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.