Groundwater Governance & Management in Pakistan-7: Post # 15

G. what are the policy instruments and institutional features of groundwater governance?

A website by Oxbridge Writers (http://www.oxbridgewriters.com/essays/estate-management/governance-issues-in-managing-groundwater-use.php) has listed policy instruments and institutional features about groundwater governance. The same points are reproduced here to visualize the existing conditions of groundwater governance in different parts of Pakistan:

1. Policy Instruments: There are three main policy instruments: (a) Regulatory; (b) Economic and (c) voluntary / advisory. Policies may make use of more than one instrument but separate categories are only to define nature of each instrument as stated below:

a.       Regulatory Policy Instruments: This category includes instruments like regulations, dug-well listing, tube-well listing, and user right allocation. We have an estimated 1.2 million tube-wells and thousands of dug-wells. Obviously, for such a huge number of groundwater pumping/ lifting units, a top-down groundwater management and monitoring is expected to be difficult and costly affair. In the absence of regulations and listing, the current practice appears to be just cooked data as each year there is constant number, like 20,000 tube-wells per year, keeps getting added. Had there been some regulations put in place for getting access to aquifer, there would have been authentic enough data available to plan for improving groundwater management.

b.      Economic Policy Instruments: These instruments comprise of financial incentives or disincentives like tax, subsidy, and charge for pumping groundwater or allowance for controlling pollution by treating wastewater. In Pakistan, groundwater resource is considered such a special common pool of natural resource that anybody can dig a well or install a tube-well without any permission or fear from the federal, provincial or local governments.

c.       Voluntary / Advisory Policy Instruments: These instruments do not need either coercive or monetary measures to manage groundwater as this approach is based on voluntary actions and / behavioral changes. Usually, such voluntary collective actions results by providing groundwater water related critical information on regular basis, presentation of practical experience and providing relevant information from different contexts where groundwater crisis were managed successfully by such instruments.

2.   Institutional Features relating to Groundwater Governance: 

Following are few reported institutional features of groundwater governance that have been tried in other countries. Such examples are to compare with local cases to build a model/s of groundwater governance suitable for local conditions. The following are some notable features for consideration;

a)      Role of Voluntary Compliance in Groundwater Governance: Monitoring more than one million tube-wells and thousands dug-wells scattered all around is an expensive option. In such a situation, voluntary compliance, if it is made to work, is a cost-effective modality to try. One example is provided from California where groups of groundwater users decided agenda, rule and regulations for groundwater management themselves. With monitoring groundwater management, it allowed transparent acts of each water user among respective group members. In spite of seriousness of groundwater crisis in Pakistan, there is no such involvement of users tried to formulate a shared agenda of groundwater management, rules and regulations to manage this critical natural resource effectively. In a society where compliance of laws and regulations is not that well established, letting local communities to devise their own agreed red-lines in this context is worth considering alternative.

b)      Role of Traditional Practices in Groundwater Governance: As stated by the referred source: “Most of the time, the traditional local action implementation along with modern scientific management system and techniques do have important role in groundwater governance. For instance, in Eritrea, the traditional system of sharing and protection of well water is very helpful for locals to conserve water throughout drought seasons.” In our case, there are also cases from Baluchistan, like Panjgoor and Ziarat, where people decided to prohibit groundwater pumping using tube-wells as a voluntary collective decision by local communities. As a consequence, their Karezes are still functioning whereas in other local basins of Baluchistan, non-regulated power- pumping has turned many horizontal galleries (karezes) into the relics of the past.

c)      Role of Administration in Groundwater Governance: Depending upon the nature of a particular aquifer conditions, the role of clear, reasonable and strong institutional arrangements is quite obvious for an effective implementation of the decentralized groundwater management. In doing so, however, there is need to define boundary of such arrangements in a way that unrelated stakeholders are excluded and any group of relevant stakeholders are not left out. If doing so, the referred care is not taken, effectiveness becomes doubtful. For example, in our context, tube-well and dug-well owners; the farmers who apply heavy doses of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides; urban groundwater suppliers and wastewater contributors are the most relevant stakeholders for any aquifer command. If institutional boundaries leave out such groups and / or include those who have nothing to do with the issue at hand, there is hardly any optimism for having effective groundwater governance. At this time, however, there is hardly any institutional arrangement in place for groundwater management. Perhaps it was fine to let more and more persons to go from groundwater pumping when water-logging was a common phenomenon; with groundwater mining developing in the most parts of the Indus Basin, such a vast aquifer with brackish water in the lower ends and central parts of many “doabs,” and sodic / saline-sodic groundwater in remaining almost 70% regions, Pakistan can’t afford to let the old regime of free-for-all to continue. While emphasizing the need for administrative measures, letting centralized and bureaucratic regulatory control will simply be a recipe for promoting the rent-seeking practices in critical area. What may be required is to have such potential regulations and institutional arrangements at the disposal of local communities at village or union council level to make them work.

    

d)     Role of Conflict resolution in Groundwater Governance: The existing political wrestling for surface water is good example for the things to come regarding potential conflicts over the exploitation of aquifer as common natural resource pool. Because of ethnic diversity along the Indus River System; it took much longer to settle surface water distribution among four provinces of Pakistan. In view of distrust among the referred stakeholders, an entity like Indus River System Authority (IRSA) is basically serves as an institutional arrangement for conflict resolution by letting the water distribution decision as agreed by the representatives of all provinces concerned. Of course, it is not an ideal arrangement but its role for sorting out many conflicts can’t be brushed aside. If it is not now but we can’t avoid such conflicts when water crisis deepens. More and more dependence on groundwater is bound to invite conflicts: (a) among those communities who are not very far from brackish aquifer conditions and their unbridled abstractions of groundwater will attract brackish-water intrusion sooner than later; and (b) among the same member of a same community where resourceful people will install deeper and large sized pumps (thereby depriving less resourceful users who use centrifugal shallow wells) without due consideration to the vertical movement of saline-freshwater interface upward for causing negative impact for all concerned. There is need to think of an entity to make responsible for proposing regulations and rules that each community to prolong the use of groundwater.

e)      Role of Political Economy in Groundwater Governance: In most of developing countries, like Pakistan, there have to propose legislation to regulate the ongoing haphazard and free-for-all blind groundwater abstractions. However, such suggestions or reports put social pressure on groundwater users and their political backers. In a situation where even numbers of new tube-wells installed are mostly cooked data, absence of relevant information allows special interest groups to get those regulations in place that promote rent-seeking practices to undermine a primary objective of moderating groundwater abstraction and quality controls. Moreover, in the same scenario of non-transparent information system, other stakeholders feel necessary to oppose and frustrate such efforts only to counterbalance the influence of other group instead of seeking to improve regulations for better groundwater management. In Pakistan, few years back a consultancy report was issued on groundwater management but the stated political economy of the unregulated groundwater abstraction has so powerful influence that nothing has happened in this context till today.

f)       Role of Information in Groundwater Governance: In Pakistan, there is very limited involvement of different entities in collecting scientific information on temporal as well as spatial basis. There is almost no information available about the aquifer conditions, groundwater resource and human impacts (like disposal of urban and industrial waste or use of heavy doses of fertilizers, insecticides/ pesticides and herbicides). In our local context, there is hardly any monitoring going to determine well spacing, water quality of pumped water, water quality variation from top of an aquifer to lower depths, water quality variations over time and space, operational hours or even procedure to install tube-wells. Drillers are the main actors in private sector who have a significant role to provide some relevant data but the current practice is simply to drill a well without preparing well-logs or water quality variations at a particular location. The provincial governments have only ventured in when tube-well subsidies were to be distributed in the distant past. In short, either there is no information available or whatever is available is inaccessible, uncertain and unreliable to a greater extent.