Groundwater Governance & Management in Pakistan-8: Post #16

H.  What should be main features of a model for groundwater governance in Pakistan?

Groundwater governance can have the following four components: (1) Economic aspect to secure efficient use; (2) social aspect to ensure equal democratic opportunities through meaningful participation of groundwater users in decision making; (3) Political aspect for assuring equitable use; and (4) environmental aspect to firm up sustainable use of groundwater resource. 

An expert team of DFID has stated that groundwater governance is focused on the exercise of appropriate authority and promotion of responsible collective action to ensure sustainable and efficient utilization of groundwater resources for the benefit of humankind and dependent ecosystems. Do we have any example where appropriate authority have been exercised and / efforts have been made for a responsible collective action for managing groundwater resources? Answer to such a question is simply a big "NO".

               

Since crisis of groundwater management is, in reality, crisis of groundwater governance; our focus should be to address root-cause of the problem instead of symbolic or real outcomes only.  A common sense statement that groundwater governance determines who gets what quantity of groundwater, when and how, and decides who has the right to groundwater and related services. The groundwater governance comprises of set of policies and decisions that are derived through institutional, formal and informal, arrangements put in place along with legislation and regulations that define roles, rules, rights and responsibilities of all stakeholders regarding the ownership, administration and management of groundwater resources.

When groundwater management is conceived to be the set of actions to implement decisions that derive from the process of governance; our predicament becomes obvious as we don’t have even rudimentary elements of groundwater governance what to speak of effective groundwater governance. This is why crisis of groundwater management become crisis of groundwater governance.

                                                                                                                  

Before proposing some important components of effective governance, symptoms of ineffective governance can be listed as under:

• Absence or lack of groundwater institutions and regulations;
• Undefined groundwater property or use rights;
• Lack of institutional or legal support for an efficient groundwater use;
• Hardly any arrangement in place to ensure sustainable abstraction of groundwater;
• Missing political will to shoulder responsible groundwater abstractions;
• No entity representing and ensuring equal democratic opportunities for overseeing groundwater  abstraction and quality control;
• Lack of social concern for equitable access to groundwater resource;
• Lack of clarification about roles, rules, rights and responsibilities of all stakeholders like local, provincial and federal agencies, private sector, civil society regarding administration, ownership and management of groundwater resource; and
• No systematic data collection and information availability about groundwater abstraction points, their location, point to point intervals, quality status with aquifer depth from say village to village, criteria for groundwater quality for abstraction, proximity from brackish groundwater zone, operational hours required to avoid rising of fresh-saline water interface vertically as well as horizontally, sizes of pumps installed, etc.