Water Governance & Water Crisis Management in Pakistan: Post # 26

Getting Rid of Ineffective Water Governance:

UNDP defines water governance as follows: “The range of political, social, economic and administrative systems that are in place to develop and manage water resources and the delivery of water services, at different levels of society.” In any country, good governance is critical for sustainable development. Similarly, good water governance is pivotal in providing sustainable water development and management. Since the water crisis is essentially a water governance crisis, addressing ineffective water governance becomes a prerequisite for facing the looming water crisis in Pakistan.

What is ineffective water governance?  United Nations’ Development Program (UNDP) has outlined the following traits of ineffective water governance:

• The lack of water institutions, fragmented institutional structures (sector-by-sector approach), unclear property rights, and overlapping and/or conflicting decision-making structures.
• Up-stream and down-stream conflicts regarding riparian rights and access to water.
• Strong tendencies to divert public resources for personal gain, unpredictability in the use of laws and, a number of regulations and licensing practices, which impede markets and voluntary action and encourage corruption and other forms of rent–seeking behaviour.

Water governance is essentially the authority of formal and informal water institutions for developing, allocating and regulating water resources among all stakeholders. Like good governance at the national level, good governance for water includes conditions such as participation, accountability, inclusiveness, transparency and responsiveness in exercising authority for developing, allocating and regulating water resources among sectors of water use and water users. If such authority does not reflect such conditions described for good water governance, the result is obviously ineffective water governance. Of course, the degree of ineffective water governance will depend upon the degree of absence of the desired stated conditions.

Among other functions, as reported by the UNDP, water governance focuses on the following main aspects:

•          The formulation and adoption of sustainable legislation, policies and institutions;

•          The way legislation, institutions and policies are being established, enforced and implemented;

•          Clarification of the roles and responsibilities of all involved stakeholders - local and national government, private sector, civil society - regarding ownership, administration and management of water resources.

In view of our past and present record regarding the lack of prerequisite conditions for good governance, it seems that poor water governance has been the root-cause for our water crisis. If this is not correct then how can we explain the following ground realities that are staring into our eyes while a very serious water crisis hovers?

• How is it that Egypt and USA can develop water resources equivalent to 3 to 5 times of their respective annual yields from the Nile River and Colorado River, while the Indus River System, having an annual yield many times higher than either of these rivers, has surface water storage development of barely 10 percent?
• After the Indus Water Treaty of 1960 and Water Apportionment Accord of 1991, why is there still so much conflict between the upper and lower riparian states and provinces?
• We hear about many stories, documented or informal, of illegal canal outlets, of seasonal renewals of widening or narrowing outlets (dhikka tradition), and of more than designed flow at the head of the secondary canals while many canals remain dry toward the lower ends. Where is the sustainable legislation to counter such acts?
• Where is the effective water regulation regime to address unpredicted flows of canals and unreliable and inequitable water distribution in the country?
• When the irrigation system in this country was designed to dispose of river water on the command area based principle of equitable irrigation water distribution, why did we allow water allowances per 1000 acres to swell to such a degree as to create water-logging salinity problems?

The above examples and many other similar issues illustrate how our water governance has turned out to be next to nothing. We are neither developing nor managing our water resources on a sustainable basis. As a consequence, our water crisis is going from bad to worse.

In order to have sustainable management of water resources, since the mid-nineties, a comprehensive irrigation reforms program is being implemented to ensure or create all prerequisite conditions for good water governance. This program is intended to do the following:

·         Create autonomous Provincial Irrigation and Drainage Authorities or PIDAs to manage irrigation water jointly with users;

·         Formal entities of water users are being developed at the secondary canal level as Farmers’ Organizations (FOs), at the main / branch canal level, as the Area Water Board (AWBs) and at provincial level as the PIDA Boards. At the canal and provincial level, farmers’ representatives and irrigation officials will jointly operate and maintain their respective systems and at secondary canal level the Farmers’ Organizations will mainly be responsible for irrigation water management.

Thus, the reform program has potential to turn a dysfunctional system into a very functional and vibrant system for water distribution as per rules of allocation and regulation jointly worked out by irrigation departments and representative of farmers. If these reforms are not properly and effectively implemented through the exercise of strong political will, these same reforms have the potential to create such a mess that even all counteracting efforts through water supply side management and water demand side management will be hard put to address the pending severe water crisis.

So far, the implementation of reforms in the irrigated sector has been too slow and too casually handled so that there is every possibility that it can easily be derailed or reversed. If this happens, it will kill all efforts from the last 15 years to bring in prerequisites of good water governance such as participation, accountability, inclusiveness, transparency and responsiveness in exercising authority for developing, allocating and regulating water resources among the irrigation water users. As a matter of fact, every effort should be made to expand the scope of such reforms to encompass other water sub-sectors instead of sabotaging and slowing down this process altogether.

Of course, there are many problems to be overcome before all canals will have water boards and all secondary canals start being managed by elected members of Farmers’ Organizations. On one hand, we need to ensure that this reform process is not scuttled by some of the vested interest groups: these may be the influential farmers or irrigation officials who benefit from rent-seeking practices. Let us not allow these reforms to drag on for decades as there is a serious danger that they can be reversed. Certain powerful sections are already declaring that they will do so once financial constraints are overcome.

On the other hand, farmers’ participation must be strengthened by providing them with an institutional home-base to find transparent and fair ways for them to get elected. The current system is simply flawed and tailored to bring in cronies of the old masters. We should let elected members from the local government system form these entities to manage their water resources. Moreover, at present, the technical support at the secondary canals comes from the old irrigation officials who are absolutely against such reforms. To build further accountability even for the technical basis and to provide such assistance to elected bodies of farmers at the secondary canal level, on-farm water management officials from the agriculture department should be assigned to make the new arrangements functional and sustainable (suggested models shown in the following two figures).

In short, if we wish to manage the water crisis effectively, securing good water governance is a critical factor. If we allow the continuation of dysfunctional water governance, even having dozens of dams will not blunt the severity of the looming water crisis.