Abstract
Cities depend on several watersheds’ ecosystems as the main source of ecosystem services for urban populations; however, this connection is not visible to decision-makers and citizens. The current governance structures do not contemplate the integrated management of the urban-rural territory by watershed; they establish few spaces for citizen participation, and limit the transparency of information. We use qualitative methods to analyze the work of the Civil Society Organization (CSO) in seven urbanized watersheds in Mexico, located under different socio-environmental conditions, to incorporate the watershed cities’ management processes through new spaces of collaborative governance. Through environmental education campaigns, the CSOs raised awareness of the importance of watershed ecosystems to provide water for cities, explored the willingness to pay for their conservation, and the perception of the work of municipal water utilities. By promoting alliances between social sectors, the private sector, communities, and different levels of government, the CSOs built new institutions to increase the collaborative decisions and facilitate public participation, such as Watershed Committees, Citizen Observatories for Water and Consultative Councils. The incorporation of cities and citizens in the conservation of environmental services of the watershed was promoted through payment for environmental services programs. These processes of building new forms of governance are not linear. They depend on the convening and organizational capacity of the CSOs, the political will of the municipalities and states, as well as the socioeconomic conditions of citizens. In general, our results suggest that CSOs allow the formation of alliances that strengthen collaborations among stakeholders at different scales, increase government transparency and accountability, and provide a bridge of trust between upstream and downstream users in the watersheds.
Highlights
By 2050, more than 68% of the world’s population will live in cities [1]
The objective of this study is to analyze the experience in seven urban watersheds in order to document the (i) mechanisms used by Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) to forge links between cities and watershed management, (ii) the construction of governance within the watershed and the urban water management, and (iii) the mechanism to encourage the participation of the cities in hydrological services conservation
The information for this study comes from various qualitative sources: (i) semistructured interviews with key actors of the CSOs, addressing themes relating to their experience of watershed management, identification of the main problems of the watershed, and the actions carried out and strategies adopted to incorporate the cities into watershed management; (ii) internal documents of each CSO to understand the objectives and their socio-environmental diagnosis, (iii) the last external review of the program to know their perspective about the performance of each
Summary
By 2050, more than 68% of the world’s population will live in cities [1]. At global level, both the number of cities and that of their inhabitants have increased. After North America, Latin America is the second most urbanized region worldwide: 81% of the regions population lives in cities [1]. This rapid growth in urbanization represents important challenges in terms of sustainability. Urbanization alters the rivers natural flow regimes and water quality, ecosystem integrity and the sociocultural values of society, with a consequential loss of ecological services [3]. Other interrelated pressures, such as the loss or degradation of natural areas in watershed headwaters, soil sealing, spillage of contaminants, saline intrusion, deterioration in water quality, and the densification of built areas, pose additional challenges to the functionality of the ecosystem and, for human well-being [4,5,6].
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