Water Governance Throughout History and Science

Abstract

Far from being pioneering in terms of trying and understanding how water and human beings and societies interconnect, this work starts by presenting an overview of the previous literature that exists in this domain. The analysis, first, draws on the academic debate that portrays water-related problems and scarcities as the result of mismanagement and ineffective policy decisions. Thus, we look in detail at the new paradigms of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) and Adaptive and Integrated Water Resources Management (AIWM). Turning to political science and International Relations (IR) theories, this chapter then equips the reader with a thorough definition and understanding of governance (vertical and horizontal governance, multi-level governance, water governance, and adaptive governance) and institutions (their concept, institutional change, institutions across scales and institutional adaptive capacity). We find there have been relatively few empirical studies on how institutions and governance mechanisms systematically build – or not – their adaptive capacity to respond to the expected impacts of climate change in the water sector. We attempt to move the analysis of institutional adaptation mechanisms away from a mere focus on organisational learning towards looking at the interactions and development process of institutions. Finally, and given the inherent multi-scale nature of water resources management, the perspective of those scholars focusing on how governance stretches across spatial and temporal levels is presented. The chapter concludes by emphasising the need to establish and reinforce institutional adaptive capacity to facilitate system transformation towards the integration of uncertainty and the consequent ability to respond to change. However, from the literature it remains unclear how this process does or should occur, thus highlighting the need for a dynamic multi-level analysis of water institutions and how they respond to change.