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
The Allocation of Groundwater: From Superstition to Science
Burke W. Griggs
Article
A Review of Alternative Water Supply Systems in ASEAN
Cecilia Tortajada, Kris Hartley, Corinne Ong, and Ojasvee Arora
Climate change, water scarcity and pollution, and growing water demand across all sectors are stressing existing water supply systems, highlighting the need for alternative water supply (AWS) systems. AWS systems are those that have not typically existed in the traditional supply portfolio of a given service area but may be used to reduce the pressure on traditional water resources and potentially improve the system’s resilience. AWS systems have been used for decades, often where traditional systems are unable to maintain sufficient quantity and quality of water supply. Simpler forms of AWS systems, like rainwater harvesting, have been used for centuries. As human population and water demand have increased, AWS systems now play a larger role in the broader supply portfolio, but these systems alone are not able to fully resolve the increasingly complex mix of problems contributing to water stress. Entrenched challenges that go beyond technical issues include low institutional capacity for developing, operating, and maintaining AWS systems; monitoring water quality; more efficiently using available resources; and establishing clear responsibilities among governments, service providers, and property owners. Like traditional water supply systems, AWS systems should be developed within a sustainability-focused framework that incorporates scenario planning to account for evolving natural and institutional conditions. In ASEAN, the adoption of AWS systems varies among countries and provides context-specific lessons for water management around the world. This article provides an overview of AWS systems in the region, including rainwater harvesting, graywater recycling, wastewater reclamation, desalination, and stormwater harvesting.
Article
Business Models for Sustainability
Nancy Bocken
Human activity is increasingly impacting the environment negatively on all scales. There is an urgent need to transform human activity toward sustainable development. Business has a key role to play in this sustainability transition through technological, product and service, and process innovations, as well as innovative business models. Business models can enable new technologies, and vice versa. These models are therefore important in the transition to sustainability. Business models for sustainability, or synonymously, sustainable business models, take holistic views on how business is operated in relation to its stakeholders, including the society and the natural environment. They incorporate economic, environmental, and social aspects in an organization’s purpose and performance measures; consider the needs of all stakeholders rather than giving priority to owner and shareholder expectations; treat “nature” as a stakeholder; and take a system as well as a firm-level perspective on the way business is conducted. The research field of sustainable business models emerged from fields such as service business models, green and social business models, and concepts such as sharing and circular economy. Academics have argued that the most service-oriented business models can achieve a “factor 10” environmental impact improvement if designed the right way.
Researchers have developed various conceptualizations, typologies, tools, and methods and reviews on sustainable business models. However, sustainable business models are not yet mainstream. Important research areas include the following: (a) tools, methods, and experimentation; (b) the assessment of sustainability impact and rebounds for different stakeholders; (c) sufficiency and degrowth; and (d) the twin revolution of sustainability and digital transition. First, a plethora of tools and approaches are available for inspiration and for creation of sustainable business model designs. Second, in the field of assessment, methods have been based on life cycle thinking considering the supply chain and how a product is (re)used and eventually disposed of. In the field of sufficiency, authors have recognized the importance of moderating consumption through innovative business models to reduce the total need for products, reducing the impact on the environment. Finally, researchers have started to investigate the important interplay between sustainability and digitalization. Because of the potential to achieve a factor 10 environmental impact improvement, sustainable business models are an important source of inspiration for further work, including the upscaling of sustainable business models in established businesses and in new ventures. Understanding how to design better business models and preempting their usage in practice are essential to achieve a desired positive impact. In the field of sufficiency, the macro-impacts of individual and business behavior would need to be better understood. In the area of digital innovation, environmental, societal, and economic values need scrutinization.
Researchers and practitioners can leverage the popularity of this field by addressing these important areas to support the development and roll-out of sustainable business models with significantly improved economic, environmental, and societal impact.
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Changes in Land Use Influenced by Anthropogenic Activity
Lang Wang and Zong-Liang Yang
The terms “land cover” and “land use” are often used interchangeably, although they have different meanings. Land cover is the biophysical material at the surface of the Earth, whereas land use refers to how people use the land surface. Land use concerns the resources of the land, their products, and benefits, in addition to land management actions and activities. The history of changes in land use has passed through several major stages driven by developments in science and technology and demands for food, fiber, energy, and shelter.
Modern changes in land use have been increasingly affected by anthropogenic activities at a scale and magnitude that have not been seen. These changes in land use are largely driven by population growth, urban expansion, increasing demands for energy and food, changes in diets and lifestyles, and changing socioeconomic conditions. About 70% of the Earth’s ice-free land surface has been altered by changes in land use, and these changes have had environmental impacts worldwide, ranging from effects on the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere and climate to the extensive modification of terrestrial ecosystems, habitats, and biodiversity. A number of different methods have been developed give a thorough understanding of these changes in land use and the multiple effects and feedbacks involved. Earth system observations and models are examples of two crucial technologies, although there are considerable uncertainties in both techniques. Cross-disciplinary collaborations are highly desirable in future studies of land use and management. The goals of mitigating climate change and maintaining sustainability should always be considered before implementing any new land management strategies.
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Puzzles of Commitment, Compliance, and Defection in Water Resource Management
John Waterbury
Collective action problems (CAPs) are ubiquitous in human undertakings including in the development and management of shared water resources. Various rational-actor models have been applied to understand their dynamics. These analyses tend to come to pessimistic conclusions based on the assumption of “free-riding” whereby any participant in a collective action (CA) will be motivated to benefit from the action without contributing to its costs. If all participants follow this logic, there will be no CA and hence no net benefit to the participants.
This view assumes the logic of individual rationality. It does not adequately account for observed behavior, which may be driven by collective or group rationality. CA in water management and other domains has been initiated and sustained despite the temptation of free-riding. To understand why, it is necessary to analyze the dynamics of commitment, i.e., the initial collective undertaking; compliance, i.e., sustaining the initial commitment; and defection, when compliance breaks down. None of these variables is static. With respect to water, the technological means of its management constantly change so that the dynamics of compliance change as well. Technological change must be anticipated in the commitment phase. Just as important, cost/benefit analysis must encompass assessing payoffs in domains not related to water itself. These payoffs may not be part of the formal terms of commitment but must inform the compliance process. When the process unravels, “water wars” may result although that has been a rare outcome.
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Decision-Making in a Water Crisis: Lessons From the Cape Town Drought for Urban Water Policy
Johanna Brühl, Leonard le Roux, Martine Visser, and Gunnar Köhlin
The water crisis that gripped Cape Town over the 2016–2018 period gained global attention. For a brief period of time in early 2018, it looked as if the legislative capital of South Africa would become the first major city in the world to run out of water. The case of Cape Town has broad implications for how we think about water management in a rapidly urbanizing world. Cities in the global South, especially, where often under-capacitated urban utilities need to cope with rapid demographic changes, climate change, and numerous competing demands on their tight budgets, can learn from Cape Town’s experience.
The case of Cape Town draws attention to the types of decisions policymakers and water utilities face in times of crisis. It illustrates how these decisions, while being unavoidable in the short term, are often sub-optimal in the long run. The Cape Town drought highlights the importance of infrastructure diversification, better groundwater management, and communication and information transparency to build trust with the public. It also shows what governance and institutional changes need to be made to ensure long-term water security and efficient water management. The implementation of all of these policies needs to address the increased variability of water supplies due to increasingly erratic rainfall and rapidly growing urban populations in many countries. This necessitates a long-term planning horizon.
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Economics of Water Security in India: Need for Strengthening Natural Capital
V. Ratna Reddy
Water security forms the basis for achieving multi-dimensional poverty alleviation. Water security is necessary for moving toward sustainable development. It reduces poverty and improves quality of life. Achieving water security is increasingly becoming a policy challenge in most of the developing countries like India. Water security is a comprehensive concept that comprises access to quantity and quality for different users and uses, ensuring environmental, economic, and social sustainability in the long run. It needs to be achieved at different scales (i.e., household, regional, and national levels). This calls for an integrated approach incorporating hydrological, socioeconomic, and ecosystem aspects. Water resources accounting is critical for ensuring water security. Resource accounting helps in identifying efficient and optimum allocation of resources to various components of water security. Integrating the costs of strengthening the natural resource base and environmental externalities is likely to help sustaining services in the long run. Integrating the economics of protecting the natural resource base into the planning and designing of service delivery is critical in this regard.
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Ecosystem Management of the Boreal Forest
Timo Kuuluvainen
Boreal countries are rich in forest resources, and for their area, they produce a disproportionally large share of the lumber, pulp, and paper bound for the global market. These countries have long-standing strong traditions in forestry education and institutions, as well as in timber-oriented forest management. However, global change, together with evolving societal values and demands, are challenging traditional forest management approaches. In particular, plantation-type management, where wood is harvested with short cutting cycles relative to the natural time span of stand development, has been criticized. Such management practices create landscapes composed of mosaics of young, even-aged, and structurally homogeneous stands, with scarcity of old trees and deadwood. In contrast, natural forest landscapes are characterized by the presence of old large trees, uneven-aged stand structures, abundant deadwood, and high overall structural diversity. The differences between managed and unmanaged forests result from the fundamental differences in the disturbance regimes of managed versus unmanaged forests. Declines in managed forest biodiversity and structural complexity, combined with rapidly changing climatic conditions, pose a risk to forest health, and hence, to the long-term maintenance of biodiversity and provisioning of important ecosystem goods and services. The application of ecosystem management in boreal forestry calls for a transition from plantation-type forestry toward more diversified management inspired by natural forest structure and dynamics.
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Ecosystem Services
Leon C. Braat
The concept of ecosystem services considers the usefulness of nature for human society. The economic importance of nature was described and analyzed in the 18th century, but the term ecosystem services was introduced only in 1981. Since then it has spurred an increasing number of academic publications, international research projects, and policy studies. Now a subject of intense debate in the global scientific community, from the natural to social science domains, it is also used, developed, and customized in policy arenas and considered, if in a still somewhat skeptical and apprehensive way, in the “practice” domain—by nature management agencies, farmers, foresters, and corporate business. This process of bridging evident gaps between ecology and economics, and between nature conservation and economic development, has also been felt in the political arena, including in the United Nations and the European Union (which have placed it at the center of their nature conservation and sustainable use strategies).
The concept involves the utilitarian framing of those functions of nature that are used by humans and considered beneficial to society as economic and social services. In this light, for example, the disappearance of biodiversity directly affects ecosystem functions that underpin critical services for human well-being. More generally, the concept can be defined in this manner: Ecosystem services are the direct and indirect contributions of ecosystems, in interaction with contributions from human society, to human well-being.
The concept underpins four major discussions: (1) Academic: the ecological versus the economic dimensions of the goods and services that flow from ecosystems to the human economy; the challenge of integrating concepts and models across this paradigmatic divide; (2) Social: the risks versus benefits of bringing the utilitarian argument into political debates about nature conservation (Are ecosystem services good or bad for biodiversity and vice versa?); (3) Policy and planning: how to value the benefits from natural capital and ecosystem services (Will this improve decision-making on topics ranging from poverty alleviation via subsidies to farmers to planning of grey with green infrastructure to combining economic growth with nature conservation?); and (4) Practice: Can revenue come from smart management and sustainable use of ecosystems? Are there markets to be discovered and can businesses be created? How do taxes figure in an ecosystem-based economy? The outcomes of these discussions will both help to shape policy and planning of economies at global, national, and regional scales and contribute to the long-term survival and well-being of humanity.
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Ecotourism
Giles Jackson
Ecotourism is responsible travel to natural areas that educates and inspires through interpretation—increasingly paired with practical action—that helps conserve the environment and sustain the well-being of local people. Ecotourism is the fastest-growing segment of the travel and tourism industry, and its economic value is projected to exceed USD$100 billion by 2027. Ecotourism emerged in the 1960s as a response to the destructive effects of mass tourism and has been embraced by an increasing number of governments, especially in the developing world, as a vehicle for achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals. As an emerging, interdisciplinary field of study, ecotourism has reached a critical inflection point, as scholars reflect on the achievements and shortcomings of several decades of research and set out the research agenda for decades to come. The field has yet to achieve consensus on the most basic questions, such as how ecotourism is, or should be, defined; what makes it different from nature-based and related forms of tourism; and what factors ultimately determine the success or failure of ecotourism as a vehicle for sustainable development. This lack of consensus stems in part from the different perspectives and agendas within and between the academic, policy, and industry communities. Because it is based on measured and observed phenomena, empirical research has a critical role to play in advancing the theory and practice of ecotourism. However, scholars also recognize that to fulfill this role, methodologies must evolve to become more longitudinal, scalable, inclusive, integrative, and actionable.
Article
Rethinking Conflict over Water
Scott M. Moore
It has long been accepted that non-renewable natural resources like oil and gas are often the subject of conflict between both nation-states and social groups. But since the end of the Cold War, the idea that renewable resources like water and timber might also be a cause of conflict has steadily gained credence. This is particularly true in the case of water: in the early 1990s, a senior World Bank official famously predicted that “the wars of the next century will be fought over water,” while two years ago Indian strategist Brahma Chellaney made a splash in North America by claiming that water would be “Asia’s New Battleground.” But it has not quite turned out that way. The world has, so far, avoided inter-state conflict over water in the 21st century, but it has witnessed many localized conflicts, some involving considerable violence. As population growth, economic development, and climate change place growing strains on the world’s fresh water supplies, the relationship between resource scarcity, institutions, and conflict has become a topic of vocal debate among social and environmental scientists.
The idea that water scarcity leads to conflict is rooted in three common assertions. The first of these arguments is that, around the world, once-plentiful renewable resources like fresh water, timber, and even soils are under increasing pressure, and are therefore likely to stoke conflict among increasing numbers of people who seek to utilize dwindling supplies. A second, and often corollary, argument holds that water’s unique value to human life and well-being—namely that there are no substitutes for water, as there are for most other critical natural resources—makes it uniquely conductive to conflict. Finally, a third presumption behind the water wars hypothesis stems from the fact that many water bodies, and nearly all large river basins, are shared between multiple countries. When an upstream country can harm its downstream neighbor by diverting or controlling flows of water, the argument goes, conflict is likely to ensue.
But each of these assertions depends on making assumptions about how people react to water scarcity, the means they have at their disposal to adapt to it, and the circumstances under which they are apt to cooperate rather than to engage in conflict. Untangling these complex relationships promises a more refined understanding of whether and how water scarcity might lead to conflict in the 21st century—and how cooperation can be encouraged instead.
Article
Sea Level Rise and Coastal Management
James B. London
Coastal zone management (CZM) has evolved since the enactment of the U.S. Coastal Zone Management Act of 1972, which was the first comprehensive program of its type. The newer iteration of Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM), as applied to the European Union (2000, 2002), establishes priorities and a comprehensive strategy framework. While coastal management was established in large part to address issues of both development and resource protection in the coastal zone, conditions have changed. Accelerated rates of sea level rise (SLR) as well as continued rapid development along the coasts have increased vulnerability. The article examines changing conditions over time and the role of CZM and ICZM in addressing increased climate related vulnerabilities along the coast.
The article argues that effective adaptation strategies will require a sound information base and an institutional framework that appropriately addresses the risk of development in the coastal zone. The information base has improved through recent advances in technology and geospatial data quality. Critical for decision-makers will be sound information to identify vulnerabilities, formulate options, and assess the viability of a set of adaptation alternatives. The institutional framework must include the political will to act decisively and send the right signals to encourage responsible development patterns. At the same time, as communities are likely to bear higher costs for adaptation, it is important that they are given appropriate tools to effectively weigh alternatives, including the cost avoidance associated with corrective action. Adaptation strategies must be pro-active and anticipatory. Failure to act strategically will be fiscally irresponsible.
Article
Stormwater Management at the Lot Level: Engaging Homeowners and Business Owners to Adopt Green Stormwater Infrastructure
Anand D. Jayakaran, Emily Rhodes, and Jason Vogel
The Clean Water Act of 1972 was the impetus for stormwater management in the United States, followed by the need for many cities to comply with consent decrees associated with combined sewer overflows. With rapidly growing urban centers and the attendant increasing costs of managing stormwater with larger stormwater facilities, green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) was deemed a useful measure to distribute the management of stormwater across the landscape. The management of stormwater has evolved from simply removing it as quickly as it is generated in order to prevent flooding, to intentionally detaining stormwater on the landscape. Typically, low-frequency large events are detained in central stormwater holding facilities, while GSI is employed to manage smaller high-frequency events, slowing and treating stormwater on the landscape itself. Installing GSI close to the source of runoff production ensures that stormwater directed towards these facilities are small enough in volume, so as not to overwhelm these systems. Within these GSI systems, the natural assimilative capacity of soils and plants slows and breaks down many of the pollutants that are found in stormwater runoff.
The requirement for a broad spatial distribution of GSI across the landscape necessitates an acceptance of these technologies, and the willingness of the managers of these urban landscapes to maintain these systems on a continual basis. The policies put in place to transfer the responsibility of stormwater management onto individual lot owners range from regulations imposed on those that develop the landscape for commercial and industrial purposes, to incentives offered to individual lot owners to install GSI practices for the first time on their properties. GSI is, however, not a silver bullet for all stormwater ills, and care has to be taken in how it is deployed in order not to exacerbate systemic environmental and racial inequities. A careful and considered adoption of GSI that includes the desires, values, and the needs of the community in conjunction with the environmental goals they are designed to address is critical.
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
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
Wastewater Reclamation and Recycling
Soyoon Kum and Lewis S. Rowles
Across the globe, freshwater scarcity is increasing due to overuse, climate change, and population growth. Increasing water security requires sufficient water from diverse water resources. Wastewater can be used as a valuable water resource to improve water security because it is ever-present and usually available throughout the year. However, wastewater is a convoluted solution because the sources of wastewater can vary greatly (e.g., domestic sewage, agricultural runoff, waste from livestock activity, and industrial effluent). Different sources of wastewater can have vastly different pollutants, and mainly times, it is a complex mixture. Therefore, wastewater treatment, unlike drinking water treatment, requires a different treatment strategy. Various wastewater sources can be reused through wastewater reclamation and recycling, and the required water quality varies depending on the targeted purpose (e.g., groundwater recharge, potable water usage, irrigation). One potential solution is employing tailored treatment schemes to fit the purpose. Assorted physical, chemical, and biological treatment technologies have been established or developed for wastewater reclamation and recycle. The advancement of wastewater reclamation technologies has focused on the reduction of energy consumption and the targeted removal of emerging contaminants. Beyond technological challenges, context can be important to consider for reuse due to public perception and local water rights. Since the early 1990s, several global wastewater reclamation examples have overcome challenges and proved the applicability of wastewater reclamation systems. These examples showed that wastewater reclamation can be a promising solution to alleviate water shortages. As water scarcity becomes more widespread, strong global initiatives are needed to make substantial progress for water reclamation and reuse.
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.
