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Policy

Sustainable water management is the focus of concern for many different groups in society today, including politicians, water managers, scientists, the public, Non-Governmental Organisations (NGO)s and industry. Their concerns are however diverse, ranging from worries over the effects of increasing demands on the quantity and economic uses of water, to worries over the quality of water and its effects on people and nature. However, while effort is put into improving water management within these sectors, a major challenge is to combine these different perspectives in sustainable water use. This is where policy analyses can help us, as it can provide insights into how different groups in society formulate their demands, and into how governments and authorities attempt to put these demands and their preferred solutions into practice. The analysis of water policy can help us identify the main actors and institutions involved, and the ways in which law and policy are combined in the move to more sustainable water and environmental management.

The relationship between policy and science is another important issue for the IHP-HELP Centre for Water Law, Policy and Science; while the polity (politics and administration) has to a large extent to rely on information from the scientific community, it must also work in a political context where one of the main issues is "who gets what, when and how". Policy-makers need to decide on how limited resources should be distributed. How should state income be used – to increase pensions for the elderly or in order to improve water quality in this or that river?  Policy-makers must take into account the benefits or disadvantages of different choices of policy within their governance systems (which include law) as well as the information provided by the scientific community.

STRIVER case study

Policy processes consist of policy formulation and policy implementation, that is, of policy- making and policy-doing. Policy groups are made up of much more than representatives of just political and administrative systems, economic and business interests also make policy and stakeholders and the public are also involved. All these groups are concerned with decisions on where and what to invest in, which technical innovations to support, and which road ahead is most likely to be the best. They also have to formulate policies that take into account the varying demands of the political and legal systems that they work in, as well as bearing in mind the preferences of their voters and customers who elect them or purchase their products. All of these groups and aspects of policy are analysed by the Centre’s researchers.

Policy makers therefore consist of a diverse group of policy-makers and policy-doers from political, governmental and economic spheres. We therefore need also to look at the type of knowledge and information that these groups contribute to water management. It is clear that the types of knowledge and rationalities of political and economic policy makers are different, and that they are both different to the type of knowledge of the scientific community or stakeholders. While scientists make claims of objectivity, political policy-makers claim that they use information for the common good of their communities and economic policy-makers use information and knowledge to make money.

At our Centre, experts in water policy work together with water lawyers, hydrologists and ecologists in order to identify barriers to improved water management and the ways towards more sustainable use of water for all. Policy analysis is conducted in many European countries, as well as in, for example, South-East Asia, Central America, Central Asia, Africa and India. An example of the kind of work being carried out at the Centre is the analysis of transboundary water governance on the Sesan in south-east Asia.

The Sesan River is one of the largest tributaries of the Mekong River. It starts in the central highlands of Vietnam and flows through mountain­ous areas in Vietnam’s Central Provinces before entering north-east Cambodia, where it winds from east to west before merging with the Srepok River and then the Mekong River. After the building of the Yali Hydropower dam in Vietnam which was finished in 2000, downstream water flows changed, seriously affecting water use and ecosystem health in both Cambodia and Vietnam. Both coun­tries are members of the Mekong River Commission which is a cooperative forum for both the utilization and protection of the Mekong River system and its tributaries and both Vietnam and Cambodia have to implement prin­ciples regarding water management. The task facing the Centre’s researchers was to identify the main actors and institutions on the Sesan and to analyze the policies and laws influencing water management on the river. Through this work, and through active stakeholder engagement, the Centre’s team was able to get representatives from both Vietnam and Cambodia together to sit down and discuss what they wanted for the future of the region. Our work in this river valley is an important policy case study, as part of the STRIVER project, for the Dundee IHP-HELP Centre for Water Law, Policy and Science.