A Watershed Moment for Democracy?

Originally published in the magazine of the Canadian Association for the Club of Rome, Spring 2010.

The Canadian water resources management community knows there is something wrong. We live in relative abundance, yet in parts of the country water stress is greater than ever, and the cumulative effects of less obvious, often longer-term stressors are difficult to determine. There is a growing sense that our water resources are not as secure as once thought. Despite these increasing concerns, there is little by way of serious investment in transforming water management in Canada to secure our most precious and fundamentally important natural resource.

Numerous recent reports offer ideas that seek to address the shortfalls. This paper will draw out some of the common elements, but its primary purpose is to detail and discuss the value of a more democratic water management system. One that connects and is connected to Canadians, and one that would broaden the sphere of responsibility for water management. This discussion does not discount the need for governments, officials and accountable institutions but rather is meant to introduce a complimentary component to the governance mix.

While many of these ideas are not new, they should be revisited and orientated within the current context. That is the task at hand. Part of this will be achieved through presentation of this discussion paper. The bulk of this work, hopefully, will take place online in the public sphere, where readers are invited to address any statements made here, and put forward new or alternative ideas and information. A blog address will be provided at the end of the article.


Background on Water

Since the 1985 release of Currents of Change , water policy recommendations and reports in Canada have had a number of points in common. They recognise that water management takes place in a large number of departments and at all levels of government. As a result, coordinated decision making is required in order to avoid the often unanticipated effects of decisions made in isolation. The watershed is widely seen as the most appropriate operational unit for managing water. Hydrologically a quasi-closed system, use of watershed boundaries enables important supply and demand, mass balance, and carrying capacity calculations. By extension, as a tension develops between natural and political jurisdictions, the regionality of water issues is understood.

Taken together, these factors are encapsulated by the theory and practice of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM). While there are many ways to identify and arrange the challenges IWRM is faced with, in a simplified way the myriad of issues are the result of multi-user allocation, misuse and overuse in the context of a complex policy environment and a fluctuating hydrological cycle.

Looking from east to west, Canada is comprised of five major watersheds : the Atlantic Ocean watershed, containing the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River; the Hudson Bay watershed, running from Alberta’s border with British Columbia eastward across the prairies toward Hudson Bay; the Arctic Ocean watershed, beginning just north of Edmonton and opening wider as it makes its way north; a small arc of the Gulf of Mexico watershed stretching along the southern edge of Alberta and Saskatchewan; and finally the Pacific Watershed, draining from the Rockies into the Pacific, from north to south. All of these great watersheds are shared in part with the United States, and all of them cross over provincial and territorial boundaries.

While there is a breadth of diversity in landscape within these major watersheds, and the subwatersheds that comprise them, there are also regional similarities and shared concerns. For example, across the southern extent of the Hudson Bay watershed, Canada’s prairies were experiencing severe drought in 2009 , heavily impacting the agriculture sector and the many communities that have strong ties to it. In 2007, at the upper end of the Atlantic Ocean watershed, the water level in Lake Superior was at its lowest level in over 100 years . These low levels in turn caused lowering levels downstream, impacting numerous interests from commercial navigation to recreational boating, fish spawning and power production, setting off a chain of social, environmental and economic impacts.

Multiple examples of these regional concerns exist within all the major watersheds. The common message is that society’s interests are directly affected in abrupt and powerful ways by changes in the quantity and quality of water. Often this is a regional phenomenon, spanning political jurisdictions while affecting local and national economies. The issues are not going away and the level of response thus far has been unconvincing.

Whether we catch fish, eat fish, use power or goods that are shipped by freighter, live in or visit a shoreline tourist community, go to the beach, go to the cottage, work in a factory, or live in a factory town, even something as basic and universal as drinking water, the list goes on. To varying and substantial degrees, we are all directly and indirectly affected by the state of our water resources. There is a strong business case for change and everyone has a vested interest in the outcome. Yet there is a general disconnect between the importance of these issues to every Canadian and the decision making role they have been confined to over the years.


A Look at Governance

When it comes to governance, there are a range of views on what elements should be included. However, there is general agreement that governance is larger than governments. Adapted from a report by the Global Water Partnership, governance can be framed this way :

Governance is a more inclusive concept than government per se; it embraces the relationship between a society and its government. It is defined by the means and institutions through which society articulates its interests and influences the decisions of government in directing the path forward and structure of society.

This definition of a more distributed model of governance, with society articulating its interests to decision makers, is consistent with the established importance of these decisions to daily life. Recent water policy reports support the need for governance to be more people-centric. As the Policy Research Initiative points out, IWRM should connect water management decision making with all relevant parties that have an interest in water . The Forum for Leadership on Water (FLOW) called for a new conservation ethic among Canadians that involves understanding the connection between our water resources and our high standard of living . Following a national series of multi-stakeholder workshops on water policy, Pollution Probe called for a broadly shared ethic of stewardship and responsibility for water management .

While the above definition of governance encompasses a wider and more inclusive decision making model based on dialogue-rich processes, it also infers what organisations like FLOW and Pollution Probe have said explicitly: Canadians have a large role to play in the governance of their water resources; and Canadians have a responsibility to ensure their interests are known and accounted for in decision making.

Critics of this model state that people aren’t interested in participating in decision making. This is in part a fair criticism, but it is also incomplete. While the general public may not be inclined to engage in decision making at this time, other factors warrant consideration.

The state of water resources governance in Canada is not unlike or disconnected to wider social phenomenon. In January 2010, the Institute of Wellbeing released a report that characterises what they call “a huge democratic deficit” in Canada . During a 2008 conference speech, Ralph Nader suggested that commercial values are increasingly taking the place of once dominant civic values such as access to justice, democratic practices, tolerance, health, and safety. He stated that while we’re supposed to be engaged citizens, and actively participate in our democracy through mechanisms such as municipal committees, citizen coalitions, or by contacting our political representatives, the reality is that we are not . One can speculate about the connection between a change is societal values, the relative level of engagement, and the level of response on both water and other issues of societal concern.

These perspectives identify a disturbing trend, but not our final state. The Institute of Wellbeing also found that while Canadians are disengaging from formal processes, they have not disengaged entirely. Instead, there is an increasing interest in informal mechanisms as people seek new ways to engage governments and participate in decision-making .


Exploring a Distributed Model

Many current discussions on water governance call for omnibus legislation and a stronger federal role . Acknowledging the need to clarify departmental mandates and improve communication between them, water management can also be seen as the management of ecosystem services. These ecosystem services include fishing, food production, irrigation, transportation and navigation, flood control, energy, industry, biodiversity, tourism, real estate, sense of place, culture and identity. They have both local and regional aspects and management decisions are being made at all levels of government. Upstream affects downstream while social and economic factors affect and are affected by both.

Each ecosystem service has a unique, though not exclusive, set of stakeholders from across sectors, with most stakeholders having an interest in more than one ecosystem service. Providing opportunities for all concerned stakeholders to engage in decision making would be a complex and time consuming exercise. However, in return, various stakeholders bring information in from other management discussions, in effect integrating the different decision dialogues in a more involved and potentially transparent way.

While this does not negate competition for water resources between users, it can provide an opportunity for wider understanding on the nature of the conflict and possible compromises. Further if there is an inequitable balance in access or acceptable behaviour it will be more readily identified and made visible, requiring explanation or some manner of remedy. Evidentially this will require objective, science-based information, making science an essential stakeholder.

Functionally, these stakeholder communities of interest become another sort of jurisdiction, connected with the regional issue(s) of the watershed while also residing in some place, or political jurisdiction. So rather than steering away from the issue of misalignment of natural and political jurisdictions, a distributed model of governance embraces it and ties these jurisdictions together.

Knowing water is managed at different and sometimes very large scales, it is unlikely that individuals and small groups have the capacity to be present in all discussions. For example, discussions seeking to balance upstream and downstream interests with each other, and with the larger forces of regional and national economies, are often beyond the reach of these stakeholders. For this we can turn to Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and Civil Society Organisations (CSOs).

While local NGOs and CSOs may not always have the individual capacity to act at higher levels of policy and resource management, they are very good at coordinating amongst themselves and organising into networks and coalitions. These are sometimes well established networks and other times emerge as ad-hoc collaboration for a united cause. As respected and trusted members of their respective communities, these networks, and their constituent organisations, can help to facilitate the upstream-downstream dialogue, integrate a range of issues, and bring detailed knowledge and information to decision making while helping connect decision making back to the affected communities of interest and place.

Finally, involvement of the public serves to generate “institutional memory” by housing knowledge of decision making with people who have a long-term interest in a given issue or place. In this way distributed governance helps keep the longer-term objectives of environmental resources management present in decision making circles that exist on much shorter timelines, moving the water agenda beyond political cycles and institutional mandates.


Current Context

For many years there has been a growing interest in consulting people on issues at the local level. This is most evident in the international development community where participatory processes have been widely used for decades. These approaches bring valuable local knowledge and perspective to decision making while building local ownership over development efforts, thereby making them more sustainable in the long run.

The most exciting new feature to enter the mix in recent years is the growing presence of social media, particularly mobile phones, and the growth of e-governance approaches. A digital democracy is emerging where, for instance, citizens are texting and videoing information from local polling stations to a central location where it is collected and accessible . This “crowd-sourcing” approach to gathering information and making new knowledge is being applied to a variety of situations where local information is needed to generate a more complete understanding of a situation. Ushahidi, for instance, is an online platform that has been used extensively to map information on a range of issues from wildlife tracking in Kenya, to crime in Atlanta and election monitoring around the world .

This channel of communication works both ways. For example, the United Nations Foundation funded mHealth Alliance is using mobile phone technology to improve health delivery in developing countries . Alongside information gathering functions such as remote data collection and disease tracking, mHealth Alliance works to address a 50% gap in coverage by providing education, awareness and healthcare worker training using the same channels.

In Bangladesh another digital technology called a “farmer card” is used to transfer subsidies directly to farmers, bypassing middlemen who typically siphon off a large portion of government assistance . Eventually covering almost 20 million small or medium-sized farms, these farmer cards will supply both farmers and governments with a range of information and services.

Critics of many traditional approaches to public participation argue that it is not truly inclusive. That inclusive consultation is two-way, transparent and sincere, with upfront dialogue before the planning begins that continues through to implementation. This is the opportunity that is emerging with every new application of social media. A watershed-based distributed governance model can benefit from these global efforts in participatory local governance.


Conclusions and Recommendations

Currently the sustainable development agenda is largely about transition away from unsustainable trends toward more sustainable patterns of development. The current approach to water management in Canada may be seen as one of these unsustainable trends. However, the perceived abundance of water dissipates urgency from increasingly serious concerns.

The history of humankind is full of eleventh hour interventions. When the going gets bad enough we relent, let go of the status quo and do something different. If the objective of foresight is to avoid tipping points and irreversible environmental and social impacts, the question then becomes, “How bad is bad enough, and how bad is it?”

Water is a complicated subject with many interconnected facets that are affected in different ways by a range of stressors, and there is real concern that the cumulative effects may finally be adding up. In recent years the Great Lakes Commission has been urging policy makers to take action, saying that the Great Lakes may be near an environmental tipping point . At a recent conservation and endangered species conference in Winnipeg there was a similar dialogue with regard to changing environmental conditions on the Canadian prairies .

These two scenarios raise real concern for smaller regions where there is comparatively less monitoring and research, and where the lack of good information makes it difficult to determine what may be going on. To have better foresight we need a better problem statement. This requires systems of communication that reach out and come in from all corners of society, and that can get information from the ground into decision making as efficiently as possible.

Most of all we need to get first things first. Responsibility for water is everyone’s concern. While accountability rests with those whose job it is to manage these issues, the rest of us are responsible for giving them the information they need and for holding them to account.

A more distributed approach to governance that is both grounded in, and leading toward, a greater sense of personal responsibility, will help address uncertainty and complexities by bringing new and important information to decision makers. It will promote long-term thinking through a new form of institutional memory, while at the same time helping water management achieve the integration we have been talking about for decades. Specific measures that can help move in this direction include the following.


Recommendation: Citizens should be empowered with knowledge and improved access to decision making.

In 2007 a working group led by Roberta Bondar released Shaping Our Schools Shaping Our Future. Their lead recommendation was that linkages between science, technology, society, and the environment, in the context of sustainable development, be mainstreamed throughout the curriculum . These experts understood the fundamental importance of environmental literacy to achieving real traction on these issues.

Building on this knowledge platform, it is essential that citizens be empowered by a broader, more distributed system of governance that provides access to the agenda and employs second generation, two-way communications that take advantage of current technologies and approaches. The ensuing dialogue should be sincere and transparent.


Recommendation: Restrictions on advocacy activity as dictated by the Income Tax Act should be revisited.

NGOs and CSOs communicate and organise well, are connected with and trusted by communities, and operate at all levels of decision making. They are in large part driven by donor money. These donations are a de facto show of support for their work and their mission. For this reason they should be allowed voice and provided with access. Currently the Income Tax Act requires that no more than 10% of organisation’s resources be directed toward advocacy, considerably limiting their ability to represent their constituency of donors and members.


While at the outset there may be an additional burden, given the level of risk and uncertainty this is a necessary transaction cost to find and refine the next generation approaches for an inclusive watershed management paradigm. These approaches will form the basis of our transition away from today’s unsustainable trends, toward increasingly sustainable development.

Transparency of various stakeholder inputs and contributions to decision making makes way for informed debate. This further energises public interest, leading to a more vigorous and determined accountability structure while bringing momentum to a shift back toward civic values.

One wonders what the broader benefits to society might be from an increasingly engaged constituency.


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References


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