Suchergebnisse

Water crises have been described as crises of fragmented governance, particularly in transboundary settings where freshwater resources cross political borders. Federal rivers are transboundary river basins within or shared by a country with a federal political system. In federal political systems, the territorial division of authority creates incentives for local innovation, learning and adaptation; it also creates barriers to cooperation and conflict resolution needed for adaptive capacity across scales. This review examines the relationship between institutional design and adaptive capacity in federal rivers in three steps. First, we review coordination challenges in federal rivers, highlighting such challenges as fundamental for adaptive capacity in multi-jurisdictional settings. Second, we examine institutional responses to these challenges. Finally, we review lessons about institutional design and performance from large-N studies of international and interstate rivers. Systematic efforts are needed to measure and compare institutional design in federal rivers. Such efforts must balance global inventories to measure institutional design variables with in-depth case studies to generate context-sensitive insights about the effectiveness of different approaches as well as the causal mechanisms linking institutional design with social, environmental and economic outcomes.

Examinations of international water treaties suggest that riparian states are not heeding the advice to adopt IWRM. Theories suggest that the larger the number of negotiating states, the lower the cost (per state) of the joint operation of treaties, but the higher the transaction costs of negotiating and maintaining them. We model the trade-off between benefits and costs associated with the number of treaty signatories and apply it to a global treaty data-set. Findings confirm that the transaction costs of negotiation and the economies of scale are important in determining the paucity of basin-wide agreements, the treaties' content and theirextent.

Background: Competition for freshwater between cities and agriculture is projected to grow due to rapid urbanization, particularly in the Global South. Water reallocation from rural to urban regions has become a common strategy to meet freshwater needs in growing cities. Conceptual issues and associated measurement problems have impeded efforts to compare and learn from global experiences. This review examines the status and trends of water reallocation from rural to urban regions based on academic literature and policy documents. Methods: We conduct a systematic literature review to establish the global reallocation database (GRaD). This process yielded 97 published studies (academic and policy) on rural-to-urban reallocation. We introduce the concept of reallocation 'dyads' as the unit of analysis to describe the pair of a recipient (urban) and donor (rural) region. A coding framework was developed iteratively to classify the drivers, processes and outcomes of water reallocation from a political economy perspective. Results: The systematic review identified 69 urban agglomerations receiving water through 103 reallocation projects (dyads). Together these reallocation dyads involve approximately 16 billion m3 of water per year moving almost 13 000 kilometres to urban recipient regions with an estimated 2015 population of 383 million. Documented water reallocation dyads are concentrated in North America and Asia with the latter constituting the majority of dyads implemented since 2000. Synthesis: The analysis illustrates how supply and demand interact to drive water reallocation projects, which can take many forms, although collective negotiation and administrative decisions are most prevalent. Yet it also reveals potential biases and gaps in coverage for parts of the Global South (particularly in South America and Africa), where reallocation (a) can involve informal processes that are difficult to track and (b) receives limited coverage by the English-language literature covered by the review. Data regarding the ...