Managing the socio-ecology of very large rivers: Collective choice rules in IWRM narratives

Highlights

• The integrated water resources management (IWRM) paradigm can be modified to include narratives at the meso-level.

• These narratives can resolve or ameliorate tensions between different interests.

• This study shows a possible typology of narratives of collective choice rules.

• In the two cases studied (China and India), these include the economics of water use, gains from technology and normative incentives.

Abstract

Integrated water resources management (IWRM) has been lauded as an integrative and participatory form of governance. However, critics claim that actual implementation remains problematic, because of deep path dependencies and the entrenched interests. This paper investigates this claim by looking at the formation of collective choice rules in integrated water resources management reforms in China’s Yellow River and the Ganges in India. The two rivers provide a natural experiment—similarity in physical scale, complexity, and integrated water resources management reforms, but highly different in social and policy contexts. Using the Q methodology and Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework, we find that, despite differences in policy contexts, narratives amongst the stakeholders in the two rivers are surprisingly similar, including a continued role for a negotiated local approach, and the presence of normative incentives for collective action, underwritten by deep historical meanings of the rivers. These narratives in turn provide some explanation for the choice of collective rules in use. They suggest that a modified form of integrated water resources management, taking into account narratives and collective choice rules, is useful for the governance of very large rivers across different contexts.

Introduction

The management of very large trans-boundary rivers is a critical component of the ecological equation, as they host 40% of the world’s population (Jansky et al., 2004). The concept of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) has emerged as a possible socio-ecological governance model (Cook and Bakker, 2012), involving physical, sectorial, and organizational integration (Kidd and Shaw, 2007). IWRM has practical as well as normative dimensions, relating to hard infrastructural integration such as at the basin level or catchment scale of a water body, as well as softer integration in management and governance including in laws, or management agreements that are formal decision-making structures in water allocation and management (Bressers and Kuks, 2004).

This broad normative appeal allowed IWRM to gain traction (Ohlson, 1999, Newson, 2000, Matondo, 2002, Global Water Partnership, 2007, UNEP, 2006)—from a management perspective, IWRM is expected to provide better adaptability against unforeseen conditions such as droughts or floods (e.g. Pahl-Wostl, 2007, UNEP, 2006, Watson, 2007, Mitchell, 2007); as a decision-making matrix, it devolves authority from national or federal governments to local governments, river basin organizations, and local water users (Kemper et al., 2007), allowing for multi-stakeholder participation and knowledge interests from different groups (Brunner and Steelman, 2005).

While elements of IWRM have been widely adopted in countries as diverse as America, Israel and Chile (Watson, 2007), and (although somewhat less well-recorded) in China (Zhang et al., 2010) and India (Janakarajan, 2006), IWRM has its share of detractors. Many attempts to implement IWRM have failed (Jonker, 2002, Jeffrey and Gearey, 2006, Pahl-Wostl and Jeffrey, 2007). In those cases where IWRM has been successfully implemented, the outcomes have fallen short of what its advocates have anticipated (Shah and Van Koppen, 2006, Medema and Jeffrey, 2005).

Current research on the failures of IWRM has focused on difficulties in implementation, especially the need to deal with complexity and uncertainty (Ohlson, 1999, Jeffrey and Gearey, 2006, Medema et al., 2008), along both the social and the physical dimensions. First, integration needs to take place across existing organizations and sections where there are already entrenched groups and interests (UNESCO and Green Cross International, 2003). Agreement on what a “collective interest” constitutes and how best to pursue this is difficult (Blomquist and Schlager, 2005). But such agreement is crucial to implementation. A second challenge stems from the physical integration of an IWRM system. Expansive scales and multiple physical dimensions can make it difficult for stakeholders to reach agreement (Van Cleve et al., 2006). As Barnett and O’Neill (2010, p. 212) point out, “a major issue with large infrastructural developments is the way they commit capital and institutions to trajectories that are difficult to change in the future”. This has variously been described as the problem of “sunk costs,” (Ingram and Fraser, 2006) or path dependencies. Complexity is also generated when the social and the physical interact—for example, environmental damage caused by over-exploitation, excessive pollution, and river engineering works (Brookes, 2002), integrating local livelihoods with ecology (fisheries and aquaculture), and taking into consideration the spiritual and cultural aspects of water, which might play a key role in influencing public sentiments (Rahaman and Varis, 2005).

Applying IWRM to the socio-ecology of rivers is therefore an attempt at a highly complex institutional change (Folke, 2006). In dealing with this complexity, scholars have argued for complements such as decentralised environmental management (Oates, 1998) or multi-level governance (Marks and Hooghe, 2004). More recently, the notion of adaptive water management and the need for social learning has been persuasively made by Pahl-Wostl et al. (2007) who argue that “sustainable management of water resources and the implementation of IWRM cannot be realized unless current water management regimes undergo a transition towards more adaptive water management.” Given that large riparian systems are too complex to be managed by high-level integrative plans, water management is a necessarily a political process and the implementation is to some extent experimentation.

But how do we reconcile the need for integration and decentralization? And how do we understand political realities of IWRM without resorting to idiosyncratic experimentation? This paper proposes that an investigation of meso-level rules about IWRM can provide some answers. Such an investigation also addresses an empirical gap in extant IWRM analyses, which have tended to focus either on fairly abstract, constitutional choice level (Blomquist and Schlager, 2005) or operational level rules (Fischhendler, 2008). Table 1 provides an illustrative list.

Our study is on the narratives in the Yellow River in China and Ganges in India, using Ostrom’s (1990) Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework, a device for studying collective-choice rules amongst communities. This paper outlines our study in four parts. First, we outline the theoretical framework of socio-ecology and explain our use of the IAD, in particular the impact of “rules-in-use” on policy outcomes. Second, we provide a conceptual map of the two cases, showing the crisis that brought about the IWRM reforms. Third, we discuss the results of the Q-methodology in uncovering the key discourse coalitions and narratives of both rivers and show how they are similar to each other, a key contribution of this paper. In particular, we find that, although the formal rules and regulations had been changed to a more centralized, integrated structure, the narratives display a continued reliance on local, negotiated approach. Second, the deep cultural and historical meanings of the rivers play a pivotal role in providing normative incentives for collective action; and relatedly, this provides a way of ameliorating between local and national interests. Last, we argue that understanding narratives allows for a modified form of IWRM which provides explicitly for the contested nature of rules-in-use, as well as a role for normative incentives, which can account for a reframing of entrenched interests and existing path dependencies.