Dutch water governance is world famous. It to a large extent determines the global public image of the Netherlands, with its windmills, polders, dikes and dams, and the eternal fight against the water, symbolized by the engineering marvel of the Delta Works. Dutch water governance has a history that dates back to the 11th century. Since the last 200 years, water governance has, however, undergone significant changes. Important historical events setting in motion longer-term developments for Dutch water governance were the Napoleonic rule, land reclamation projects, the Big Flood of 1953, the Afsluitdijk, the impoldering of the former Southern Sea, the ecological turn in water management, and the more integrated approach of “living with water.” In the current anthropocentric age, climate change presents a key challenge for Dutch water governance, as a country that for a large part is situated below sea level and is prone to flooding.
The existing Dutch water governance system is multilevel, publicly financed, and, compared to many other countries, still relatively decentralized. The responsibilities for water management are shared among the national government and Directorate-General for Public Works and Water Management, provinces, regional water authorities, and municipalities. Besides these governmental layers, the Delta Commissioner is specifically designed to stimulate a forward-looking view when it comes to water management and climate change. With the Delta Commissioner and Delta Program, the Netherlands aims to become a climate-resilient and water-robust country in 2050.
Robustness, adaptation, coordination, integration, and democratization are key ingredients of a future-proof water governance arrangement that can support a climate-resilient Dutch delta. In recent years, the Netherlands already has been confronted with many climate extremes and will need to transform its water management system to better cope with floods but even more so to deal with droughts and sea-levels rising. The latest reports of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change show that more adaptive measures are needed. Such measures also require a stronger coordination between governmental levels, sectors, policies, and infrastructure investments. Furthermore, preparing for the future also requires engagement and integration with other challenges, such as the energy transition, nature conservation, and circular economy. To contribute to sustainability goals related to the energy transition and circular economy, barriers for technical innovation and changes to institutionalized responsibilities will need to be further analyzed and lifted.
To govern for the longer term, current democratic institutions may not always be up to the task. Experiments with deliberative forms of democracy and novel ideas to safeguard the interests of future generations are to be further tested and researched to discover their potential for securing a more long-term oriented and integrated approach in water governance.
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Article
Water Governance in the Netherlands
M.L. (Marie Louise) Blankesteijn and W.D. (Wieke) Pot
Article
The Allocation of Groundwater: From Superstition to Science
Burke W. Griggs
Groundwater is a critical natural resource, but the law has always struggled with it. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, the common law developed several doctrines to allocate groundwater among competing users. The groundwater revolution of the mid-20th century produced an explosive growth in pumping worldwide—and quickly exposed the flaws of these doctrines. Legal rules predicated on land and on surface waters could not meet the challenges posed by the common-pool groundwater resource: those of understanding groundwater dynamics, quantifying the impacts of pumping on other water rights, and devising satisfactory remedies. Unfettered by received property restraints, pumping on an industrial, aquifer-wide scale depleted and contaminated aquifers, regardless of doctrine.
The groundwater revolution motivated significant legal developments. Starting in the 1970s, the Supreme Court of the United States adapted its methods for resolving interstate water disputes to include the effects of groundwater pumping. This jurisprudence has fundamentally influenced international groundwater law, including the negotiation of trans-boundary aquifer agreements. Advances in hydrogeology and computer groundwater modeling have enabled states and parties to evaluate the effects of basin-wide pumping. Nonetheless, difficult legal and governance problems remain. Which level of government—local, state, or national—should exercise jurisdiction over groundwater? What level of pumping qualifies as “safe yield,” especially when the aquifer is overdrawn? How do the demands of modern environmental law and the public trust doctrine affect groundwater rights? How can governments satisfy long-neglected claims to water justice made by Indigenous and minority communities? Innovations in groundwater management provide promising answers. The conjunctive management of surface and groundwater can stabilize water supplies, improve water quality, and protect ecosystems. Integrated water resources management seeks to holistically manage groundwater to achieve social and economic equity. Water markets can reward water conservation, attract new market participants, and encourage the migration of groundwater allocations to more valuable uses, including environmental uses.
The modern law of groundwater allocation combines older property doctrines with 21st-century regulatory ideals, but the mixture can be unstable. In nations with long-established water codes such as the United States, common-law Anglophone nations, and various European nations, groundwater law has evolved, if haltingly, to incorporate permitting systems, environmental regulation, and water markets. Elsewhere, the challenges are extreme. Long-standing calls for groundwater reform in India remain unheeded as tens of millions of unregulated tube wells pump away. In China, chronic groundwater mismanagement and aquifer contamination belie the roseate claims of national water law. Sub-Saharan nations have enacted progressive groundwater laws, but poverty, racism, and corruption have maintained grim groundwater realities. Across the field, experts have long identified the central problems and reached a rough consensus about the most effective solutions; there is also a common commitment to secure environmental justice and protect groundwater-dependent ecosystems. The most pressing legal work thus requires building practical pathways to reach these solutions and, most importantly, to connect the public with the groundwater on which it increasingly depends.
Article
Environmental Policy and the Double Dividend Hypothesis
Antonio M. Bento
Since the 1990s, the so-called double-dividend debate—that is, the possibility that swaps of newly environmental taxes for existing distortionary taxes such as taxes on labor or capital could simultaneously improve environmental quality and reduce the distortionary costs of tax system—has attracted the attention of policymakers and academics. And while prior to the 1990s environmental economics as a field was not ready to inform this debate, scholars quickly moved to incorporate insights of the theory of second-best from public economics to inform the discussion. The result was a substantial advancement of the field of environmental economics, with the evaluation of the welfare effects of alternative policy instruments relying on general equilibrium models with pre-existing distortions.
Initially, scholars casted substantially doubt on the prospects of a double dividend, and suggested that environmental tax reforms would not reduce the distortionary costs of the tax system. This is because studies documented that the tax-interaction effect dominated the revenue-recycling effect. That is, newly environmental taxes interact with pre-existing distortions in labor markets. And even when the revenues of environmental taxes are used to cut the rate of the labor tax, the environmental tax reform exacerbates, rather than alleviate, pre-existing distortions in labor markets. Throughout the 2000s and in more recent decades, the literature has documented many instances where a double dividend is more likely to exist, including in the context of developing countries.
Article
Ecological Water Management in Cities
Timothy Beatley
Managing water in cities presents a series of intersecting challenges. Rapid urbanization, wasteful consumption, minimal efforts at urban or ecological planning, and especially climate change have made management of urban water more difficult. Urban water management is multifaceted and interconnected: cities must at once address problems of too much water (i.e., more frequent and extreme weather events, increased riverine and coastal flooding, and rising sea levels), but also not enough water (e.g., drought and water scarcity), as well as the need to protect the quality of water and water bodies.
This article presents a comprehensive and holistic picture of water planning challenges facing cities, and the historical approaches and newer methods embraced by cities with special attention to the need to consider the special effects of climate change on these multiple aspects of water and the role of ecological planning and design in responding to them. Ecological planning represents the best and most effective approach to urban water management, and ecological planning approaches hold the most promise for achieving the best overall outcomes in cities when taking into account multiple benefits (e.g., minimizing natural hazards, securing a sustainable water supply) as well as the need to protect and restore the natural environment. There are many opportunities to build on to the history of ecological planning, and ecological planning for water is growing in importance and momentum. Ecological planning for water provides the chance to profoundly rethink and readjust mankind’s relationship to water and provides the chance also to reimagine and reshape cities of the 21st century.
Article
Environmental and Cultural Flows in Aotearoa and Australia
Erin O'Donnell and Elizabeth Macpherson
In settler colonial states like Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, water for the environment and the water rights of Indigenous Peoples often share the common experience of being too little and too late. Water pathways have been constrained and defined by settler colonialism, and as a result, settler state water law has both a legitimacy problem, in failing to acknowledge or implement the rights of Indigenous Peoples, and a sustainability problem, as the health of water systems continues to decline. In both Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, the focus of water law has historically been to facilitate use of the water resource to support economic development, excluding the rights of Indigenous Peoples and poorly protecting water ecosystems. However, in the early 21st century, both countries made significant advances in recognizing the needs of the environment and the rights of Indigenous Peoples. In Aotearoa New Zealand, Te Tiriti o Waitangi (the Treaty of Waitangi) provides an important bicultural and bijural framework that is beginning to influence water management. In 2017, as part of a Treaty dispute settlement, Aotearoa New Zealand passed legislation to recognize Te Awa Tupua (the Whanganui River) as a legal person and created a new collaborative governance regime for the river, embedding the interests and values of Māori at the heart of river management. In Australia, water recovery processes to increase environmental flows have been under way since the 1990s, using a combination of water buybacks and water savings through increased efficiency. There has been growing awareness of Indigenous water rights in Australia, although progress to formally return water rights to Indigenous Peoples remains glacially slow. Like Aotearoa New Zealand, in 2017, Australia also passed its first legislation that recognized a river (the Birrarung/Yarra River) as a living entity and, in doing so, formally recognized the responsibilities of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people as Traditional Owners of the river. This trend toward more holistic river management under a relational paradigm, in which the relationships between peoples and places are centered and celebrated, creates a genuine opportunity for water governance in settler states that begins to address both the legitimacy and sustainability flaws in settler state water law. However, these symbolic shifts must be underpinned by relationships of genuine trust between Indigenous Peoples and the state, and they require significant investment from the state in their implementation.
Article
Water User Associations and Collective Action in Irrigation and Drainage
Bryan Bruns
If there is too little or too much water, farmers may be able to work together to control water and grow more food. Even before the rise of cities and states, people living in ancient settlements cooperated to create better growing conditions for useful plants and animals by diverting, retaining, or draining water. Local collective action by farmers continued to play a major role in managing water for agriculture, including in later times and places when rulers sometimes also organized construction of dams, dikes, and canals.
Comparative research on long-lasting irrigation communities and local governance of natural resources has found immense diversity in management rules tailored to the variety of local conditions. Within this diversity, Elinor Ostrom identified shared principles of institutional design: clear social and physical boundaries; fit between rules and local conditions, including proportionality in sharing costs and benefits; user participation in modifying rules; monitoring by users or those accountable to them; graduated sanctions to enforce rules; low-cost conflict resolution; government tolerance or support for self-governance; and nested organizations.
During the 19th and 20th centuries, centralized bureaucracies constructed many large irrigation schemes. Farmers were typically expected to handle local operation and maintenance and comply with centralized management. Postcolonial international development finance for irrigation and drainage systems usually flowed through national bureaucracies, strengthening top-down control of infrastructure and water management.
Pilot projects in the 1970s in the Philippines and Sri Lanka inspired internationally funded efforts to promote participatory irrigation management in many countries. More ambitious reforms for transfer of irrigation management to water user associations (WUAs) drew on examples in Colombia, Mexico, Turkey, and elsewhere. These reforms have shown the feasibility in some cases of changing policies and practices to involve irrigators more closely in decisions about design, construction, and some aspects of operation and maintenance, including cooperation in scheme-level co-management. However, WUAs and associated institutional reforms are clearly not panaceas and have diverse results depending on context and on contingencies of implementation. Areas of mixed or limited impact and for potential improvement include performance in delivering water; maintaining infrastructure; mobilizing local resources; sustaining organizations after project interventions; and enhancing social inclusion and equity in terms of multiple uses of water, gender, age, ethnicity, poverty, land tenure, and other social differences.
Cooperation in managing water for agriculture can contribute to coping with present and future challenges, including growing more food to meet rising demand; competition for water between agriculture, industry, cities, and the environment; increasing drought, flood, and temperatures due to climate change; social and economic shifts in rural areas, including outmigration and diversification of livelihoods; and the pursuit of environmental sustainability.
Article
Use of Experimental Economics in Policy Design and Evaluation: An Application to Water Resources and Other Environmental Domains
Simanti Banerjee
Economics conceptualizes harmful effects to the environment as negative externalities that can be internalized through implementation of policies involving regulatory and market-based mechanisms, and behavioral economic interventions. However, effective policy will require knowledge and understanding of intended and unintended stakeholder behaviors and consequences and the context in which the policy will be implemented. This mandate is nontrivial since policies once implemented can be hard to reverse and often have irreversible consequences in the short and/or long run, leading to high social costs. Experimental economics (often in combination with other empirical evaluation methods) can help by testing policies and their impacts prior to modification of current policies, and design and implementation of new ones. Such experimental evaluation can include lab and field experiments, and choice experiments. Additionally, experimental policy evaluation should pay attention to scaling up problems and the ethical ramifications of the treatment. This would ensure that the experimental findings will remain relevant when rolled out to bigger populations (hence retaining policy makers’ interest in the method and evidence generated by it), and the treatment to internalize the externality will not create or exacerbate societal disparities and ethical challenges.
Article
Containing Carbon Through Cap-and-Trade or a Per-Unit Tax
John A. Sorrentino
Carbon has been part of the Earth since its beginning, and the carbon cycle is well understood. However, its abundance in the atmosphere has become a problem. Those who propose solutions in decentralized market economies often prefer economic incentives to direct government regulation. Carbon cap-and-trade programs and carbon tax programs are the prime candidates to rein in emissions by altering the economic conditions under which producers and consumers make decisions. Under ideal conditions with full information, they can seamlessly remove the distortion caused by the negative externality and increase a society’s welfare. This distortion is caused by overproduction and underpricing of carbon-related goods and services. The ideal level of emissions would be set under cap-and-trade, or be the outcome of an ideally set carbon tax. The ideal price of carbon permits would result from demand generated by government decree meeting an ideal fixed supply set by the government. The economic benefit of using the ideal carbon tax or the ideal permit price occurs because heterogeneous decision-makers will conceptually reduce emissions to the level that equates their marginal (incremental) emissions-reduction cost to the tax or permit price. When applying the theory to the real world, ideal conditions with full information do not exist. The economically efficient levels of emissions, the carbon tax, and the permit price cannot be categorically determined. The targeted level of emissions is often proposed by non-economists. The spatial extent and time span of the emissions target need to be considered. The carbon tax is bound to be somewhat speculative, which does not bode well for private-sector decision-makers who have to adjust their behavior, and for the achievement of a particular emissions target. The permit price depends on how permits are initially distributed and how well the permit market is designed. The effectiveness of either program is tied to monitoring and enforcement. Social justice considerations in the operation of tax programs often include the condition that they be revenue-neutral. This is more complicated in the permit scheme as much activity after the initial phase is among the emitters themselves.
Based on global measurement of greenhouse gases, several models have been created that attempt to explain how emissions transform into concentrations, how concentrations imply radiative forcing and global warming potential, how the latter cause ecological and economic impacts, and how mitigation and/or adaptation can influence these impacts. Scenarios of the uncertain future continue to be generated under myriad assumptions in the quest for the most reliable. Several institutions have worked to engender sustained cooperation among the parties of the “global commons.” The balance of theory and empirical observation is intended to generate normative and positive policy recommendations. Cap-and-trade and carbon tax programs have been designed and/or implemented by various countries and subnational jurisdictions with the hope of reducing carbon-related emissions. Many analysts have declared that the global human society will reach a “tipping point” in the 21st century, with irreversible trends that will alter life on Earth in significant ways.
Article
The Value of the Environment in Recreation
Gianluca Grilli
Natural environments represent background settings for most outdoor recreation activities, which are important non-consumptive benefits that people obtain from nature. Recreation has been traditionally considered a non-market service because it is practiced free of charge in public spaces and therefore of secondary relevance for the economy. Although outdoor recreation in natural parks became relevant during the 19th century, the increased popularity of recreation after the Second World War required tools for the assessment of recreational benefits, which were not considered in the evaluation of investments in recreational facilities, and increasing spending for recreational equipment captured the attention of outdoor recreation as an economic sector. In the 1990s, it was observed that many recreational activities were commercialized and started being considered equally important to tourism as a means to boost the economy of local communities. The expansion of outdoor recreation is reflected in a growing interest in the economic aspects, including cost–benefit calculations of the investments in recreational facilities and research on appropriate methods to evaluate the non-market benefits of recreation. The first economic technique used for valuing recreation was the travel cost method that consisted in the assessment of a demand curve, where the demanded quantity is the number of trips to a specific site and the cost is the unit cost of travel to the destination. After this first intuition, the number of contributions on recreation valuation exponentially grew, and new methods were proposed, including methods based on stated preferences for recreation that can be used when travel cost data that reveal consumers’ behavior are not available. A regular assessment of recreational benefits has several advantages for public policy, including the evaluation of investments and information on visitor profile and preferences, income, and price elasticity, which are essential to understand the market of outdoor recreation and propose effective strategies and recreation-oriented management. The increasing environmental pressure associated with participation in outdoor recreation required effective conservation activities, which in turn posed limitations to economic activities of local communities who live in contact with natural resources. Therefore, a balance between environmental, social, and economic interests is essential for recreational destination to avail of benefits without conflicts among stakeholders.
Article
Water Security
Claudia Sadoff, David Grey, and Edoardo Borgomeo
Water security has emerged in the 21st century as a powerful construct to frame the water objectives and goals of human society and to support and guide local to global water policy and management. Water security can be described as the fundamental societal goal of water policy and management. This article reviews the concept of water security, explaining the differences between water security and other approaches used to conceptualize the water-related challenges facing society and ecosystems and describing some of the actions needed to achieve water security. Achieving water security requires addressing two fundamental challenges at all scales: enhancing water’s productive contributions to human and ecosystems’ well-being, livelihoods and development, and minimizing water’s destructive impacts on societies, economies, and ecosystems resulting, for example, from too much (flood), too little (drought) or poor quality (polluted) water.
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