Revolutionizing Water Management and Governance

Water Commons. Water Citizenship. Water Security.

In Cebu City, the Philippines, public sector workers like Zosimo Salcedo at the Metro Cebu Water District (MCWD) opposed Asian Development Bank financing that would purportedly increase the burgeoning city’s water supply. The financing sounded like a water workers dream – more infrastructure funds spells more jobs. So why was Zosimo Salcedo opposing the funds?

Contrary to common perceptions that workers are only concerned with preserving jobs and receiving higher pay, the union acted as stewards of the water commons. You might call them water citizens. They understood their responsibility as ‘carers’ of water, from catchment to storage to distribution. They didn’t measure their effectiveness simply in numbers of households connected to the grid but in conservation, watershed protection and raising questions about what increased debt would mean for the water system’s long-term financial and resource sustainability. They asked the hard question as to whether, in fact, the new infrastructure meant to extract more water would, in the long run, actually ensure continuous and increased water supply. Rather than tap new surface and groundwater sources, they concluded that it made more economic and ecological sense to conserve water through cheaper system repair and watershed protection.

“[The] water crisis is largely our own making. It has resulted not from the natural limitations of the water supply or lack of financing and appropriate technologies, even though these are important factors, but rather from profound failures in water governance.” – United Nations Development Program report on water governance

What is extraordinary about this change in mindset is the emergence of a new consciousness that workers have an important role to play in tending, caring and nurturing water, even though their own daily work involved a minimalist technical role with water distribution alone. In effect, Salcedo and his colleagues in the MCWD workers union symbolized a fundamental restructuring of the relationship between the water workers, the water utility, the community and water itself. In this new consciousness and practice, which we call water citizenship, they sought to secure water for all, for all times.

The Challenge of Safeguarding Water

One of the wonders of the Earth is the pristine waters that give life to an astonishing diversity of ecosystems and human societies. Climate change has made it painfully clear that although ecological regions are distinct, natural systems and human societies are intimately intertwined. Deforestation for agricultural expansion in one eco-zone can alter monsoon events in another. We all have a stake – and ought to have a voice – in making decisions about transformations of nature, even if they occur a continent away.

You can think of our entire planetary natural resource base as one giant global commons or alternatively, as a series of inter-connected, localized commonses. Either expression presents formidable governance, management and sovereignty challenges. The term “commons” turns current water planning topsy-turvy. A water commons means that water is available for all people and ecosystems, and that the resource be passed on undiminished and intact for future generations’ enjoyment. You don’t have to look far to see that current water planning often fails to uphold those principles and embrace the views of commons champions like Salcedo.

“What we do to water, we do to ourselves and the ones we love.” – From Popol Vuh , an ancient Mayan text , from: Future Generations at the Table: Governing and Managing Our Water Commons

Garret Hardin, in the “Tragedy of the Commons”, was pessimistic about the commons. He argued that shared ownership of a common resource is likely to lead to unequal use, pilfering and degradation. There is certainly much evidence, including in the Lempa River case examined here, that an unmanaged commons can be disastrous. Hardin’s work is often cited to justify the break-up of the commons into private parts.

The 2010 Nobel Prizewinner for Economics, Elinor Ostrom, has a more optimistic view. She waded into communities’ commonses and did not find tragedy. She did find resource conflicts – they are inevitable – but also sufficient intelligence and altruism to manage skirmishes and develop binding rules for equitable sharing. As in the case of the semi-arid region of Minas Gerais, Brazil described in this collection, these rules can be far-sighted enough to ensure that nature itself receives her fair share of the water commons. Ostrom discovers resource users exercising choice – to pursue an unequal and unsustainable resource management regime or attempt something more cooperative. Managing the water commons for the common good is a creative endeavor that provides a true test of good governance2 practices. Imagine a debate among political candidates on how best to steward our shared water resources – instead of demagogic discrediting of public services!

Ostrom articulated principles and practices that can guide good governance of the water commons – for example, defining the universe of users, mapping the physical boundaries of the common resource, ensuring governance rights to all stakeholders, designing low-cost conflict resolution and sanctioning mechanisms and nesting/linking management rules and institutions from the local to the international, from upstream to downstream. These principles and practices aren’t water engineering feats – they’re largely intuitive institutional arrangements and all too often ignored. The cases here apply one or more of these practices and together with Maude Barlow’s water commons principles, they provide much of the analytical lens we use to offer lessons from these case studies.

The authors of these cases are public sector water operators and policy analysts, community activists and academics. The editors of this compilation are colleagues in the Reclaiming Public Water Network who have been working for some time to bring about greater democratization of water. We offer these cases to shine light on new ways forward as well as to invite your contributions to a growing understanding of how to govern and manage our shared water commons.

A New IWRM 2.0 to Tackle the Deepening Water Crisis

Twenty years ago, at the Rio Summit in 1992, commons-based water governance and management took steps both backwards and forward. That’s not surprising; the Rio discussions were a battle ground for opposing development models. The millennia-old philosophical ethic that water belongs to all and is to be safeguarded for future generations, was called into question by Dublin Principles adopted in the first Earth Summit in Rio Declaration (1992): “Water is a public good and has a social and economic value in all its competing uses”.

Public and private institutions seized on the opportunity to place water in a market framework and as a society we seemed to lose sight of the water commons. There’s no question that pricing is essential to operate a water system but it must be fair. That means that higher volume, wealthier users pay more per unit and the poorest households receive a free or subsidized lifeline. But that has not generally been the guiding principle. Instead, policy makers and private operators seem to have become enamoured with full cost recovery4 from all users, even when it means denying basic rights to water. The prospect of turning a profit from water also began to seem possible to entrepreneurial operators – both politicians and CEOs. This new economic interpretation was to profoundly change the entire system of water management worldwide. More