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Securing urban water supply through reservoir reoperation–An analysis of power resources and equity in cases from India, Spain and the USA [1]

['Laura Turley', 'Environmental Governance', 'Territorial Development Hub', 'University Of Geneva', 'Geneva']

Date: 2023-08

This paper examines intersectoral water allocation, in particular how cities secure water vis-à-vis rural users, and assesses the equity of this (re)allocation. We use the distribution theory of institutional change, and argue that urban water providers mobilize power resources (positional, financial and informational) to secure water. We adapt the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework to study this empirically, with case studies from India, Spain and the United States that centre around a large reservoir and its reoperation. Results show the importance of financing power in all cases, and also suggest that cities may lack the positional power needed to implement drinking water priorities. The ‘hybrid equity approach’ reveals the diversity of equity considerations on rural-to-urban water reallocation, both in terms of local perspectives and also regarding universal equity principles. Finally, it is fruitful to study power and equity together, as the former generally has profound distributional and procedural implications which are at the heart of equity.

Funding: Funding for fieldwork in India was generously provided by the Ernst and Lucy Schmidheiny Foundation (L.T.). Funding for fieldwork in Spain and the USA was generously provided by the UNESCO Water Chair on Hydropolitics (L.T) and the Environmental Governance and Territorial Development Department at the University of Geneva (L.T). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Data Availability: The interview protocol, list of organizations interviewed, and overview of the participatory network maps are included as supplementary material . Original interview transcripts have not been included in order to maintain confidentiality, as permissions for publication of the full transcripts were not requested during data collection. Professor Christian Bréthaut, University of Geneva, is able to receive requests for data for this paper at [email protected] .

Introduction

Urbanization is a defining feature of human activity over the past century, with significant implications for the delivery of a reliable water supply [1]. By 2050, over two thirds of the human population will live in cities, and 1 billion of these urban dwellers will live in water-stressed cities [2]. As municipal water providers look for ways to meet future water needs, many will increasingly rely on water reallocation and transfers away from rural uses, as cities are generally incapable of meeting their water supply needs within their own territory [1, 3]. Rural to urban water reallocation is being further driven by climate change, which affects the timing and location of water, with implications for per capita water availability [4].

In this article, we study urban water allocation from a power and equity perspective, exploring how urban utilities secure additional supply from a shared reservoir, and what the equity implications are. Water allocation is highly dependent on institutions–the formal entitlements to water such as rights, licenses or permits to abstract the resource. However, in order to understand allocation from an equity perspective, we join other authors in arguing that it must also be understood in terms of power relations between actors [5–7]. Water allocation is a political process, resulting from decisions, rules and commitments about water that require political support to be implemented [8, 9]. Moreover, it reflects wider social relations of exchange and access (e.g. socioeconomic class, ethnicity) and the historical patterns of these relationships [5]. Many factors outside of the water sector shape these relations such as social policy, gender, spatial development, and infrastructure [8]. We maintain that power relations have material consequences for water allocation equity, and that it is therefore valuable to study and operationalize these two concepts together.

To study the power behind allocation decisions, we employ the distributional theory of institutional change. The notion of power resources [10] is mobilized as an independent variable across three diverse case studies to study the positional, financing and informational power of urban water providers. In each of the case studies, cities secure additional water allocations through the reoperation of a nearby reservoir: the city of Jaipur (India) through the Bisalpur Reservoir, the city of Zaragoza (Spain) through the Yesa Reservoir, and cities of the Front Range (USA) through the Colorado Big Thompson Reservoirs, with varying implications for other, pre-existing users. The reservoirs are located in regions with an agricultural tradition, and providing water for irrigation was an original operating purpose. However over time, population growth and urbanization have necessitated more water for nearby cities that comes (at least in part) through surface water reallocations from the reservoir.

We then analyze the water allocation outcomes in terms of equity, focusing on intersectoral allocations between urban and rural users. We propose a ‘hybrid equity approach’ that considers local actors’ perspectives on water reallocation, as well analyzing the cases in terms of more universal equity principles. We do this by situating the relevant actors (and their power) in the local context and synthesizing their justifications and critiques of the rural-to-urban reallocation, as well as by assessing each of the case studies against five ‘directional principles’ of water equity [8].

This article mobilizes both institutional scholarship on resource allocation and political ecology perspectives on equity–benefiting from the insights (and perhaps addressing some of the shortcomings) of both. Institutional analysis captures an essential element of water allocation and access through the study of formal and informal rules, but struggles to incorporate power, with mainstream frameworks tending to normalize distributional assumptions and implications [5, 11, 12]. Political ecologists, on the other hand, have been emphasizing the social and political nature of water access for decades, showing how the flow of water reflects the social power that is distributed in society, but tend to occupy a purely critical space [8, 13, 14]. The guiding research questions that frame the article are:

What power resources do urban water providers use to secure water vis-à-vis other rural users? What are the equity considerations of local actors? How do they align with universal equity principles?

In the following section, we review the literature on access to natural resources from an institutional perspective, focusing on the incorporation of power into institutional analysis. We describe the notion of power resources, and present an analytical approach based on the well-known Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework. A brief discussion of equity in water allocation is proposed with which to evaluate the urban water allocation outcome. In the Research Design and Method section, we present the comparative case study and data collection approach. In Results we describe the case studies, focusing on the urban water providers, and analyzing the extent to which the three power resources were mobilized to secure water allocation vis-à-vis other users, as well as presenting the local equity considerations. Finally, in the Discussion section we summarize the use of power resources by urban water providers, summarize the local equity perspectives, and apply the universal equity principles to the three case studies. We then conclude and propose avenues for future research.

Access to natural resources, and accounting for power in institutional analysis A considerable literature on access to natural resources is devoted to the central role of rules, or institutions, such as property rights [15–17]. This is also true for water allocation, which is often defined in terms of the prevailing formal institutions in a given place and time–the rules that generate licenses, permits or entitlements to abstract water [18]. Property rights are not limited to ownership of a resource, particularly in the case of water, generally owned by the state, but are most comprehensively understood as different configurations or ‘bundles’ of rights that may include access or withdrawal rights, management decision-making rights, the rights to exclude other users, and alienation rights [19]. Like property rights, public policies can also determine the benefits that people can secure from resources, such as surface and groundwater. For example, a public policy may prioritize drinking water allocation in times of scarcity, or set minimum environmental flows on a river to protect ecosystems. A challenge is ensuring the coherence between public policies and property rights; the latter tend to be more enforceable [20]. The possibilities an actor has to access water will be determined at least in part by the prevailing rules, and their interactions [20]. Beyond rights, however, there are other factors that determine access to natural resources. In the theory of access, Ribot & Peluso posit that we must also consider structural and relational access mechanisms like technology (e.g. infrastructure), capital (e.g. finance, equipment), markets (access to exchange relations), knowledge (e.g. expert status), and other social relationships (e.g. friendships, identities) [7]. Whereas the traditional literature on property rights focused on the right to benefit from things, they focus instead on the ability to benefit from things, shifting the discussion towards recognizing the underlying webs of social power that enable or constrain people to benefit from natural resources [7]. Indeed, it is not uncommon for people to hold property rights to resources that they do not have the ability or capacity to benefit from [6]. In the water sector, this perspective echoes work done on the study of water reform in post-apartheid South Africa, in which it was argued that people lack ‘real’ rights to water if such rights are promised in law, but denied in practice [21]. Similar observations have been made through juxtaposing the ‘regulatory state’, focused on regulatory compliance and enforcement practices, with the ‘everyday state’ in which actors are enmeshed in society and its formal and informal modes of water access [22]. Recent calls have been made to frame water security in terms of capabilities, or the benefits that people are able, in practice, to derive from water services [23]. How does the institutional analysis literature reconcile these perspectives? This chasm between the formal rules governing access and the reality ‘on the ground’ can be explained in different ways. Firstly, informal institutions, like norms, practices and local rules-in-use are in constant interplay with the formal institutions, and may be highly influential in affecting outcomes in natural resource governance [24]. Secondly, actors may behave strategically vis-à-vis the formal rules: stretching their boundaries, adapting them to local contingencies, behaving opportunistically to benefit personally, or by ignoring them all together [25, 26]. Thirdly, institutions themselves are made–and continuously reshaped–by actors (albeit usually slowly). Finally, the formation and implementation of institutions takes place not on an even playing field, but in a political arena in which some actors are endowed with more power than others [10, 25, 27]. This paper builds on this latter point on the nature of power in society, and how it structures the performance and outcomes of institutions. In an important contribution to this field, Jack Knight argued that institutions are best explained by distributional conflicts, and power, rather than collective benefits or some ‘pareto-superior response’ to collective goals [10]. Decision-making processes are political, and they result in institutions that are good for some actors, and bad for others, depending on who has the power to impose their will [28]. In the distributional theory of institutional change, the bargaining power of an actor is a function of their resource provision; asymmetries in the so-called ‘power resources’ held by actors are the main determinants of institutional change [10]. For Knight, to exercise power over someone or some group is to affect by some means the alternatives available to that person or group. The view of power as relation between actors resonates with the wider literature on power. A seminal definition is that “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do” [29]. According to Dahl, an actor’s power consists of all the resources (opportunities, acts, objects, etc.) that he can exploit in order to effect the behaviour or sway the choices or strategies of another [29]. Similarly, relationships are central to Lukes’ first two dimensions of power: instrumental power depends on the possession of resources that are useful in shaping policy outcomes in competition with others, and structural power acknowledges that decisions are influenced by the social structures within which they are embedded [30]. Giddens also refers to reference to power resources, which are found in the structure of social systems and also via agents in the course of their interactions [31]. What are power resources? For Knight, they are a combination of actors’ attributes and informal institutions, capturing the ways in which actors behave–usually strategically–in bargaining situations [10, 28]. Some examples are positional power (ability to carry out credible threats), opportunity costs (how many bargaining rounds can the actor sustain), risk acceptance (higher if holding more resources), and uncertainty (the more we discount our future the more we focus on short term gains). These and other power resources have been studied empirically in natural resource settings [32–34]. Power resources also come from the formal rules that make up the state [28]. Property rights and other formal institutions have different distributional implications, for which actors bargain based on their expected net gains from formal institutional arrangements [17]. Knoepfel, for example, studies power in political processes, such as decision-making over water, proposing ‘action resources’ to include law, information, organization, time, personnel, money, patrimony, force, consensus and political support [35]. In the context of water allocation, biophysical or infrastructural variables can become power resources too. Land resources where water is stored, used and managed can be a strategic resource for accessing water [5]. Infrastructure and riparian position may be important resources, as an actor with the ability to plan, construct and operate large infrastructure can create new hydro-political realities, changing the nature of competition over water resources [36]. Biophysical resources generally are important to the extent to which humans have placed use value on them [37]. In this article, we take the view that power resources can come from a wide range of social and ecological variables, however we propose to look empirically at three: Positional power refers to an actor’s position that allows for certain actions and certain strategies, for example how positions of authority enable actors to carry out credible threats [34]. Positional power comes about first and foremost from the relationships defined through formal institutions, but also through how actors interact strategically with their multi-positionality, due to overlap in policies and property rights, for example. In the context of water allocation for cities, we expect that urban water providers use positional power as implementation agencies for government policy on drinking water priorities, in order to secure additional water supply. Financing power refers to the budgetary and financial resources available to an actor to influence decision-making. Financing has been studied in transboundary water settings, in which actors use financial support to bring about compliance by other actors [36]. In the context of water allocation for cities, we expect urban water providers to use financing power to build capital intensive water infrastructure projects to secure additional water supply. Informational power refers to the ways in which access to information, particularly the awareness of alternatives, is used by an actor strategically [10]. In addition, knowledge, which includes skills and expertise has proven to be important [33]. In the context of water allocation for cities, we expect urban water providers to hold superior information and knowledge about water supply scenarios, and on the governance regime, and use this strategically to their advantage to secure additional water supply.

Analytical framework combining power resources & the IAD framework To study the these three power resources systematically and empirically, we adapt the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework (IADF), which is frequently used by institutional scholars to relate concepts in governing common pool resources such as water [38]. It provides a systematic way to understand institutions and actors, and to evaluate outcomes. At the centre of the analytical framework is the ‘action arena’–a social space in which actors interact, such as through decision-making activities, exchanging goods and services, or engaging in collaboration or conflict [38]. The activity in the arena is shaped by biophysical conditions, attributes of the community and rules-in-use in the original IAD framework. To incorporate power, adaptations to the IADF have added ‘political economic context’ and ‘discourse’ to the variables [11]. Others study power by using the framework to study not only action, but also inaction, non-decisions or the inability of actors to influence rules [12]. In our version (Fig 1), we instead focus on power resources, and cluster all of the exogenous variables together into this broad category. This is done to capture the myriad types of power resources that can potentially be used by actors to influence decision-making, discussed in the previous section. The ability of actors to bring these diverse resources into the action arena is our version of power. Actors’ power resources are relative to others’, and are leveraged in cooperative or conflictual logics [35, 39]. In some cases, the actors with the most power resources at their disposal have more ability to coerce others (i.e. more possible tactics and strategies) than those with fewer (i.e. fewer options, less manoeuvrability) [36]. But this is not necessarily the case; it remains an empirical question [10, 35]. PPT PowerPoint slide

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TIFF original image Download: Fig 1. Adapted IAD framework for studying power resources and equity. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pwat.0000097.g001 In the subsequent empirical analysis, our adapted IADF is used to conceptualize the variables (positional, financial and informational power) that an actor (urban water providers) can bring into the action situation (reservoir reoperation events). The outcome is fixed and shared across the three case studies: urban water provides secure additional water allocation. We use the IADF to look a posteriori at what power resources were influential in reaching this outcome, and if there are observations that can be made across the cases. We then assess this outcome in terms of equity.

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[1] Url: https://journals.plos.org/water/article?id=10.1371/journal.pwat.0000097

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