Access to water is essential for improving the lives of poor people, but in many parts of the world growing competition for scarce supplies threatens current livelihoods and hopes for the future. How can water rights systems be reformed to reduce social inequity, economic inefficiency and environmental degradation? These conclusions, to an edited book published by the International Food Policy Research Institute, outline practical lessons in water rights reform, demonstrating how changes in policies and procedures can help enhance equitable and sustainable water use.
As competition for water grows globally, water users and water management organisations seek better institutional arrangements for co-ordinating use and resolving conflicts. Water rights can be useful tools for protecting availability of water for basic needs, securing irrigation deliveries, increasing urban water supplies and enhancing environmental flows. Implemented correctly, water rights reform can secure access to water for existing users and offer equitable ways to meet additional water needs.
Reforming water allocation institutions may consume great effort but yield little impact, or even backfire, engendering confusion, conflict and deepening insecurity about access to water. The water rights reforms reviewed demonstrate some common challenges in implementing new policies:
- Reform is typically initiated by government bodies, not in response to public demands for reforms. Civil society groups and other opponents have managed to block proposed water law revisions in several countries. However, civil society groups so far have generally not moved from opposing proposed water law revisions to initiating or achieving enactment of their own policy proposals.
- Where some degree of transferability has been allowed among rights-holders, attention to registration and enabling transfers has overshadowed the basic issue of security of tenure.
- Stakeholder participation has increased in basin and sub-basin bodies, yet their roles remain largely advisory.
- Whilst almost all countries exempt minor water use for drinking, bathing and household livestock purposes, these exemptions only provide priority where supplies are available and do not regulate excessive abstraction by competing users.
- Programmes to reform rights to water may threaten to disrupt or destroy local institutions that regulate access to water, hence the formulation of statutes should be compatible with existing rights and practices.
- Attempting to leap directly into a tradable rights system, without first clarifying and securing the rights of existing users, may be a recipe for frustration and failure.
Water rights are a tool for water management that can be effective only in combination with other supportive institutional arrangements. Decisions about when and how to modify and apply water rights need to consider objectives and conditions.
- Reforming water rights takes time and may yield little benefit if pushed too quickly or without appropriate synchronisation between different components of institutional change.
- Rather than imposing nationwide changes simultaneously, an enabling institutional framework that allows the timing of changes to respond to local conditions could be more effective.
- Investing in consultation early in the reform process offers a platform for public involvement that can encourage broad social support and allows water users to shape how and when reform occurs.
- If regulations are developed in parallel with the drafting of laws and pilot implementation, all three can be adjusted to ensure that there is adequate legal backing for regulations and that new laws support changes that can be put into practice.
- Periodic renewal of water licences provide a useful opportunity for adjustment in response to changing conditions and lessons learned.
- A phased approach, vesting rights in existing users and focusing on clarifying rights before developing mechanisms for transfers may increase political feasibility.
