Jeroen Warner

More Sustainable Participation? Multi-Stakeholder Platforms for Integrated Catchment Management

This paper argues for realistic expectations of Multi-Stakeholder Platforms (MSPs). MSPs are currently a hot topic in the water policy community, despite voices of disillusionment with participation in development work. Research carried out in Peru, Argentina, India, South Africa and Belgium suggests that platforms certainly can prove helpful networks in communication on and management of competing claims to water, managing coordination problems, coalition-building and/ or visioning. However, experience has put paid to implicit and explicit expectations from platforms, especially with a view to the integration of knowledge and actors. It makes no sense to separate distributive negotiation and politics (‘bad’) from integrative negotiation and social learning (‘good’). Platforms mix both modalities of negotiation, and actors may strategically withhold or contribute their knowledge. Second, no significant power sharing (vertical inclusion) takes place. A typology of MSPs ranked by influence finds no platform with a significant mandate. It is suggested that MSPs are an institutional bargaining space that is especially useful for visioning and information exchange, but cautioned not to insist that ‘water MSPs’ confine themselves to water issues only, and to institutionalized groups only. For some stakeholders, the communication and information process itself is good enough, but others will want results: ‘food on the table’. Some stakeholders will never join as they do not see how it benefits them and/or because they find it more advantageous to work around the platform. Initiators of platforms for stakeholder involvement in water management should therefore be very clear on what the participatory process aims at and can realistically achieve.

Multi-stakeholder platforms: integrating society in water resource management?

Multi-Stakeholder Platforms are a currently popular concept in the international water world. It is however not a very well defined phenomenon. The present article unpacks the concept, proposes to see platforms as networks, and identifies two ´schools of thought´: social learning and negotiation. It attempts a preliminary typology of platforms encountered in real life, in which the Comites de Bacia in Brazil, for all their shortcomings, come out as a relatively influential type. In closing, the article then identifies reasons for non-participation, suggesting that it is an inevitable corollary of organised participation.

Virtual water hegemony: the role of agribusiness in global water governance

The recent global food crises have highlighted how the agro-food system tends to be subject to powerful agribusiness players, with thus far unidentified consequences for global water security. By connecting hydro-hegemony and virtual water concepts, this study illustrates the Western dominance over the virtual water embedded in international agro-food commodity trade flows. Accordingly, foreign direct investment in land by emerging Asian and Arab economies and their increased competition over the sources of global food supply chains appear as strategies to challenge the Western agribusiness “virtual water hegemony”.

Hegemony and asymmetry: multiple-chessboard games on transboundary rivers

Keywords Transboundary rivers Hegemony Asymmetry Two-level games Hydropolitics1 IntroductionWater connects, and transboundary rivers connect a host of actors in different states inmultiple ways. Riparian states can depend on each other for sea access, generating jointbenefits and minimising the losses from natural hazards. Yet, riparians can also use theriver to annoy, threaten, and damage each other by discharging wastewater into the basin orconstructing sufficient dams to store and regulate the river’s flow (Zawahri 2008). In anincreasingly interdependent world, we would expect a growing number of transboundaryriver treaties as states attempt to minimise the social, economic, and political lossesincurred from developing the basin and preventing unwelcome unilateral action. Suchattempts at cooperation may also lead to more integrated river basin management.Yet even when international water agreements are signed, it does not mean contractingstates are actually cooperating, and the lack of agreement does not mean riparian states arefighting. In other words, the presence of a treaty does not automatically translate intobehavioural altering cooperation. In the Iberian Peninsula and on the Mekong basin, forexample, relations remain conflictive despite some form of institutionalised cooperation.Thus, conflict and cooperation are ambiguous terms that tend to be used to describe howstates interact over their shared water resources. The objective of this special issue is totease out the dynamics of basin conflict and cooperation where power relations areasymmetric.

Making space for the river : governance experiences with multifunctional river flood management in the US and Europe

Making Space for the River presents not only opportunities and synergies but also risks as it crosses established institutional boundaries and touches on multiple stakeholder interests, which can easily clash. Making Space for the River helps the reader to understand the policy and governance dynamics that lead to these tensions and pays attention to a variety of attempts to organize effective and legitimate governance approaches. The book helps to realize connections between policy domains, problem frames, and goals of different actors at different levels that contribute to decisive and legitimate action. Making Space for the River has an international comparative character that sheds light upon both the country-specific governance dilemmas which relate to specific state traditions and institutional characteristics of national water management, but also uncovers interesting similarities which provide us with building blocks to formulate more generic lessons about the governance of Making Space for the River in different institutional and social contexts. The authors of this book come from a variety of disciplines including public administration, town and country planning, geography and anthropology, and these different disciplines bring multiple ways of knowing and understanding of Making Space for the River programs. The book combines interdisciplinary scientific analyses of Space for the River projects and programs with practical knowing and lessons-drawing. Making Space for the River is written for both practitioners and scholars and students of environmental policy, spatial planning, land use and water management. ISBN: 9781780401133 (eBook) ISBN: 9781780401126 (Print)

Implementing room for the river: Narratives of success and failure in Kampen, the Netherlands

This article analyzes the discursive strategies surrounding the implementation of the Dutch water safety program ‘Room for the River’. When this program was announced, it was heralded as a paradigm shift fitting in with the ongoing transition to ‘living with water’. Yet announcing a paradigm shift is not the real thing. When a policy is made, it is still a dead letter. For it to become implemented, people have to act on it as if it is a reality. It needs to be socially produced – and reproduced. The present article looks at how the new river policy initiative is ‘translated’ to the local level, how discourse coalitions ‘pro’ and ‘contra’ develop and how they discursively defend their claims. In this ‘translation process’ elements of the original policy narrative are selected and reinterpreted to fit into the specific purposes of local stakeholders. While its protagonists have been active in promoting the program as a successful ‘paradigm shift’, others have questioned this claim. This contribution inventories the different narratives of success and failure on Room for the River, by homing in on an indicative case study. We show how elements of the official policy narrative are used, broadened, questioned or reinterpreted by local actors to defend their specific point of view. Their narratives try to weld discursive alliances between catchy rhetorical devices, normative values and sources of expertise. They make selective use of the dominant narrative of current river management speak, and ‘shop’ between scientific and policy venues to support these claims. Points for practitioners Policy ideas and labels are inevitably translated and modified as they ‘land’ in the local arena. A ‘success’ label may influence but cannot determine local acceptance and implementation of a policy. Locally, labels are likely to become tangled with other labels and interpretations. Multi-objective policies prove particularly vulnerable to criticism from ‘purist’ and one-issue opponents. Project managers should anticipate the dynamics of reframing and be able to adjust that discourse and labeling where necessary lest they become burdens.

'Virtual Water' - Real People: Useful Concept or Prescriptive Tool?

Abstract The ‘virtual water’ thesis is beginning to take centre stage in the water security global discourse. From its origins as a conceptual tool for countering the gloomy Malthusian (‘water scarcity leads to water wars’) argument, it is now increasingly seen as a serious prescriptive tool for the redistribution of water from water-rich to water-poor regions of the world. The authors interrogate the thesis from a political economy and sustainable livelihoods perspective, arguing that the indiscriminate use of ‘virtual water’ as a prescriptive tool has important implications for the security, vulnerability and livelihood strategies of actors within nation-states. Adopting such an approach could turn what is a highly illuminating analytical concept—‘virtual water’—into a deleterious policy instrument. The water may very well be characterised as ‘virtual’ but the people and politics are very ‘real’.

Let’s bring in the floods: de-poldering in the Netherlands as a strategy for long-term delta survival?

Controlled flooding, while heavily contested, is being experimented with in the Dutch delta as a new and ecologically oriented strategy to deal with floods, in contrast to the conventional flood prevention paradigm. The Noordwaard project (2012–15) represents an exemplary case. At the expense of agricultural practices, land is set aside occasionally to accommodate river floods, while restored flood and tidal dynamics aim to benefit nature development. It is argued that although controlled flooding aims to restore historical land and water dynamics in the area, the role of sedimentation processes has remained largely unaddressed in relation to shaping long-term delta futures.

Transboundary water interaction III: contest and compliance

This paper serves international water conflict resolution efforts by examining the ways that states contest hegemonic transboundary water arrangements. The conceptual framework of dynamic transboundary water interaction that it presents integrates theories about change and counter-hegemony to ascertain coercive, leverage, and liberating mechanisms through which contest and transformation of an arrangement occur. While the mechanisms can be active through sociopolitical processes either of compliance or of contest of the arrangement, most transboundary water interaction is found to contain elements of both. The role of power asymmetry is interpreted through classification of intervention strategies that seek to either influence or challenge the arrangements. Coexisting contest and compliance serve to explain in part the stasis on the Jordan and Ganges rivers (where the non-hegemons have in effect consented to the arrangement), as well as the changes on the Tigris and Mekong rivers, and even more rapid changes on the Amu Darya and Nile rivers (where the non-hegemons have confronted power asymmetry through influence and challenge). The framework also stresses how transboundary water events that may appear isolated are more accurately read within the many sociopolitical processes and arrangements they are shaped by. By clarifying the typically murky dynamics of interstate relations over transboundary waters, furthermore, the framework exposes a new suite of entry points for hydro-diplomatic initiatives.

The struggle over Turkey’s Ilısu Dam: domestic and international security linkages

While on the surface the Turkish state appears to have asymmetrical power vis-à-vis downstreamers and local societal opponents, and therefore, the ability to shape basin politics, domestic, basin and international protest over the ‘securitised’ Ilısu Dam in Turkey proved more decisive in that respect. A cornerstone of the GAP (Güneydoğu Anadolu Projesi, Southeast Anatolia Project) multi-dam project to harness the water from the Euphrates and Tigris, the dam project elicited successful resistance from Turkey’s downstream neighbours, social and environmental NGOs and professionals targeting the international donors and contractors. On the basis of document research and interviews, this article investigates which factors opened up the space for politicising the project, and how this politicisation played out in both the domestic and international domain. The link between the securitised (where water is almost by default a security issue) and non-securitised spheres of hydropolitical decision-making (where it is not) proved crucial to the success of the anti-dam opposition.