Groundwater-resource governance: Are governments and stakeholders responding to the challenge?

Failure of groundwater management often results from inadequate governance arrangements, rather than from lack of knowledge about sustainable yield or pollution vulnerability of aquifers (or groundwater bodies). All hydrogeologists, concerned about protecting groundwater resources from serious depletion (and its collateral effects) and from contamination generated at the land surface, should be asking themselves whether governance provisions for their resource are adequate and being implemented effectively. This article, derived from a related World Bank publication (Foster et al. 2009), has as its objective the motivation of groundwater scientists (as key stakeholders) in advocacy to improve national and local groundwater-governance provisions. The term ‘governance’ is generally understood to mean the exercise of political, economic and administrative authority for national affairs at all levels (UNDP 1997) — and comprises the mechanisms, processes and institutions through which citizens articulate their interests, mediate their differences and fulfill their legal rights and obligations. ‘Governability’ is an indication of capacity to implement governance provisions effectively. It follows that ‘groundwater governance’ comprises the promotion of responsible collective action to ensure socially-sustainable utilisation and effective protection of groundwater resources for the benefit of humankind and dependent ecosystems (Foster et al. 2009)—an objective central to the International Association of Hydrogeologists’s (IAH) mission. This involves defining policy options, translating them into goals, providing institutions, procedures, means, monitoring and accounting, enabling stakeholder participation, and taking responsibility for outcomes. Groundwater is a widely distributed but essentially local resource. Thus, to understand whether effective governance arrangements are in place, one has to get down to subnational (provincial and district) level, since this is the level at which most ‘groundwater bodies’ (scientifically rational resource-management units) occur and to which they relate. It is not adequate to evaluate the governance situation solely at national level—since at this level there is often a semblance of sufficiency that does not stand more detailed scrutiny. Nevertheless, national and regional assessments of governance provisions and their implementation are a pre-requisite for promoting appropriate institutional arrangements and mobilising adequate financial resources in this context.