Watershed Governance & Management in Pakistan-4 : Post # 5

Concepts of  Governance at Different levels in the Literature

A governance system is a complex package of policies, programs and institutions which, in concert, are intended to provide a specific outcome. The outcomes chosen involve fundamental decisions about how, why and by whom decisions are made, the direction, type and scope of information flows, the responsibilities of economic, community and public sectors, and how activities are encouraged, monitored and enforced.  Addressing the underlying causes of resource competition requires changing the fundamental ground rules that define who is involved in making resource management decisions, what powers these different actors exercise, and how they are held accountable for their decisions. Such innovations in governance are important largely because they are systemic, altering the underlying systems and relationships in which resource management decisions are made.

Moving from overall concept of governance to more specific like water governance, our brief about groundwater management present its different definitions as: “Water governance has been defined as the political, social, economic and administrative systems that are in place to develop and manage water resources and delivery of services at different levels of society (GWP, 2003) or, as described by Moench et al. (2003), water governance is the set of systems that control decision-making with regard to water resource development and management. Hence, water governance is much more about the way in which decisions are made (i.e. how, by whom, and under what conditions decisions are made) than the decisions themselves.”

Watershed governance is a subset of water governance. It includes the institutional and legal shift toward ecologically-based water allocations, ecosystem-based land and water use decisions, comprehensive demand management and soft path approaches. The overarching goal of watershed governance is to provide alternatives to current systems of water governance and planning that are focused too narrowly on water in isolation from its broader interactions across sectors and within the ecosystem.

Functional watershed governance is essentially an environment created to sustain and enhance watershed functions. What are those potential watershed functions that are to be sustained and enhanced? Generally, the following five watershed functions are considered important:

1.      It collects water from rainfall;

2.      It stores water of various amounts and for different times;

3.      It releases water as runoff;

4.      It provides diverse sites for chemical reactions to take place; and

5.      It provides habitat for flora and fauna.

The first three functions are physical in nature and are termed hydrologic functions. The last two are the ecological functions. Human activities affect all the functions of a watershed. For example, when buildings and other impervious areas such as cemented court yards, streets and other similar structures cover the ground, infiltration decreases and most of the water runs off into collection ditches where stream channel erosion may occur. Furthermore, reduced infiltration may result in less recharge of the groundwater stored in aquifers which supply most of Pakistan’s drinking needs. With both urban and agricultural land uses, chemicals such as fertilizers and pesticides can mix with rain entering the soil and may reach groundwater, causing pollution of public and private wells.

 Obviously, for managing such watershed functions on sustainable basis, we need to have managerial conditions, actions and results. However, to do so, most important is the availability of conducive environment, policies, programs and institutional arrangements in place and functional to allow and implements decisions for watershed management. This stated conditional points to have a functional watershed governance system to sustain and enhance watershed functions. In other words, if we are facing crisis in the management of our different river watersheds, it is essentially then the crisis of watershed governance that is the root-cause of this problem. The watershed governance is only the subset of water governance and then everything comes under overall governance in the country.

 While discussing various governance systems, it is important to note that the watershed governance systems have a number of characteristics that set them apart from the other governance systems. For one, they often seek to give priority to non-human beneficiaries (i.e. plants and animals). In addition, they often seek to bank (save) and redistribute environmental benefits to future generations of people. Further, unlike many policy arenas (include issues such as health care), they typically give science strong voice in agenda setting and evaluation. Finally, they tend to require more comprehensive and integrated responses than other policy issues because watershed health is typically threshold bound and not attainable through incremental steps (e.g. 90 percent of what is necessary to prevent drinking water contamination and fish extinction may still constitute failure).