Water is becoming an increasingly scarce resource in India. India faces an increasingly urgent situation with its finite and fragile water resources being stressed and depleted while various sectoral demands are growing rapidly. 'Initiating and Sustaining Water Sector Reforms' offers detailed solutions to this complex and important concern.
This monograph comprehensively examines water law regulations and reform in the present decade, going beyond a simple analysis of existing water law and regulations to encompass environmental, social, economic, and human rights aspects of water as a natural resource. Using the specific case of India and on the related international law and policy framework that directly influences water regulatory developments in India, this book offers what will be the first and only analysis of water law reforms taking place at the national level in many developing countries in their domestic and international context. On the one hand, international freshwater law remains under-developed and existing legal instruments such as the 1997 UN Convention only address a limited set of relevant issues. Yet, the international law and policy framework concerning freshwater is increasingly important in shaping up law reforms taking place at the national level, in particular in developing countries. Indeed, non-binding resolutions such as the Dublin Statement on Water and Sustainable Development (1992) have had an immense influence on water law reforms in most developing countries. This book seeks to conceive of and analyse freshwater regulation in a broader context, and go beyond a literature that either lauds or criticises ongoing water sector reforms to provide an analytical basis for the reforms which all countries will have to adopt in the near or medium-term future.
Case studies were conducted in five selected Asian countries on their water policy reform initiatives. Of the five countries, China stands out as the country that has derived the most from on-going global efforts in promoting water sector institutional reforms and the concept of integrated water resources management (IWRM). China has emerged as the leader in adapting these concepts to suit the context of the country. Advanced stages of water development in many parts of the country and increased water shortages due to rapid economic development have prompted China to forge ahead in the search for institutional solutions to make the water sector more productive, and the management of water resources more sustainable. In the other selected countries, efforts to replicate the models of developed countries without much adaptation and due reference to their stages of development have generally failed. The dominance of irrigation within the water sector and the informality of the economy related to water in these countries seem to make the application of prescribed IWRM principles rather unfeasible. The lesson to be drawn from policy reviews of the five countries is that effective waterinstitutions are not static systems, but are adaptive and dynamic institutional developments compatible with the local context, particularly with the structure of the overall economy of the country and its water sector.
The water sector reform in Malaysia, initiated in 2004, intended to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the water sector in the long term. This book explains the overall policy process of the reform and assesses the extent to which the reform has met its objectives and the means through which it has done so. The conclusions point to a weak correlation between the reform outputs on the one hand and the operational efficiency and environmental effectiveness gains of water utilities on the other. They also offer valuable insights into the policy arrangement that successfully shaped the water reform process. The policy process of the Malaysian water sector reform reflects the current global trend towards centralizing water management within the public domain with a clear division of tasks between policy formulation, regulatory oversight and service provision. Federal and state actors have become the dominant players in the water sector. This has reduced the role of private water utilities to a small fraction of activities within the entire value chain of water, and strengthens close regulation oversight from the regulator. Lastly, civil society groups now have a growing (albeit still small) influence on the water sector. In terms of policy recommendations, this book reiterates the need to adopt a private sector culture in managing public water; to establish a clear division of tasks between policy formulation, regulation and service provision; and to facilitate wider public engagement as well as to promote better informational governance in the water sector, including the call for a national water data bank.
Water policies around the world are in urgent need of reform. Despite improvements in some sectors and countries, progress on meeting national, regional and international goals for managing and securing access to water for all has been uneven. Rallying policymakers around a positive water reform agenda needs to be a high priority and calls for strong political commitment and leadership. This report on Meeting the Water Reform Challenge brings together key insights from recent OECD work and identifies the priority areas where governments need to focus their reform efforts. It calls for governments to focus on getting the basics of water policy right. Sustainable financing, effective governance, and coherence between water and sectoral policies are the building blocks of successful reform.
This publication examines issues of water sector reform and performance from the perspectives of institutional economics and political economic studies. The authors develop an alternative quantitative assessment methodology based on the principle of 'institutional ecology', as well as data collected from 127 water experts from 43 countries and regions around the world using a cross-country review of recent water sector reforms within an institutional transaction cost framework.
This book examines the challenge of reform of the urban water supply sector in developing countries, based on case studies of state-owned water companies in Ghana, India, Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe. The growing public private partnership for urban water supply is analyzed, focussing on the concession contract model. The implications for meeting the water needs of the urban poor, for the regulatory role of the state and for state capacity building are also discussed.
Building on the main water challenges identified by the OECD Environment Outlook to 2050, this report examines financing of the water sector; the governance and institutional arrangements that are in place; and coherence between water policies and policies in place in other sectors of the economy.
