trade-offs and synergies between freshwater resource uses. There are three types of incentives for sustainable freshwater resource management—regulatory, market-based, and normative. The latter—including pro-social preferences, cultural values and beliefs, identity, and social norms— have been historically underappreciated, but their role in delivering sustainable livelihood and development opportunities in this context is increasingly recognized. The diversity of stakeholders involved in freshwater resources means that a diversity of incentive types is likely to be at play in CBC; these should be harmonized, or at least not undermine one another, such as economic incentives crowding out intrinsic incentives.

Cross-cutting elements

1. Cultural connections: Culture is a set of shared knowledge, values and beliefs, and conventions (e.g., norms, rules, and rights) that define expectations of behavior within a collective. Strong cultural connections to freshwater resources provide normative incentives for sustainable management. Increasingly, preserving cultural services is recognized as one of the most compelling reasons for conservation. Conservation initiatives need to connect cultural diversity with biological diversity by incorporating diverse livelihood needs and cultural values into conservation objectives.
    
2. Equity and power balancing: Power is the ability to effect change against opposition and is derived from forms of capital (natural, physical, financial, human, cultural, social, or political). Equity includes procedural equity in capacity to participate in decision-making and distributional equity of outcomes (such as food and freshwater security); equity of participation in freshwater resource governance processes is important for shaping governance outcomes. Because freshwater resources often span vast spatial scales and involve multiple users affecting the quality and quantity of the resource, challenges around equity and power balancing may be a particularly important for designing robust freshwater resource CBC.

To achieve their potential, freshwater resource management projects must take into account the physical and social drivers unique to freshwater resources. The four pillars describe critical enabling conditions for the success of freshwater resource governance which are applicable beyond CBC programs: they have important lessons for example, for groundwater governance efforts under the CGIAR’s Nexus Gains Initiative. Strengthening elements within each pillar and coordinating activities across pillars is key to making them mutually reinforcing. Finally, all of the pillars work toward preserving cultural connections, achieving equity and water justice, and resolving power imbalances in freshwater resource CBC. These latter cross-cutting elements are both strategic means of achieving freshwater resource CBC objectives and ends in themselves.

Wei Zhang and Ruth Meinzen-Dick are Senior Research Fellows with IFPRI's Natural Resources and Resilience Unit. Ruth Meinzen-Dick also leads the Strengthening Nexus Governance workstream in the CGIAR NEXUS Gains Research Initiative.

Referenced paper:
Wei Zhang, Hagar ElDidi, Yuta J. Masuda, Ruth S. Meinzen-Dick, Kimberly A. Swallow, Claudia Ringler, Nicole DeMello & Allison Aldous (2023) Community-Based Conservation of Freshwater Resources: Learning from a Critical Review of the Literature and Case Studies, Society & Natural Resources, DOI: 10.1080/08941920.2023.2191228