Drought in Africa, Asia and Latin America has impacted millions of people who have had difficulty in accessing water for domestic and other uses. This situation is likely to intensify in future in the face of increasing and severe impacts of climate change.
Residents in cities and urban areas alike have faced acute shortages of water. The result has been increased costs of accessing water for individuals, businesses and governments.
“We need to focus on solutions that will shape our water future. We need all stakeholders to agree on a clear agenda and begin managing water more wisely,” said the Minister for Water and Irrigation, Gerson Lwenge, when addressing delegates to the High-level Symposium on Catchment Water Governance.
The symposium, which was held recently in Dar es Salaam was organised by WWF and focused on water catchment governance in situations of scarcity and complexity.
Tanzania is endowed with abundant surface and ground water resources that are sufficient to meet demands of the various uses but the distribution of the resources is not uniform.
Some areas experience prevalent severe water shortages while others have plenty of the resources which is over and above their needs. The latter have been tempted to mismanage the resource while indirectly or indirectly intensifying the scarcity in the already affected areas.
Given the situation, there is need to scale up effective management of water resources in order to meet demands of various users and in so doing, move towards the sustainable development of the country.
“This calls for, among other things, a transformational set up that would strengthen sector institutions in order to improve the integrated water resources management and development,” said the minister, adding that such transformation should ensure that the number of people with access to sustainable water resources reaches the targets indicated in the National Development Vision 2025.
Speaking about the management of the Great Ruaha River and its catchment where WWF is implementing the Ruaha Water Programme, Keven Robert, Head of Water Programmes, said that previous management efforts to reduce the river’s dry periods and institute perennial flows have had little success because the focus was on water management.
“There were no shared explicit plans to take account of the many centres of decision-making and action on water governance,” he said, adding:
“To date there has been no coherent system for effectively for mediating stakeholder’s access, use and management of water resources in the Great Ruaha River in a fair and sustainable way,” he added.
The situation called for a new approach to manage the river and its catchment, the Sustainable Water Access, Use and Management (SWAUM) which is meant to address governance failures.
The approach is a multi-stakeholder catchment learning process that involves bringing together representatives of all stakeholders including poor people and hard-to-reach groups and facilitating them in developing understanding of the contested issues and jointly constructing and reframing options and identifying solutions.
In effect the new approach goes beyond the ‘cause and effect’ analysis as a means of providing solutions to complex situations and associated conventional management approaches.
Instead, it brings together diverse catchment stakeholders, both formal and informal, in deciding or influencing issues of access, use and management of water resources.
The approach exploits the opportunities that arise in bringing together stakeholders and enabling them to work together in order to address existing conflicts and reducing disagreement, to identify knowledge gaps and prepare for uncertainty and mitigate capacity constraints through more effective and efficient working.
In many developing countries water governance has been impacted by climate change which has to a great extent strained the availability of the resource. Central and local governments have been taking various measures of adaptation but the impacts of climate change have been overwhelming.
Support from the international community has not been very effective because of the existing set up which requires all funds to be directed to the ministries and through a not-so-open process, the money should reach local governments who are supposed to implement the adaptation measures.
“This set up must change if local governments are to be change agents of climate change adaption particularly in the water sector.
There must be devolution in climate change adaptation with the money from the international community being channeled directly to the local governments,” said Dr. Friis-Hansen when presenting a paper titled Devolving Climate Change Adaptation during the symposium.
He argued that in most cases district councils are required to implement adaptation measures but they are not given adequate resources to shoulder this responsibility.
“The funds are tied up in the ministries and when such money reaches the district council it is only a trickle of what it was originally and there is nothing local governments can do with such meagre resources,” he explained.
The issue of corruption as a major challenge to water governance was also discussed at the symposium where participants stressed the need for transparency and accountability as virtues that would eliminate corruption in water governance.
However, at a global scale, corruption in water governance is a very serious problem. According to the Water Integrity Global Outlook (WIGO) international agencies, governments, private companies, local authorities and communities spend hundreds of billions of dollars on infrastructure and water services but ten per cent of those investments, equating to in excess of $75 billion, is lost to corruption each year.
This will make it difficult for countries to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of ‘availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all’ will be achievable.
“There’s recognition that to achieve the SDGs we need to work on developing democratic institutions and increasing accountability. It is really a question of governance” explains Floriane Clement, a researcher in institutional policy and analysis at the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) who contributed to the report.
The report finds that no part of the financing system, public or private, is immune from corruption or integrity failures. Often, corruption can be ‘built in’ to projects from the outset. When corruption rules are perceived as social norms embedded in the broader political structures, there is a need to shape a more politically and culturally grounded anti-corruption strategy.
The WIGO report, published last month by the Water Integrity Network (WIN), highlights some specific cases of large-scale corruption. Occurring within public institutions, as well as in interactions with the private sector, these have leached money from water development programmes.
However, there are cases where corruption has been reduced or eliminated. The study also highlights circumstances where integrity has been designed in to water-sector initiatives, inhibiting corruption from taking root. For example, in Zambia, the National Water Supply and Sanitation Council (NWASCO) monitors commercial utility companies and takes action if persistent performance problems are encountered.
Clement believes that a combined top-down and bottom-up approach is needed to tackle corruption within the agricultural water sector. Making new laws, legislation and policies can contribute to reducing corruption, she says, but is not enough. “We need to support civil rights movements and empower local people so they have the ability to make government officials accountable,” she urges.
“Supporting representative and downwardly accountable civil society organizations at different scales, and instigating capacity-building programmes, can help to achieve this,” she adds.
The need to tackle water integrity issues has gained momentum in recent years. IWMI is currently working with WIN to publish a joint research report on water integrity definitions and discourses, which will be published later in the year.
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