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Replenishing Australia’s Water Future: From Stagnation to Innovation Read chapter Read first chapter

2018 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

Regulatory and Economic Instruments: A Useful Partnership to Achieve Collective Objectives?

Authors : Adam Loch, C Dionisio Perez-Blanco, Dolores Rey, Erin O’Donnell, David Adamson

Published in: Reforming Water Law and Governance

Publisher: Springer Singapore

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Abstract

In this chapter we examine how water governance and demand management arrangements can be linked to economic instruments, such as water markets, to address the broad range of water reallocation problems that exist in many global contexts. The utilization of economic instruments is context-specific throughout the world and can take many forms. This chapter therefore lists the pros and cons of some more common instruments. While successfully combining regulatory and economic instruments is far from straightforward, policy-makers can learn from growing evidence of successful partnerships between these two approaches. It may be costly both in terms of political support and transaction investments to strip away existing arrangements in favour of more flexible and better-suited institutions to manage scarce water resources. However, it would be expected that ignoring the problems, and hoping they will resolve themselves, would be more harmful to private and public welfare outcomes in the long run.

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previous chapter Water Entitlements as Property: A Work in Progress or Watertight Now?
next chapter Water Markets and Regulation: Implementation, Successes and Limitations
Footnotes
1
Market failure occurs when markets fail to allocate resources efficiently. In this case, no market may exist for the good.
 
2
Missing markets deal with intertemporal externality problems that create information asymmetry for current generations, and exclude the concerns of future generations.
 
3
It is this point that can work against arguments for provision of water as a basic human right. The infrastructure involved to establish (and eventually replace) the means to cleanse, store and deliver water is significant—usually regardless of the volumes put through it. Thus, while water access is a right, it comes at a high economic cost which must be addressed in some meaningful way by policy-makers.
 
4
In contrast, governments in developing countries typically impose price controls to keep prices below competitive levels.
 
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Metadata
Title
Regulatory and Economic Instruments: A Useful Partnership to Achieve Collective Objectives?
Authors
Adam Loch
C Dionisio Perez-Blanco
Dolores Rey
Erin O’Donnell
David Adamson
Copyright Year
2018
Publisher
Springer Singapore
Book
Reforming Water Law and Governance

Print ISBN: 978-981-10-8976-3

Electronic ISBN: 978-981-10-8977-0

Copyright Year: 2018

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8977-0_6