INTRODUCTION: WATER, GOVERNMENT AND GOVERNANCE

Since water flows through all aspects of a society's life, and all human activities depend on it in one way or another, it is a useful medium through which to consider how collective decisions are made about issues of common interest, such as the governance of natural resource use. The overarching objective of the management of water has been defined succinctly as the achievement of water security: ‘the reliable availability of an acceptable quantity and quality of water for health, livelihoods and production, coupled with an acceptable level of water-related risks’ (Grey and Sadoff 2007).

The objective is easy to state but its realisation is more difficult. One critical question is: who is responsible for the achievement of water security? For some aspects of water, this is relatively easy to define – for instance, the supply of safe water for domestic purposes to a large town is usually the job of that town's local government. But responsibility for other functions is more difficult to pin down – for instance, who apportions water from a small river in a heavily populated rural area where many farmers want to take more water than the river can provide?

Governments, particularly in poorer developing countries, seldom have the means to administer natural resources at this level of detail. And while agreements may be reached between local people on water sharing, how can these be prevented from breaking down if there is a shortage? If a dam could store water to increase and assure the farmers’ supplies, who should authorise, build and pay for its construction?

Who gets priority if there is also a factory and a town that need supplies? Who controls water quality and decides how much waste may be dumped into rivers by industries and municipalities, and under what conditions? How is the extraction of underground water regulated to ensure that wells do not run dry? And who decides how much effort – and sacrifice – should be devoted to environmental protection, since this invariably means restraining the use of the resource?

To successfully undertake the wide range of activities necessary to achieve water security, complex information has to be collated, alternative solutions need to be developed and analysed, and many different interests have to be reconciled.