Adaptive and Integrated Water Management

Numerous arguments have been put forward regarding the need for a major change in water resources management. In particular increasing awareness of the impacts of climate change has lead to the insight that water management must be become more flexible in order to deal with uncertainties and surprise. This paper argues for a paradigm shift through the development and implementation of integrated and adaptive water management approaches. Adaptive management is defined here as a systematic process for improving management policies and practices by learning from the outcomes of implemented management strategies.

Development and implementation of adaptive management approaches requires structural changes in water management regimes. Such changes are slow due the inertia inherent in prevailing regimes. Concepts for understanding water regime properties and transition processes are summarized. Emphasis is given to the role of actor platforms and processes of social learning in multi-level governance regimes. The paper concludes a strong recommendation to implement learning cycles as an integral part of water management.

China’s severe water challenges as a result of rapid social and economic development, has led to significant impacts on regional eco-security, ecosystem service and human health. Grounded in ancient Chinese human ecological philosophy, a social-economic-natural complex ecosystem-based approach ‘China Water Vision’ is briefing to help people understand and simplify the complicated ecological dynamics and cybernetics of water. To transform the complexity vision into a sustainability mission, an integrative and adaptive management approach is being enhanced through capacity building including philosophical rethinking, institutional reform and technological renovation so as to transform reductionism to holism, fragmented to integrated management, and physical to ecological engineering.

Rapid industrialization and urbanization have taken place in China since its opening up to the world and transition from planned to market economy. In the past 28 years, China’s average annual economic growth rate (GDP) was about 9.67%. The pace, depth, and magnitude of this transition, while bringing prosperity to citizens, have exerted severe ecological stresses on local human living conditions and regional water sustainability. Water shortage, contamination, flooding and drought are only the surface symptoms of the water issue. Its indirect and long term impacts on regional and global eco-security are far-reaching. Water sustainability can only be assured with a human-ecological understanding of the complex interaction among environmental, economic, and social/cultural factors.

In dealing with this complexity, the key issue is to allow more people to understand China’s comprehensive water vision, its ecological dynamics and cybernetics, and search for effective technological instruments including integrative planning, engineering, management and capacity building to promote water sustainability (Fig. 1).

Arising from concerns that integrated and adaptive water resources management (I/AWRM) may not be sufficiently tailored to certain kinds of complex environments, this article examines their design through a governmentality framework, positing that I/AWRM could be enhanced by increasing accountability and local appropriateness through citizen’s actions that address or are situated in three types of domains — spatial units termed ‘holons’, hydrological regime ‘phases’ and problem-solving ‘tasks’ — an exercise termed ‘domanial’. For reasons explained in the paper, the geoeconomic scope of this paper are countries as in Sub-Saharan Africa where climatic variability and widespread irrigation dominates river basins that in turn have limited capacity for well-financed administration commonly seen in Europe. The need to recognize irrigation in adaptive water management is born from the great proportion of freshwater depleted by the sector and its effects on water shortages and behaviors in other sectors. Because of these characteristics, there is a risk that in irrigated semi-arid environments, IWRM (with a regulatory emphasis on managing water use to effect water allocation between sectors in large river basin units) or adaptive versions of IWRM (emphasizing iterative refinement and wider system complexity) will not engender satisfactory outcomes. The relevance and definitions of domains are explored in the paper, as is a brief policy discussion on domanial water resources management (DWRM).

In this chapter I explore the potential value of adaptive management of wicked problems, using Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin as a focus. The Murray-Darling Basin is one of the largest and most economically important catchments in Australia. Being large and eco-socially-politically very complex, resource managers face many ‘wicked’ problems-including dryland salinity, biodiversity decline, waterway eutrophication and competition for use of surface and groundwaters, all against the backdrop of climate change and increasing understandings of systems. Narrowly focused ‘rational’ approaches are proving insufficient to address these issues, so government policy discourse has turned, in part, to adaptive management. Adaptive management enables managers to learn about whole systems as they are managed, and so is expected to cope with complexity and uncertainty. As an observer of adaptive management of natural resource management in the Murray-Darling Basin I question whether adaptive management as it is currently practiced is reflecting the ideal. I suggest that current adaptive management projects are concerned with ‘taming’ problems to enable them to be addressed with conventional management. Ironically, this appears to be in response to complexity and uncertainty, a function of the risk averse cultures in which management operates. To use the full potential of adaptive management to address eco-socially-politically complex natural resource management issues requires an acceptance that risk and uncertainty are inevitable. The first step to achieving this could be to support leaders who can construct cultures conducive to more courageous adaptive management.

This paper presents the first completed version of the Management and Transition Framework developed in the NeWater¹ project. The framework is an interdisciplinary conceptual framework supporting the analysis of water systems and management regimes to improve the scientific understanding of system properties and to give practical guidance for the implementation of transition processes towards more adaptive systems. The framework integrates a range of concepts to develop a more coherent understanding of the complexity of water management regimes. Specific emphasis is given to adaptive capacity and learning processes. The framework has been developed in a participatory process involving a wide range of researchers from different disciplines. The framework development process made thus an important contribution to the process of integration within the project.

The current version of the MTF is a combination of graphical representation and narratives and divided into three components for the usage in research or practical implementation. The framework will be tested and refined in an interactive process between case study implementation, comparative analyses and generic concept development.

This study investigates groundwater systems and their usage related to interference during flood events and water engineering activities along rivers in urban areas. In the context of river training for flood protection a multitude of river engineering measures are currently planned in Europe. Due to the experience gained from hazardous flood events in the last twenty years, most countries have acquired a more comprehensive view of rivers. This includes the consideration of processes at the catchment scale as well as ecological aspects. Multiple interests concerning groundwater use and protection challenge the intentions of water engineering and groundwater protection schemes that can only be solved by simultaneously considering all of the various interests.

Extending current protection concepts with process-based approaches that consider the interaction between surface and subsurface waters could enhance sustainable development of groundwater resources. Knowledge of the composition of groundwater quality, including an adequate consideration of variable hydrologic boundary conditions and fluctuations of loads in rivers, is therefore of great importance.

Previously, decisions concerning impacts on urban groundwater flow regimes were typically taken at the level of the individual project. However, it is the sum of all impacts, and their interaction in time and space, that has to be considered. To accomplish this, it is necessary to develop instruments that facilitate to adequately quantify the consequences of the cumulative effects of numerous decisions concerning the groundwater flow regime and groundwater quality. At the same time, system profiles must be identify together with the delineation of boundaries and specific targets that lead to defined overall goals for specific groundwater areas.

These instruments form part of groundwater management systems, comprising among others, the setup of groundwater observation systems, high resolution numerical groundwater modelling, and the development and evaluation of scenarios. Applying methods of scenario development facilitates the assessment of effects of water engineering measures on riverine groundwater and its usage for drinking water. The implementation of these process-based approaches is illustrated by selected examples in the agglomeration of the city of Basel, Switzerland.

The literature addressing international river basin regimes has largely focused on either local institutional arrangements or international institutional arrangements. The focus has been primarily on the linkages between the national layer and the international layer but not between local and international layer. This is consistent with the dominant international relations theories that focus on inter-state relations. Consequently, there is almost no systematic study of how actors at the local layer link to international layer and vice versa. In the Rhine River Basins, both practitioners and scholars have assessed the crucial role of local actors and industries in governance of international river basin regime. However, these assessments fall short of addressing how local actors are crucial and how they are linked to the international layer. This paper investigates how institutional drivers at the local layers link to the international layer and how the linkages characterize vulnerability and adaptability of international river basin regimes.

In times of rapidly changing physical and regulatory environments, adaptiveness is one of the central parameters of sustainable water management. To investigate how different institutional settings are able to adapt to new conditions, two organisational settings in the Rhine basin are compared: the German water association Wupperverband and the Dutch water board Hoogheemraadschap De Stichtse Rijnlanden (HDSR). To facilitate comparison, the institutional settings of both regulatory systems are analysed based on empirical data, and using the Institutional Analysis and Development framework (IAD) (Ostrom 2005).

Historical development, Institutional settings for membership, roles and decision making of responsible water management agencies are analysed and compared in view of important adaptive management prerequisites. We argue that combinations of different institutional elements influence the capacity of both water agencies to adapt to changing conditions in an effective and legitimate way. Special focus is put on the role of emergent leadership, social learning, and both formal and informal forms of participation by stakeholders outside of the regulatory system.

As a conceptual solution to the complex problems of water management the concept of Integrated Water Resources Management [IWRM] has recently come to prominence. Though institutional transfer of IWRM from international to domestic arena has been widespread, this process is arguably under-researched. This paper attempts to address this problem by looking at the area of history and theory of IWRM, in particular focusing on how deeper analysis of the conceptual framework of IWRM can enhance the current understanding of the institutional transfer of IWRM. The paper consists of three parts. The first part deals with the history of the IWRM concept and its relations with other theories [e.g. integrated resource management, strategic planning]; the second part is devoted to globalization of IWRM and introduces the notion of policy transfer networks as applied to water governance; and the third part analyzes the on-going process of institutional transfer of IWRM to Guney-Dogu Anadolu Projesi [GAP] project in Turkey.

Models play a central tool in the development and implementation of management strategies. In this paper we identify four major modeling purposes that are important for understanding and managing complex socioenvironmental systems: prediction, exploratory analysis, communication and learning. Each of these purposes highlights different system characteristics, role of uncertainty, the properties of the model and its validation. We argue that uncertainty has no meaning in isolation, but only relative to a particular modeling activity and the purpose for which a model is developed (e.g., when a model is developed for predictive purposes uncertainty needs to be eliminated as much as possible, while when a model is developed for exploration uncertainty can be considered a source of creative thoughts). Here, we specifically investigate the implications different purposes have in dealing with uncertainties. We present a set of strategies modelers can use to guide their developments. In light of these concepts, the modeling activity is re-contextualized, from being a process that aims at representing objectively an external reality, to one that can only be defined according to the characteristics of the problem at hand: its level of complexity, the knowledge available, the purpose of the model and the modeling tools. We present an example from the adaptive management field.

Deliberating, negotiating, designing, and implementing water management policies are often disconnected activities. Different actors come together in separate arenas at different times, places and levels to gain support for their policies, programs and projects. Scale represents a class of key choices, commitments and constraints that actors contest or are forced to accept. In the Mekong region water governance is multi-level and multiscale with issues and actors that surge and ebb as they move from deliberation, negotiation and allocation of water and related services and back out again. The attributes and outcomes of multi-level governance — like fairness, equity and sustainability — depends not only on the interplay of institutions, but also the fortuitous and staged cross-level interactions among less rigid and formalized social networks and deliberative platforms. While attributing impacts to deliberative engagement is not a straight-forward exercise, our hypothesis remains that cross-level interactions in deliberations initially produce and later help influence negotiations and the robustness of structure of rules, agreements, policies and institutions.

The mandate for making decisions on allocation of freshwater resources in New Zealand has been devolved to regional councils by the Resource Management Act (RMA) enacted in 1991. The RMA promotes a sustainable management approach to integrated management of air, water and land. Growing demand for an increasingly scarce supply of sustainably allocatable water under a relatively buoyant market-led export economy based on primary production has increased competition and conflicts between different stakeholders. Regional councils have found it difficult to satisfactorily address such conflicts under the current RMA institutional framework and conflicts have escalated in regions such as Central Canterbury. As discussed in this paper, the objective of the Sustainable Groundwater Allocation Research project is to identify and address the underlying causes of these conflicts with the aim of enhancing the potential for integrated water management in New Zealand through adaptive governance. Progress to date suggests that institutional arrangements for water governance that facilitate strategic planning based on collaborative multistakeholder processes with cognitive and social learning are key ingredients in this quest.

There are growing accounts of innovative, often collaborative institutional approaches to water management that seem to respond better to new challenges in supply and water quality management. While some describe these new institutional designs as a “third way”, as opposed to traditional state-centered or market-based modes, we find that the most salient features of it to characterize even those effective state or market designs. The fundamental ingredient, which is patterned relationships, is one that arises when social networks are built around the formal (state or market) institutions. The necessary plane of description is not on the dimension of structure (state, market, or otherwise) but in the nature and workings of these relational networks. We describe necessary features of these networks. We illustrate these points with a case study: the Environmental Water Account (EWA), a novel market-based program for negotiating water allocations around the San Francisco Bay-Delta (California, U.S.A.). We point out how this institution worked precisely because it was not merely a market-based program but, rather, built in features of an effective social network. In this way, we found a capacity of the EWA to adapt to the dynamic nature of water resources and needs, along with the uncertainties inherent in a complex social-ecological system.

Over recent years there have been a number of attempts at integrated approaches being taken to water and flood risk management. Recent flooding events in Europe have triggered discussions about giving rivers back their nature (floodplains in stead of dikes). However, the emphasis tends to be on finding space for flood water in rural areas in order to protect the urban areas. The question how to deal with major floods in urban areas has not received much attention, and as yet the delivery of increased system resilience as defined by de Bruijn (2005) is a major challenge. In a resilient approach the focus is on accommodating flood waters, with concurrent impact minimalization and rapid recovery. Spatial solutions (diversification of defense levels for different land uses according to their vulnerability) may provide important opportunities to reduce flood impacts, whereas flood proofing of buildings enhances the recovery capacity of the system. In this paper it is argued that cities play an important role in driving the transition to adaptive flood management approaches across different spatial and temporal scales. Yet, at the moment there are a number of bottlenecks which have so far hampered the adoption and effective implementation of flood risk management into urban planning practices. As such the recent Urban Flood Management (UFM) project, which aims at the development and verification of UFM strategies and methodologies in the cities of Dordrecht, Hamburg and London, may provide relevant practical examples to address these issues. These experiences could contribute to national and European policy making, such as input for the EU Flood Directive. This paper discusses the background and challenges to the UFM project, and also shares the first insights from this international umbrella project.

Although drinking water provision and sanitation have long been considered as natural monopolies, the ongoing liberalisation of public services in the European Union is also influencing the water sector. In the Netherlands, the liberalisation trend has led the actors responsible for drinking water provision, wastewater collection, and surface water quality to start benchmarking processes in order to make the performance of the sector transparent and encourage learning across organisations. Benchmarking is regarded as what (1997) characterise as “a process for identifying and importing best practices to improve performance”, and the organisations involved have chosen for what (1996) categorise as a combination of ‘performance benchmarking’ and ‘competitor benchmarking’: comparison of performance measures across organisations that deliver the same product or service.

The adaptive management concept of Cyclic Floodplain Rejuvenation (CFR) has been implemented at the operational level in Dutch river management. The floodplains of Beuningen, situated to the west of Nijmegen functioned as a pilot study. Current river management formed the reference framework within which the CFR approach. By comparing and contrasting processes of importance within different floodplain management disciplines on a bio-geomorphological scale classification, differences in the scale preferences of involved actors were identified and understood. The tool developed to distinguish these different preferences in scales is the Integrated Scale Hierarchy. We concluded that the ability of river managers and conservationists to scale up for the purpose of CFR was a necessary condition for the success of operational CFR. The constraining arguments for focusing at the current floodplain level of management as opposed to the river reach level more suitable for the implementation of CFR measures, were then subjected to validation. We found the concerns for navigational safety and increased managerial complexity to be valid whereas the arguments relating to hydraulic effectiveness and conservation appeared to be ill-founded. Consequently, scaling up to the reach level remains a challenge for managers of the restrained lowland rivers of The Netherlands.

We investigated the impact of climate change in the Aral Sea basin (Central Asia) using long term observational time series of three indicators - air temperature, precipitation, and change in river discharge. For each indicator data of approximately 200 measurement locations (hydrological and meteorological stations) were considered. Changes and trends in the data were identified using statistical methods and modeling. Missing data in individual time series were estimated using correlations between related stations.

The results show that the annual air temperature in Central Asia started to increase considerably after 1950. The time series of mean annual temperatures show trends of increasing temperatures of varying magnitude. At some stations temperature trends are affected by human activities, especially in the vicinity of larger cities. On the contrary, no trends in precipitation or an increase in the amount of precipitation could be detected in the Central Asian region. No relation between precipitation and temperature increase could be detected.

Increasing temperatures accelerate the degradation of glacier fields in the Pamir and Tian Shan mountains which are a major source of river runoff in Central Asia. The reduction in glacier area and changes in precipitation patterns will alter the flow regime of the rivers — a fact that has been stated before. In this article we present an assessment of the magnitude of the expected changes based on available climate related data and provide examples of the implications of climate change on the flow regime of the river. Analysis of river runoff time series revealed that total runoff has so far changed only little. However, the shape of the hydrograph has changed, which will have strong impacts on the main water users, especially irrigated agriculture.

Given the observed and expected impact of climate change in the Aral Sea Basin and the large uncertainties of predicting future river runoff the paper concludes that new water management approaches are needed that can cope with increasing variability and uncertainty in water availability and their consequences for current and future water users.

Situated between the tidal river Hugli on the west, the overflowing swamps on the east, and having tidal creeks surrounding, Kolkata suffered chronically from drainage congestion and water logging (Fig 1), especially during monsoon period with large run-off The city proper has a combined sewer disposal system laid in west to east direction as per natural slope of the basin. The drainage is disposed through channels and canals partly via wetland ecosystem with sewage-fed fisheries for natural sewage treatment and partly directly to river Kulti, which further carries the discharge to Bay of Bengal. The added areas lack proper central sewerage collection system by the municipality and sewage management is done by septic tank, surface drain, conduits laid underground and deposited to the canals and local ponds resulting in pollution and health hazards. Though works have been done by the Central and State Government Organizations, the results have not been totally satisfactory due to many factors on the face of tremendous force of unprecedented urbanization. Recently, increasing awareness about environment, pollution, health hazard and sustainability has generated some actions taken up for better drainage solution in an adaptive and integrated manner. The municipality and local government are introducing measures, which are anticipated to minimise the adverse impacts on environment.

Parallel to the technical questions, institutional aspects of development in water sector and water saving strategies in irrigation occurred as one of the global aspects of a problem of water resources in the world and some regions particularly, apart of political and food problems (Madramootoo 2001; Van Hofwegen and Svendsen 2000; Burt and Stuart 2001; Molden.et al 2001).

Water development projects often fail, which represents a poor outcome given the limited progress against the Millennium Development Goals in providing people with adequate water and sanitation services. This may not be surprising given that water management has been identified as being in the complex system domain. According to the Cynefin framework, many traditional approaches are not suitable; but it suggests an approach based on the methods of probe, sense and respond. In line with this general framework, a participatory assessment methodology has been used to explore experiences in the atoll town of Tarawa in the Republic of Kiribati. After framing the case study, information was collected providing multiple perspectives and these include narrative sources. When reviewing previous experiences, project implementations are seen as probes or disturbances to the system from which patterns of behaviour can be sensed. For this purpose, the critical factors leading to success or failure are described using network representations. These are then used to inductively sense system patterns, and the conclusions thereupon reinforce key recommendations in a recent United Nations report. Additionally, the findings in this paper feed into a larger study where Agent-based simulation and Bayesian networks are used in a participatory setting for integrated assessments.

This paper examines a set of criteria for processes that aim to attain sustainable river basin planning at the regional scale. The criteria answer to the lack of deductive methodologies for the assessment and development of participatory approaches to water planning. They are derived from the two concepts and sustainability principles participation and integration. The criteria are here explained and their use is illustrated by presentation of the results and conclusions from two case studies. The first case concerns an assessment of the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD). — In what ways does the WFD support or obstruct processes for sustainable water management? The second case concerns the ongoing planning processes in Sweden that follow from the implementation of the WFD. The cases show that the criteria work well in achieving their purpose as their use resulted in practicable proposals for taking the studied planning objects closer to meeting the criteria.

Typical water management or natural resource management decision problems require decision makers to select a subset of available decision options that return a maximum benefit whilst satisfying limiting constraints, usually a budget constraint. This optimisation problem becomes increasingly difficult to solve if uncertainty aspects are being considered and/or as more decision options are included. To tackle this selection problem the multi-criteria analysis tool (MCAT) which contains both multi-criteria functionality and solution methods was developed. The benefit scores for the decision options are computed with the well known compromise programming technique. To optimise the selection of options subject to the constraints, two heuristics, namely Local Search and Tabu Search were coded. MCAT was primarily developed to optimise water management decision making in Australia. However it can also be used to solve a range of other decision problems in natural resources management as well.