Global Water Resources

Festschrift in Honour of Asit K. Biswas

Cecilia Tortajada, Eduardo Araral

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000455076
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

This is a Festschrift in honour of Professor Asit K. Biswas, for his manifold contributions to water resources policy and management and his extensive efforts over six decades to generate, synthetize, apply, and disseminate knowledge at national and global levels.

Global Water Resources: Festschrift in Honour of Asit K. Biswas includes invited contributions on global water issues from 23 globally renowned leaders in the public and private sectors, as well as academia, who have made significant contributions to the field of water resources policy, management, development and governance. The vision and expertise of this distinguished group of experts provides a unique focus on unfolding water issues and their bearing on world development

This book will be of great value to scholars, students, and policymakers interested in water resource governance, sustainable development, and climate change.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Water Resources Development.

A decade of work on water governance at the OECD: what have we learnt?

Angel Gurría

ABSTRACT

Our societies, economic systems and collective well-being depend on water security and access to water services. Yet, megatrends related to climate change, urbanization and demography are likely to generate more uncertainty about water availability and demand. Responding to these threats will require sharp actions to ensure universal access to drinking water and sanitation. Simultaneous action is also needed to invest in infrastructure and better articulate who does what, how, at which scale, and why. This article explores a decade of work on water governance at the OECD, providing key observations and lessons learnt.

A shared conviction that water security is key to sustainable development

In 2010, in their landmark book Future water governance: problems and perspectives, Professor Asit Biswas and co-author Cecilia Tortajada warned:

One development can be predicted with complete certainty; the world in 2030 will be significantly different from what it is in 2010.… Water governance may have to change more during the next 20 years compared to the past 2000 years, if societal expectations are to be successfully met.

Fully in line with this statement, when I campaigned to become secretary-general of the OECD in 2006, I proposed water as one of my three priorities (together with migration and health) to support better policies for better lives. At the time, there was a striking lack of awareness of the water challenge world-wide.

From my earlier experience as minister of finance and public credit in Mexico, I was convinced that water was a critical driver for sustainable growth. This is why I set up and chaired the Water Financing Taskforce during the 6th World Water Forum (Mexico, 2006), actively contributed to the Camdessus report (World Panel on Financing Water Infrastructure, 2003) and joined the United Nations Secretary-General’s Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation to send a wake-up call to decision makers.

Figure 1. Overview of the OECD principles on water governance. Source: OECD (2015).

On many occasions, Professor Biswas and I joined forces to insist that greater solidarity and inclusion are essential to water security and climate justice and that public policies should support fair distribution of the socio-economic benefits of water and secure human health, environmental sustainability and income opportunities. We have also repeatedly warned that no country should take current levels of water security or service delivery for granted, and that serious action is needed in all countries, be they developed, emerging, or developing.

Today, the economics and governance of water security are finally seen as integral parts of how societies can better achieve and sustain socio-economic development, inclusive growth and environmental sustainability at all levels. The acknowledgement of water as a dedicated goal in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is a testament to this recognition.

A gloomy outlook that requires urgent action

What on Earth is not driven by water? Our entire society, economic systems, and collective well-being depend on water security and access to water services. We cannot afford to ignore the severity of the crisis any longer.

Today, nearly 200 million people per year are affected or killed by floods, droughts and other water-related disasters. By 2050, water demand will increase by 55%, over 40% of the world’s population will live under severe water stress, and the number of people exposed to flood risk will rise from 1.2 billion now to 1.6 billion, 20% of the global population (OECD, 2012). Continued intense groundwater depletion threatens food security in several regions of the world. And more than 2 billion people do not have access to safe drinking water, while even more lack access to sanitation (WHO/UNICEF, 2017).

Megatrends related to climate change, urbanization and demography will be compounding factors and will continue to exacerbate tensions, generating more uncertainty about water availability and demand. Responding to these threats will require sharp actions and ambitious reforms to concurrently manage the risks of ‘too much’, ‘too little’, and ‘too polluted’ water while ensuring universal access to drinking water and sanitation and reducing the disruption of our freshwater systems.

Designing and implementing such reforms using evidence-based public policies requires acknowledging that the solutions to water challenges cut across sectors (e.g., environment, agriculture, health, land use and spatial planning) and depend on a coordinated approach by governments. They also require significant investment: projections of global financing needs for water infrastructure range from USD 6.7 trillion by 2030 to USD 22.6 trillion by 2050.

Yet, investing in infrastructure is not enough. Simultaneous action is needed to improve governance arrangements: setting the right incentives, managing complexity, and better articulating who does what, how, at which scale, and why. Fundamentally, effective governance is at the heart of finding sustainable solutions to this water crisis.

From vision to action

When I joined the OECD, I set up a multidisciplinary water team tasked to engage different policy communities, including environment, public governance, territorial development, agriculture, financial affairs and development cooperation. By mainstreaming the water challenge into the OECD inclusive growth agenda, we have contributed to improving awareness, providing evidence and supporting ambitious reforms through benchmarks, standards and experience sharing. Our achievements include a wealth of ground-breaking economic analyses, solid policy recommendations and direct support to countries’ reforms on the ground. Also, because we firmly believe that ‘governance’ is not only about ‘governments’ and that meeting the water challenge is a much broader shared responsibility, we make sure that stakeholders are engaged alongside policy makers.

A decade of OECD work on water governance has taught us that the cross-cutting nature of water policy requires a whole-of-government, multilevel and multi-stakeholder approach to manage trade-offs across siloes and to ensure that decisions made in any related policy area are water-wise. Health, environment, agriculture, energy, spatial planning, regional development, gender equality and poverty alleviation are all directly related to water. This is why governing water is first and foremost about managing a complex system of responsible authorities, scale, stakeholders and priorities.

The OECD’s achievements and legacy to improve water policies for better lives were crystallized in the OECD Council recommendation on water (2016), a concise legal instrument common to the 36 OECD countries that is a unique source of coherent, evidence-based guidance on water quality, water quantity, water-related risks and disasters, water governance, and water pricing and financing. A cornerstone of its development was the OECD principles on water governance (2015), which provide the 12 essential actions in relation to water governance frameworks, institutions and instruments.

Since their adoption, the principles have also been endorsed by non-OECD countries, including China, Brazil, South Africa and Morocco, and over 140 stakeholder groups, who are using them as a tool for dialogue, self-assessment and collective action. The principles are built around three mutually reinforcing blocks of water governance:

• Effectiveness is about defining clear, sustainable water policy goals and targets at all levels of government, to implement those policy goals and to meet expected targets.
• Efficiency is about maximizing the benefits of sustainable water management and welfare at the least cost to society.
• Trust and engagement is about building public confidence and ensuring inclusiveness of stakeholders from across society.

The evidence base from more than a decade advising governments

While supporting water reforms in developed and developing countries, we strived to raise the water profile in local and national agendas with a range of tools and frameworks for action. Actions included:

• Our ‘3 Ts’ called for combining taxes, tariffs and transfers to finance access to water services, changing the conventional wisdom from full to sustainable cost recovery.
• Our Checklist for Private-Sector Participation contributed to dispelling myths about the role of the private sector in water and clarifying how to make the best use of private operators.
• Our Water Security Framework provided a methodology to ‘know’, ‘target’ and ‘manage’ water risks, recalling that related decisions remain essentially political.
• Our work on water governance in cities showed that ageing infrastructure, tighter public budgets and megatrends are generating serious threats for OECD city dwellers.
• Our work on water pollution explored innovative ways to tackle emerging pollutants, which raise emerging concerns globally, although we know little about their harmful effects overall.

What we have learned about governance from supporting water reforms at all levels

Coping with current and future challenges requires robust public policies, targeting measurable objectives at the right time and on the appropriate scale, clear roles and responsibilities for relevant authorities, and regular monitoring and evaluation. Water governance can greatly contribute to the design and implementation of such policies, with shared responsibility across levels of government and the broader range of stakeholders (e.g., civil society, business) who have an important role to play to reap the economic, social and environmental benefits of good water governance.

The water sector has intrinsic characteristics that make it highly sensitive to and dependent on multilevel governance. Water connects across sectors, places and people, as well as across geographic and temporal scales. In most cases, hydrological boundaries and administrative perimeters do not coincide. Freshwater management is both a global and a local concern, and involves a plethora of public, private and non-profit stakeholders in the decision-making, policy and project cycles. Water is also a highly capital-intensive and monopolistic sector, with important market failures where coordination is essential. To varying degrees, countries have allocated increasingly complex and resource-intensive responsibilities to sub-national governments, resulting in interdependencies across levels of government that require coordination to mitigate fragmentation. Finally, the governance landscape for freshwater management has changed in the last 25 years. Information flows more easily and potentially sheds greater light on malpractices and failures.

OECD evidence shows that there is not a one-size-fits-all solution to water challenges worldwide, but rather a large diversity of situations within and across countries. Governance responses should therefore be adapted to territorial specificities to fit water policies to places. In short, governance is good if it can help solve key water challenges using a combination of bottom-up and top-down processes while fostering constructive state–society relations. It is bad if it generates undue transaction costs and does not respond to place-based n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction: Festschrift
• 1 A decade of work on water governance at the OECD: what have we learnt?
• 2 The knowledge economy in the twenty-first century: a modest proposal
• 3 Scotland: a world-leading Hydro Nation
• 4 Nestlé’s corporate water strategy over time: a backward- and forwardlooking view
• 5 Scarcity of water or scarcity of management?
• 6 Singapore’s water challenges past to present
• 7 Facing the challenge of extreme climate: the case of Metropolitan Sao Paulo
• 8 China’s achievements of water governance over the past seven decades
• 9 Some reflections on water for residential uses in developed countries
• 10 Can water professionals do more?
• 11 Reflections on flood control in Japan and recommendations for developing countries
• 12 A retrospective analysis of Laos’s Nam Theun 2 Dam
• 13 What I learned from Asit Biswas about transboundary water, ethics, mentoring and, in general, how to be a better human being
• 14 Water resilience and human life support - global outlook for the next half century
• 15 Adaptive and sustainable water management: from improved conceptual foundations to transformative change
• 16 Economically challenged and water scarce: identification of global populations most vulnerable to water crises
• 17 The status of the UN Watercourses Convention: does it still hold water?
• 18 Australian water decision making: are politicians performing?
• 19 Rent-seeking behaviour and regulatory capture in the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia
• 20 Quenching the thirst of rapidly growing and water-insecure cities in sub-Saharan Africa
• 21 Sustainability of water and energy use for food production based on optimal allocation of agricultural irrigation water
• 22 Rethinking on the methodology for assessing global water and food challenges
• Index