Watersheds as Sites of Conflict

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

1. Filson, G. C., Sethuratnam, S., Adekunle, B., & Lamba, P. (2009). Beneficial management practice adoption in five southern Ontario watersheds. Journal of Sustainable Agriculture, 33(2), 229-252.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Lamba, P., Filson, G., & Adekunle, B. (2009). Factors affecting the adoption of best management practices in southern Ontario. The Environmentalist, 29(1), 64-77.
5. Lane, M. B., McDonald, G. T., & Morrison, T. H. (2004). Decentralisation and environmental management in Australia: a comment on the prescriptions of the Wentworth Group. Australian Geographical Studies, 42(1), 103-115.
6. Wolf, A. T. (1998). Conflict and cooperation along international waterways. water policy, 1(2), 251-265.
7. Wolf, A. T. (2007). Shared waters: Conflict and cooperation. Annu. Rev. Environ. Resour., 32, 241-269.

Issues of Fit (an installment)

Sustainable development requires that we better understand how our economic activities are interwoven with the ecological goods and services that are either factors of production directly, or are implicated within their supply chain. However to limit the analysis to economic and environmental factors, and not fully embrace the social dimensions of the SD challenge, is to overlook instrumental, institutional and political dimensions that may make or break the potential for progress. From a water management and ecosystem service perspective many fundamentally important social factors are of a geographical nature, and this requires that issues of fit be considered.

One take on fit begins with the notion of a dislocation of ecosystem service supply from the accruing of benefits. Similarly there are temporal dimensions and associated incongruities between the human and ecological dimensions of integrated socio-ecological systems. These factors have important implications that present serious challenges for our policy systems.

Better linkages between science and policy is agreed upon as essential to realising more sustainable development. However natural scientists are more typically focused on the factors of ecosystem service supply. Social scientists on the other hand tend to be more interested in the benefits. Where supply and benefit may be separated by large distances in both time and space, including municipal (or even state/province) jurisdictional divides, managing these discontinuities is essential to moving forward, but it falls in the middle, not in either camp, and is often overlooked.

Politically it is important that users understand their dependence on ecosystem services, but moreover that those users and their representatives understand that the source of the associated benefits may lie beyond their jurisdictional reach. Similarly their decision making may have externalities in jurisdictions elsewhere.  Accordingly adaptive policies that work across scales and jurisdictions are therefore necessary, but very new and often untested ground for public administration.

Moreover, the notion that a watershed may be a jurisdiction in its own right, with citizens who have rights and obligations to one another that transcend political boundaries, but who also may be at odds with one another in terms of values and goals, is still very much a theoretical construct. This condition presents a host of institutional challenges, both formal and informal, which, taken together, speak to perhaps one of the most daunting meta-challenges of sustainable development: that of values, culture and cultural lock-in.

These general remarks are intended as an informal introduction to some of the issues at play as concerns fit and the lack of fit. Future installments on this issue are expected to discuss topics in more detail, including, nested and cross-scale institutions, as well as institutional effectiveness; socio-ecological resilience and (dynamic, evolving) complex ecological-economic systems; and the effects of watershed political economy on institutional development and implementation.