Ground Water Rights, Spatial Variation, and Transboundary Conflicts

Abstract

The goal for any property rights system is to achieve equity, efficiency, and certainty. Trying to achieve these goals for ground water is difficult because a ground water right is not exclusive. To make matters more complicated, ground water is often under the jurisdiction of more than one political unit. The result is transboundary conflicts. Two critical elements must be included in any system of ground water rights. The system must define how the ground water can be used and define the relationships that each user and each use has with the other users and uses in the system. Unfortunately, these relationships are seldom completely defined and are made more complex by the transboundary scales at which they operate. As ground water moves horizontally across boundaries, different users or different jurisdictions have sequential control, creating conflicts between the first users and subsequent ones. Other problems occur because of vertical relationships, with more than one person or entity having control over ground water at the same time. This simultaneous exercise of authority can create conflicts between an individual who possesses a right to use ground water and a state or federal agency that regulates the same water. Transboundary conflicts occur at different scales and include conflicts between neighboring property owners as well as conflicts between countries. Scale, the property rights structure, and the nature of the relationship between users influence the way transboundary ground water conflicts are resolved.

Pre‐Development Groundwater Conditions Surrounding Memphis, Tennessee: Controversy and Unexpected Outcomes

“…For example, Arnold and Buzas () point out that one of the discrepancies in the aforementioned survey was that a transboundary aquifer may have been identified by one country but not by its counterpart. Confusion regarding ownership of groundwater beneath one's land owing to the paucity of groundwater law also exacerbates transboundary groundwater conflicts; such is not so much the case with surface water (Matthews, ). Surface water, because of its visible passage across the landscape, has a long history of water conflict law and thus the laws are better defined (Arnold and Buzas, ).…”

The Dominant Water Estate and Water Reallocation

“…Ground water has different property rules (Matthews 2005). Ground water is water in an aquifer and does not refer to soil moisture or other water that has not reached the saturated zone.…”

Asymmetric Abstraction and Allocation: The Israeli‐Palestinian Water Pumping Record

“…The particular set of challenges related to the allocation and management of international transboundary ground water was considered in detail in the volume 43 special issue of Ground Water , notably Jarvis et al (2005), Matthews (2005), and Eckstein and Eckstein (2005). The social, political, and legal aspects of ground water abstractions considered collectively in that body of work are gaining ever more prominence globally, as evidenced by two upcoming conferences devoted to the subject in the second half of 2008 in Tripoli and Kampala.…”