Water sector governance: a return ticket to anarchy

Abstract

A political-science perspective of anarchy holds that anarchy is the absence of a ruler. In the water sector, especially in terms of irrigated agriculture, emerging deficiencies of public irrigation systems as well as the budget crisis of governments to sustain irrigated agriculture, resulted into increased water user participation. Understanding the apparently increasing smidgeon of anarchy in the water sector includes the appreciation of the complexity of water governance developments such as the introduction of Participatory Irrigation Management (PIM), Irrigation Management Transfer (IMT), basin councils, Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) and Multi-Stakeholder Platforms (MSP), as well as the limited role of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and grassroots organisations (GROs), for decades considered the ‘magic bullet’ in taking over and providing state services to the public. We conclude that governance is anarchy by other means

Crafting Spaces for Good Water Governance in Pakistan

“…The appropriate forum within which millions of irrigators sharing tens of thousands of interdependent watercourses can experience those criteria for good governance—transparency, fair participation, and subsidiarity to appropriate scales—remains elusive. The watercourse and the WUA—though retained as a unit of management under the 2019 WUA ordinance—is an imperfect forum as farmers are “members by default” (Wegerich et al., 2014) and do not have the choice to be participants, a key criterion for success in the CPR literature (McGinnis & Ostrom, 2008; Ostrom, 1992). However, above the watercourse scale in the hydraulic hierarchy (e.g., at distributary scales), any meaningful sense of community is lost.…”

“…As an engineering feat, the use of gravity to apportion water to more than 100,000 watercourses is remarkable, but it is important to challenge any assumptions that IBIS construction was rooted in hard science, as “this ignores that the construction of the irrigation systems was a learning process of colonizers who did not practice irrigation within their own country” (Wegerich et al., 2014, p. 14). Politics and privilege of the nineteenth century are embedded in the IBIS design alongside hydraulics, as local elites were engaged in the process of canal digging (Mustafa, 2011; Shahid et al., 2019), with State management at the time limited only to the main canal and local communities applying for the rights to build and connect their own secondary and tertiary channels as they were able (Wegerich et al., 2014). Elite privilege in the IBIS structure may have been exacerbated further with Pakistan’s 1947 independence from Britain, as the evacuation of Hindus from their homes along the IBIS without any subsequent land tenure reform left a vacuum in which a strong landholding class could grow (World Bank, 2019).…”

The U-Turn in Government Facilitation: How Dutch Water Authorities Facilitate Nongovernmental Initiatives

“…Embracing external initiatives can further generate public support and lead to more innovative solutions (A. Van Buuren et al, 2015; Wegerich, Warner, & Tortajada, 2014). The facilitated project can function at arm’s length from centers of political authority, thereby potentially offering greater flexibility in decision-making, resource acquisition, management, and accountability arrangements (Skelcher, Mathur, & Smith, 2005).…”

Government facilitation of external initiatives: how Dutch water authorities cope with value dilemmas

“…Things can be accomplished that the government could not have done on its own. Embracing external initiatives can further generate public support and lead to more innovative solutions to public problems (van Buuren et al, 2015;Wegerich, Warner, & Tortajada, 2014). The facilitated project can function 'at arm's length' from centres of political authority; this may offer greater flexibility in decision making, resource acquisition, management, and accountability arrangements (Skelcher, Mathur, & Smith, 2005).…”