The conflict being considered
here is not necessarily a violent one such as those some fear may occur between
upstream and downstream nations in an increasingly water-stressed world;
something that a good deal of research has found to be counter to the facts
(e.g. Wolf, 1998, 2007). Rather it takes the shape of competing interests wrestling
for access to the resource, with legislation and associated agencies and
institutions as the primary sites of contestation.
Over the last few decades
Integrated Water Resources Management has all but become a convention in the
water management world, with watersheds held up as an appropriate unit for
decision making. The argument goes that these quasi-closed hydrological units
contain within their boundaries both the resource itself, and the various stressors
on the resource, allowing for clearer causality and management of cause and
effect. However this presents only a partial picture.
To expand the scope it can be
helpful to reconceptualise the management of water resources as the management
of how our activities draw on and affect these resources. In effect, we are not
managing water or nature but we are managing ourselves, and this brings us quickly
up against questions like: what specifically is it about how we are behaving
that needs to be managed; why are we doing these things rather than something
else; and most interestingly, who gets to decide what we do?
In short, there exists a range of
possible ways we might use water resources, but “we” are not a homogeneous
bunch and decisions made will benefit us differentially. There will be winners
and losers, and so we individuals use their resources to compete in order to privilege
their interests.
This challenges another
conventional wisdom; that watersheds give rise to a sense of place and that
watershed residents will come together as a community in defence of their
shared interest; of their place. This may or may not be true in the event that
some external entity was threatening to exploit the resources of the watershed.
However even in this “us against them” scenario there are likely to be winners
and losers at the watershed level, undercutting any hypothetical solidarity. Indeed
communities can be sites of conflict as well as collaboration (Lane et al.,
2004), where different actors may have dramatically different cultural frames
and imperatives.
Turning away from the theoretical
toward a practical example, source water protection in Ontario, as a social
process, is influenced by ecological, social, economic, institutional and
political contexts such that, “different types of knowledge
and experience, diverse values and expectations, and divergent social
perspectives, are continuously confronted, (re)aligned and contested ... among
public, private and civil society actors and organisations, with their
associated political, ethical and socio-economic imperatives.” (Ferreyra &
Beard, 2007).
Agricultural interests are
particularly sensitive to the authority of legislation to protect source water.
Surveys of farmers have shown that they oppose regulatory control by government
over their land (Filson et al, 2009, Lamba et al, 2009). By extension farmers
see source water protection efforts as local arenas for regulation rather than
venues for collaborative multi-stakeholder dialogue (Ferreyra et al, 2008).
Civil society actors and other
proponents of source water protection that are primarily interested in
ecological and public health see the watershed as the appropriate scale for
environmental governance. However farmers’ core values are those of economic
wellbeing and self-determination, leading them to see the farm and county as
the appropriate scale for environmental governance (Ferreyra et al, 2008).
Tensions between different groups, grounded in different core values and
perspectives, and amplified by varying levels of resources and other
capabilities, can be expected to affect decisions made and the institutions
built up around source water protection.
On the one hand this should result
in a source water protection regime that is in some way balanced with other
interests and ideas of how the resource ought to be managed. There may however
be equity issues where some actors are better able to represent and advance
their interests; where minority interests are marginalised in a politicised
environment; or where some interests have little or no voice at all, for
instance, future generations or non-human residents of the watershed. This may
be overemphasising the influence of the political economy on water resources
management, but it does so only to make the point that it can not be ignored.
References
- Filson, G. C., Sethuratnam, S., Adekunle,
B., & Lamba, P. (2009). Beneficial management practice adoption in
five southern
- Ferreyra, C., & Beard, P. (2007). Participatory evaluation of collaborative and integrated water management: Insights from the field. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 50(2), 271-296.
- Ferreyra, C., de Loe, R. C., & Kreutzwiser, R. D. (2008). Imagined communities, contested watersheds: challenges to integrated water resources management in agricultural areas. Journal of rural studies, 24(3), 304-321.
- Lamba, P., Filson, G., & Adekunle, B. (2009).
Factors affecting the adoption of best management practices in southern
- Lane, M. B., McDonald, G. T., &
Morrison, T. H. (2004). Decentralisation and environmental management in
- Wolf, A. T. (1998). Conflict and cooperation along international waterways. water policy, 1(2), 251-265.
- Wolf, A. T. (2007). Shared waters: Conflict and cooperation. Annu. Rev. Environ. Resour., 32, 241-269.
