Negotiating Water Governance
Negotiating Water Governance

Author: Emma S. Norman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-09

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 1317089170

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Those who control water, hold power. Complicating matters, water is a flow resource; constantly changing states between liquid, solid, and gas, being incorporated into living and non-living things and crossing boundaries of all kinds. As a result, water governance has much to do with the question of boundaries and scale: who is in and who is out of decision-making structures? Which of the many boundaries that water crosses should be used for decision-making related to its governance? Recently, efforts to understand the relationship between water and political boundaries have come to the fore of water governance debates: how and why does water governance fragment across sectors and governmental departments? How can we govern shared waters more effectively? How do politics and power play out in water governance? This book brings together and connects the work of scholars to engage with such questions. The introduction of scalar debates into water governance discussions is a significant advancement of both governance studies and scalar theory: decision-making with respect to water is often, implicitly, a decision about scale and its related politics. When water managers or scholars explore municipal water service delivery systems, argue that integrated approaches to salmon stewardship are critical to their survival, query the damming of a river to provide power to another region and investigate access to potable water - they are deliberating the politics of scale. Accessible, engaging, and informative, the volume offers an overview and advancement of both scalar and governance studies while examining practical solutions to the challenges of water governance.

Ecosystem services certification: Opportunities and constraints
Ecosystem services certification: Opportunities and constraints

Author: Erik Meijaard

Publisher: CIFOR

Published: 2011-09-13

Total Pages: 72

ISBN-13: 6028693596

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A major challenge in trading ecosystem services is the need to quantify and commoditise services, for monitoring and verification as well as for trade. This is relatively straightforward for goods such as forest honey or shade-grown coffee, but potentially complex for services such as water purification, reducing risk from floods or other disasters or carbon sequestration. Developing certification systems for forest ecosystem services is one potential way to define, quantify and verify these services in a way that buyers can trust, and this is why certification of ecosystem services is promoted by a number of environmental and forestry NGOs. Certification of ecosystem services is a useful concept, but many practical and theoretical obstacles must be addressed before it can be put into practice. This paper is a review of existing development in certification of ecosystem services, with information useful for designing and implementing projects to evaluate the efficacy of new systems. We discuss the potential use of more holistic concepts for measuring management sustainability, which are to date undeveloped and untested, and recommend developing pilot projects that are specifically designed to address a number of challenges inherent to ecosystem service certification.

Swimming Upstream
Swimming Upstream

Author: Paul A. Sabatier

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2005-04-29

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 9780262264754

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In recent years, water resource management in the United States has begun a shift away from top-down, government agency-directed decision processes toward a collaborative approach of negotiation and problem solving. Rather than focusing on specific pollution sources or specific areas within a watershed, this new process considers the watershed as a whole, seeking solutions to an interrelated set of social, economic, and environmental problems. Decision making involves face-to-face negotiations among a variety of stakeholders, including federal, state, and local agencies, landowners, environmentalists, industries, and researchers. Swimming Upstream analyzes the collaborative approach by providing a historical overview of watershed management in the United States and a normative and empirical conceptual framework for understanding and evaluating the process. The bulk of the book looks at a variety of collaborative watershed planning projects across the country. It first examines the applications of relatively short-term collaborative strategies in Oklahoma and Texas, exploring issues of trust and legitimacy. It then analyzes factors affecting the success of relatively long-term collaborative partnerships in the National Estuary Program and in 76 watersheds in Washington and California. Bringing analytical rigor to a field that has been dominated by practitioners' descriptive accounts, Swimming Upstream makes a vital contribution to public policy, public administration, and environmental management.

Motivation for payments for ecosystem services in Laos
Motivation for payments for ecosystem services in Laos

Author: William Robichaud

Publisher: CIFOR

Published: 2014-08-26

Total Pages: 26

ISBN-13:

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Payment for ecosystems services (PES) is a mechanism that attempts to create motivation for the conservation of biodiversity, where insufficient motivation existed before. Laos is a country rich in natural resources, with high dependence on these natural resources (particularly forests and rivers) for national income generation. Consequently, the country would seem to be fertile ground for the application of the PES concept, particularly in the hydropower sector. The largest hydropower project currently in operation in Laos is the Nam Theun 2 dam, which exports most of its electricity to neighboring Thailand. The dam’s watershed is the largest nature reserve in Indochina, Nakai-Nam Theun National Protected Area. Through mechanisms brokered by the World Bank, Nam Theun 2 has several features common to PES schemes. They are focused on using revenues from the dam to conserve the biodiversity and forest cover of Nakai-Nam Theun. This brief examines the degree of alignment of Nam Theun 2 with PES principles as commonly understood, and examines the potential for successful application of PES schemes generally in Laos. Some generally recognized constraints to implementation of PES schemes in developing countries are compounded in Laos, a Marxist state, which embraces social and economic philosophies contrary to the capitalist PES features of individual ownership of natural resources and transparency. Consequently, motivation within government for advancing PES in policy and law will likely be low, and a constraint to its uptake within the country. The way forward will likely be to focus on small, local projects that align with existing government policy.