Federalism, water, and (de)centralization in Brazil: the case of the São Francisco River water diversion

Integrated Water Resources Management in Federations: The Examples of Brazil and Switzerland

“…Besides containing biophysical characteristics, a river basin exhibits an ensemble of socioeconomic and political-administrative scales [7,9,13]. Stakeholders can create, constrain and shift scales to suit their own interests [9,10,12,13]. The choice of scale may reflect the social, political and economic context [9], and changing power and authority, as different spatial levels equate to differences in access to resources, data interpretation, assessments, knowledge, decision-making and policy implementation [9,12].…”

“…Since the 1990s, many countries have adopted the concept in their national legislation and changed their institutional frameworks [2,9,10]. Some unitarian countries, such as France, have institutionalized watershed institutions throughout the country.…”

Governing water in federal river basins

“…In India, a states' territorial reorganisation in 1956 turned the Madras state (later renamed Tamil Nadu) into a non-riparian state to Krishna river, and created a new riparian state (Andhra Pradesh), thus changing the configuration of actors in the Telugu Ganga project (Chokkakula 2018). In Brazil, the interbasin and interstate nature of the São Francisco transfer scheme created complex power dynamics and in practice meant that decision-making authority by river basin bodies and states was overruled by federal authority (Empinotti et al 2018). The river basin level is not automatically the preferred scale for water governance; even when strong basin institutions exist, basin-wide planning efforts may struggle to integrate sustainability and equity into interstate decision making, particularly when water shortages are distributed unevenly, as experienced in the Colorado river basin (Berggren 2018).…”

“…Third, several papers shed light on the challenges of representation and accountability in decision making to account for subnational and local interests. Thus, Empinotti et al (2018) start from the story of approval and implementation of the São Francisco water transfer. The formula used to determine representation in decision-making bodies, as well as capacity asymmetries, can undermine participation and decentralised decisions in practice.…”

“…Some articles analyse water governance arrangements through comparison, examining multiple countries or river basins in order to detect common trends and lessons learned from different settings (Benson 2018; De Stefano and Hernandez-Mora 2018; Garrick et al 2018;Heinmiller 2018;Muller 2018;Wheeler et al 2018). Several papers emphasise the importance of observing institutional arrangements over time (Chokkakula 2018;De Stefano and Hernandez-Mora 2018;Empinotti et al 2018;Garrick et al 2018), as decentralisation and intergovernmental relationships are constantly evolving to adapt to changing societies and power dynamics.…”