Towards a Model for Ecosystem Governance: An Integrated Water Resource Management Example

The concept of governance, and especially good governance, is pivotal to the achievement of Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM). The concepts of

governance

used in much of the current literature on IWRM indicate that it is often used in a contradictory way and sometimes used interchangeably with the word

government

. This chapter proposes a Trialogue Model of governance that is structured around three groups of actors — government, society and science — and discusses the dynamic interactions between these groups. The interfaces between these three groups of actors, or actor-clusters, and the dynamics of their interactions, provide the basis for a critical assessment of governance as a concept. The chapter isolates four specific elements of scale that are relevant to governance: economic, political, administrative and international; as well as three structural aspects: mechanisms, processes and institutions. In addition, the chapter identifies four processes: articulating interests, exercising legal rights, discharging legal obligations and mediating disputes, and analyses the central role of norms and values in good governance. Finally, an analytical distinction is made between governance as a

process

and governance as a

product

, and a new definition of ecosystem governance is offered. Evidence is presented to demonstrate the highly dynamic nature of governance processes, with clear differences that distinguish mature democracies and fledgling democracies.