Water information: what is it good for? The use of information in transboundary water management

Timmerman, Jos; Langaas, Sindre

doi:10.1007/s10113-004-0087-6

Cited by 59 publications

(40 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Especially upstream countries have a tendency to restrict information exchange as it is not in their local interest to give full access to the available information, thus ensuring a favorable position with respect to the countries with no access to information [Timmerman and Langaas, 2005].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing the value of cooperation and information exchange in large water resources systems by agent‐based optimization

Giuliani

Castelletti

2013

Water Resources Research

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[1] Many large-scale water resources systems, especially in transboundary contexts, are characterized by the presence of several and conflicting interests and managed by multiple, institutionally independent decision makers. These systems are often studied adopting a centralized approach based on the assumption of full cooperation and information exchange among the involved parties. Such a perspective is conceptually interesting to quantify the best achievable performance but might have little practical impact given the real political and institutional setting. In this work, we propose a novel decision-analytic framework based on multiagent systems to model and analyze different levels of cooperation and information exchange among multiple decision makers. The Zambezi River basin is used as a case study. According to the proposed agent-based optimization approach, each agent represents a decision maker, whose decisions are defined by an explicit optimization problem considering only the agent's local interests. The economic value of information exchange is estimated comparing a noncooperative setting, where agents act independently, with the first basic level of cooperation, i.e., coordination, characterized by full information exchange. The economic value of cooperation is also estimated by comparison with the ideal, fully cooperative management of the system. Results show that coordination, obtained with complete information exchange, allows the downstream agents to better adapt to the upstream behaviors. The impact of information exchange depends on the objective considered, and we show coordination to be particularly beneficial to environmental interests.Citation: Giuliani, M., and A. Castelletti (2013), Assessing the value of cooperation and information exchange in large water resources systems by agent-based optimization, Water Resour. Res., 49,[3912][3913][3914][3915][3916][3917][3918][3919][3920][3921][3922][3923][3924][3925][3926]

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing the value of cooperation and information exchange in large water resources systems by agent‐based optimization

Giuliani

Castelletti

2013

Water Resources Research

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“…Institutional and organizational arrangements designed to build connections between knowledge and action for waterresources management are extremely diverse, and their performance is not yet well understood (13,14). Some efforts are narrowly focused and short-lived, whereas others are expected to have longer time frames of engagement.…”

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confidence: 99%

Linking knowledge with action in the pursuit of sustainable water-resources management

Jacobs

Lebel

Buizer

et al. 2010

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

132

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Managing water for sustainable use and economic development is both a technical and a governance challenge in which knowledge production and sharing play a central role. This article evaluates and compares the role of participatory governance and scientific information in decision-making in four basins in Brazil, Mexico, Thailand, and the United States. Water management institutions in each of the basins have evolved during the last 10-20 years from a relatively centralized water-management structure at the state or national level to a decision structure that involves engaging water users within the basins and the development of participatory processes. This change is consistent with global trends in which states increasingly are expected to gain public acceptance for larger water projects and policy changes. In each case, expanded citizen engagement in identifying options and in decision-making processes has resulted in more complexity but also has expanded the culture of integrated learning. International funding for water infrastructure has been linked to requirements for participatory management processes, but, ironically, this study finds that participatory processes appear to work better in the context of decisions that are short-term and easily adjusted, such as water-allocation decisions, and do not work so well for longer-term, high-stakes decisions regarding infrastructure. A second important observation is that the costs of capacity building to allow meaningful stakeholder engagement in water-management decision processes are not widely recognized. Failure to appreciate the associated costs and complexities may contribute to the lack of successful engagement of citizens in decisions regarding infrastructure.water management | water sustainability | public participation | stakeholder engagement

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“…Interest groups, even if small, are well-organized and influential, and thus are capable of hampering public policy dialogue and impeding transformative change [80]. A practicable way forward for Italy is a stepwise transition to a (more) resource efficient economy [81,82], an integral part of which is a modern water allocation regime that is consistent with the principles we have outlined.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 77%

The Water Abstraction License Regime in Italy: A Case for Reform?

Santato

Myšiak

Pérez-Blanco

2016

Water

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Abstract:The current Water Abstraction License (WAL) regime in Italy is no longer flexible enough to cope with the challenges posed by human-induced climate and global environmental changes. The cornerstones of the current regime were laid down in the 1930s and have remained essentially unchanged ever since. The sole noteworthy reform of the Italian WAL regime was the decentralization of the regulatory competences from the state to the regional authorities in the late 1990s. In this paper, we review the WAL regimes across the administrative regions comprising the Po River Basin District (PRBD), the largest and economically most important in Italy. PRBD's WAL regime includes a rigid and scattered WAL normative that hinders the performance of bottom-up conflict resolution mechanisms at a basin scale; a water pricing scheme that does not reflect the cost of water conveyance and use, and does not encourage efficient water allocation; and the lack of a central WAL register, which delays and in some cases impedes an environmental impact assessment for issuing new licenses or renewing existing ones, and does not allow prioritizing applications according to their full economic value. We argue these deficiencies may compromise both the integrity of riverine and water dependent ecosystems and the economic uses of water. This paper offers insights that can inform reform of water allocations in the PRBD and elsewhere in Italy and in Europe.

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Water information: what is it good for? The use of information in transboundary water management

Cited by 59 publications

References 12 publications

Assessing the value of cooperation and information exchange in large water resources systems by agent‐based optimization

Assessing the value of cooperation and information exchange in large water resources systems by agent‐based optimization

Linking knowledge with action in the pursuit of sustainable water-resources management

The Water Abstraction License Regime in Italy: A Case for Reform?

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