Lessons on Water Policy Reforms from Down Under
Sailen Routray
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Map of Australia from the Year 1914
Photo Credit - Wikimedia Commons |
The book under review is an edited volume that is the outcome of a workshop held by the Risk and Sustainable Management Group of the University of Queensland to discuss the guide to the Murray-Darling Basin Plan and to input into the water policy process. The guide to the plan released in October 2010 was opposed virulently by farmers of the basin, and its copies were burnt in meetings. Much of the anger was directed at the perception that the guide envisioned the curtailing of water entitlements of farmers in the basin.
The cutbacks in water entitlements were indeed proposed by the guide, with the overall goal of restoring the environmental balance of the Murray-Darling river basin. But these cutbacks were mandated to be facilitated by buying of water entitlements from willing sellers by the Commonwealth Government. This was a clearly case of lack of proper communication between the government (actually the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, an Australian commonwealth government institution) and the farmers.
At the heart of this controversy are concerns and issues such as environmental sustainability of river basins, the ways in which this issue of sustainability and interests of rural communities (based on agriculture) can be mediated, and the best ways of mediating this. The essays contained in the volume under discussion provide some deep, well-argued templates about thinking about these issues. Given the increasing scarcity of water in India, persistence of conflicts (both inter-sectoral and inter-state) surrounding water, and the alarming environmental health of a large number of its rivers, these issues are of increasing relevance in India.
There are some similarities between water resources situation in Australia and India. Firstly, in both the countries river systems show high variability of flows. Second, and equally importantly, both inherit strong federal constitutional and institutional architectures. In the first paper in the volume authored by Tim Cummins and Alistair Watson, titled ‘A hundred-year policy experiment: the Murray-Darling Basin in Australia’ we come across a summary of literature that classifies the history of water resources development in Australia into four phases. These four phases are exploration, expansion, phase of mature water economy, and the present state, that of contraction.
These scholars use these phases to characterise the whole water economy of Australia. This schema may be borrowed for understanding the Indian context, albeit with some modifications. Different regions and river basins of India have had different histories and a pan-Indian schema might not be very productive to use.
However, it is increasingly clear that the limits of expansion of development of surface water resources are being reached in India. In a large number of river basins in India we are reaching limits of sustainable extraction. In this context how Australia manages to address the issue of environmental sustainability of river basins might have important lessons for policy planners and practitioners in India.
Nga Nguyen, Tim Goesch, and Peter Gooday in their paper titled ‘Assessing the regional impacts of the Basin Plan and the Water for the Future program in the Murray-Darling Basin’ argue that impact on agricultural production and employment will be minimal (at the basin level) with the proposed withdrawals from agriculture for restoring environmental balance. In fact, they argue that any such impact will not be much more than the ‘natural’ fluctuations that already exist due to variations in water availability.
This might be true for many environmentally fragile river basins in India as well where some withdrawal of water from irrigation to support the river basin as an ecosystem can be carried out without much serious socio-economic disruption. But these policy interventions will need to be carried out after careful studies and proper consultations with all relevant stakeholders, especially farmers. In this context, the use of real options theory and state-contingent analysis might be important policy tools to achieve the goals optimally.
As discussed by Mallawaarachchi et al. in their paper titled ‘Investment as an adaptation response to water scarcity’, in a stat-contingent approach we can deal with production and decision maker uncertainty separately. Also, all possible outcomes can be talked about within a state of nature. There is perhaps a need to apply such analysis in the Indian context
But even if diversion of water from irrigation to support the ecosystem of rivers is desirable and possible, how is such a policy objective to be realised? Most of the papers in this volume dealing with this issue advocate a market-based approach. They of course do not propose the use of market-based approaches in a blanket, ahistorical fashion.
This advocacy is based in the specific history of water management in the Murray-Darling River basin. During the expansion phase of water resources development in the basin, the government was the sole player in water delivery. Over a period of time clear water entitlements and some water trade emerged in parts of the basin.
Therefore, many scholars in this edited volume argue that a clearly specified market-based approach will work the best; water entitlements are envisaged to be bought from willing sellers by the government which then is supposed to put them into environmental uses.
Following the analysis of the papers, the introduction by the editors summarise the points of agreements amongst scholars who have contributed to this volume: these are that, a) ‘water should be purchased from willing sellers, that is, there should be no cuts in water entitlements’ (p.2), b) ‘irrigation infrastructure projects to recover additional water should only be financed publicly when the cost is consistent with the market price of the water saved’ (p.2), and ‘funding allocated to infrastructure investment under the National Plan for Water Security should be used to finance investment in social infrastructure wherever the benefits are greater than those of investment in irrigation infrastructure’(p.2).
But even if there is this scholarly consensus about how to deal with diversions of water from agricultural to environmental use, the question of measuring the value of the environmental goods still remains. Jeff Connor et al. in their chapter ‘Maximising benefits from Murray-Darling Basin water resource management’ deal with this issue.
They summarize three methods – ‘stated preference, revealed preference, and cost-based approaches’ (p. 141-142) that can help us measure the non-market values of services provided by ecosystems. They further argue that these can be used in Benefit-Cost Analysis in any water-resources related projects and analyses productively.
Given the context of the present water usage patterns and institutional architecture in the Murray-Darling basin these constitute sage advice indeed. But this reviewer wonders whether these can be usefully extended into the Indian context. For example, most Indian surface-based irrigation systems are run by old water bureaucracies of hoary colonial origins, and the water sector does not have any clear system of entitlements.
How does one trade off the competing claims of irrigation and environment in the Indian context then? The situation in India is therefore, far more complex. Additionally the political economy of water in India is embedded within a wider cultural politics of caste and community. The Australian case then is not easily extendable to the Indian context although some tools and techniques such as state-contingent analysis might be productively employed in the Indian context as well.
I have two reservations about this volume. Firstly, the volume is economistic in its orientation. This is in line with increasingly influential economic scholarship in the water sector that is slowly challenging the dominant hydrological scholarship; but more often than not this emergent scholarship replaces narrow engineering models with perhaps equally narrow economic orthodoxies (Routray 2006).
Secondly, and equally importantly, the volume under review also does not deal with important sociological/anthropological critiques of frameworks that see policy as design that gets implemented, and not as something that is co-emergent with practice (Mosse 2005). Despite, these observations, this is a major addition to the literature on water policy and river basin management, and should be widely circulated, read, and discussed.
References
Mosse, D. 2005. Cultivating development: an ethnography of aid policy and practice. New Delhi: Vistaar Publications.
Routray, S. 2006. Water: Social Differentiation, Politics and Participation. Indian Journal of Social Work 67(4): 423-429.
Details about the Book: John Quiggin, Thilak Mallawaarachchi and Sarah Chambers. 2012. Water Policy Reform: Lessons in Sustainability from the Murray-Darling Basin. Cheltenham and Northampton: Edward Elgar.238 pages + xx. Price not quoted.
Note: A slightly different version of this review was first published in 2013 in the journal Current Science 105 (3): 391 – 393.
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