The Role of Prior Appropriation in Allocating Water Resources into the 21st Century

Abstract

This article demonstrates how widespread technological changes in agriculture have weakened the security of traditional appropriative water rights. Since legal protection of these rights has severely restricted the use of transfer mechanisms to reallocate water to emerging social needs, this demonstration provides a powerful and novel argument for increasing the exibility of the prior appropriation system and operating it in conjunction with other legitimate water-allocation doctrines protecting public interests in water.

Relaxing the Principle of Prior Appropriation: Stored Water and Sharing the Shortage in Alberta, Canada

“…While there are other short-term solutions (Clark and Abt 1993), we anticipate that the principle of prior appropriation will increasingly be recognized as hindering the full and appropriate range of responses to water shortage. While this doctrine was dominant across western North America through the twentieth century, we agree with the view of Tarlock (1991Tarlock ( , 2001, Huffaker et al (2000) and others, that prior appropriation should be relaxed in the twenty-first century. With the success of these initiatives that we described for the Oldman River Basin, we consider that the principle of prior allocation has been substantially relaxed in Alberta.…”

“…Consequently, there has been concern about this water allocation strategy but it has also been recognized that its considerable history and formally legislated implementation would impede change (Huffaker et al 2000;Tarlock 2001). In this paper we describe a case study in which two independent water management challenges each prompted the rejection of prior appropriation and provoked alternative water allocation strategies.…”

Assessing farmers' willingness to participate in water banking: a case study

“…In spite of the incentives described, barriers to the development of water markets are widely documented. Much of the research literature on barriers focus on third party effects that involve a threat to water rights as established through Prior Appropriation Doctrine (Acton and Narayanan, 2000;Gould, 1988;MacDonnell, et al, 1994MacDonnell, et al, , 1995Gopalakrishnan, 1973;Huffaker, Whittlesey and Hamilton, 2000;Whittlesey and Huffaker, 1995;Whittlesey, 1997). Additional potential barriers involve hydrologic limitations and economic externalities (Gillilan and Brown, 1997;Green and Hamilton, 2000;MacDonnell, et al, 1994;McKinney, 1991).…”

An eco-environmental water demand based model for optimising water resources using hybrid genetic simulated annealing algorithms. Part I. Model development

“…The optimisation models in the abovementioned studies do not take into account EWD, and they use conventional approaches such as linear programming to optimise water resources. In recent years, researchers have focused on optimisation of EWD (Dai and Labadie, 2001;Huffaker et al, 2000;Schluter et al, 2005), but they have not considered the eco-environment as an individual sector in their models.…”