Name: Water Conflicts and Diplomacy: How Conflicts Block Integrated Management
Uploaded: 2016-07-27T20:56:29.000Z
Duration: 24 min 19 s
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Hello, I'm Neil Grigg. I'm in the Department of Civil Engineering at Colorado State University.

This session is going to be about conflicts and diplomacy in water resources. I'm a professor

in the department of Civil Engineering, as I mentioned. Normally, you would think of

that as a technical engineering department, which it is. But, over the years as I've worked

in water resources and many different situations, I've found that conflicts block solutions

more than technical issues do. In this session, and in another one, I want to focus on the

nature of these conflicts, why they block integrated management, and what we can do

about it. The dilemma is that water resources involve

a lot of interconnected issues. There are two attributes of water that are unique among

complex systems. One is, there's so many demands on water for so many different uses, that

we inevitably come into conflicts about the use of water. The second aspect of water which

is unique is that it travels from one group of people to another as it moves through the

hydrologic cycle. It's like we're interconnected even if we don't want to be. When you think

about human nature and the nature of business and organizations, and what might cause some

of the problems we have with conflicts, you can see that there are two types of issues

that really block solutions. The first is self-interest. We're all working toward our

own interests whether financial or value systems or whatever. We'll take the actions that seem

to make more sense to us. The other is organizational self-interest in the sense that the organizations

have power structures and incentives that cause them to act in their own interest rather

than in community interest. The other aspect to water is what you might even think about

as a type of government failure. We have stovepipes between the different levels of government

and between governments at the same level like county and city governments. They don't

line up with watersheds. There are a lot of governmental problems that block integrated

solutions. When you think the integrated water management

and the nature of these conflicts, it's natural to go right away to the watershed as a place

where you can see these many different aspects of water management coming together. As I

mentioned, these different types of demands on water, you can see those in a diagram of

a watershed where there's conflicts between cities and farms, recreational uses of water

and so. Then, think about upstream and downstream conflicts and pretty soon you get the picture.

These are sort of age old dilemmas. In fact, this diagram goes back to the 1950s as a way

to explain to people what's going on with water conflicts.

When we are looking at why we have to integrate our management and how we really need to resolve

our conflicts, you can see all these different demands on water which you've been hearing

about in this course already: water scarcity, water for food, health issues, environmental

needs for water, habitats, and even disasters where one aspect of water management will

turn around and either lead to a disaster, like a dam failure, or it may, the disaster

aspect may block the other uses of it. The coordination required for all of these is

very complex as you can imagine. What happens is that these conflicts happen.

They require solutions through what we call governance. Governance sounds like government,

but it means something else. You're supposed to have in the course here, a special session

on governance where we explain in more detail. To me, it's the operations of government as

government goes about, resolving conflicts, managing resources, and solving problems in

different ways. With more management, a number of issues come to fore. One is allocating

resources and water resources. That's probably one of the major conflict arenas. You also

have conflicts that arise between what government does in the public sector and what the private

sector can do, such as an industry or a business of any kind that needs water. I already mentioned

that water is unique and essential to all of our uses. To come up with systems that

can help us solve all of these different problems, we have to have ways to value water. That's

another source of difficulty because people see different value systems when they try

to give their opinion on how to allocate water resources.

Integration is needed. It really boils down to effective coordination between all of these

different demands and uses, how to do that coordination in the face of market failure

and government failure. By the way, there's a field called Public Choice which has come

about in an attempt to bridge the gap between market failure and government failure and

to be realistic about how government officials and private business people operate and make

decisions as they go along. The challenge is how to do it. This is a formidable challenge

as you can imagine. We'll talk a little about that in this session and in the next one.

To review that, the conflicts are those that are the reasons that we have the problems.

They're more serious than science or technical solutions, even money sometimes can't unblock

these conflicts that we've got. The conflicts are widespread. They occur from small scale

settings like that watershed I showed to large settings like river basins or even nations.

The solution should be effective water governance, but we don't know how to do that yet and we

need to figure it out. I mentioned that governance is the actions

of government to employ the process of governing to solve human needs. A more detailed definition

is that governance involves the authority to manage water affairs as it is applied to

the sector of water resources. Governance is going to be applied in every sector of

human endeavor. What we're talking about is applying it in the category of water affairs.

For a longer definition of it, you see there a quote from the global water partnership

where they say that governance involves a "range of political, social, economic, and

administrative systems to develop and manage water resources and water services at different

levels of society." I find long definitions like that to be hard to work with because

when you try to wrap so many concepts into one definition you start to lose sight of

the big picture. The bottom line is that in a lot of places, this governance isn't working

well. At the bottom I have another quote this time from the World Water Assessment Programme,

which is part of the United Nations UNESCO system, "In many countries water governance

is in a state of confusion." You can imagine how that would be the case when you look at

a lot of political difficulties in countries around the world. It's a miracle that we can

manage water even at a basic level, but it's essential to solve that problem and bridge

the gaps that are there. I want to give you a few examples. When we

talk about governance and integrated water management and conflicts, these are all abstract

concepts. We need to look at examples in order to see how it really plays out. One example

is the Colorado River which is famous in the western United States as needing governance

but also involving many conflicts. I have two maps here, the top one a geophysical map

where you can get an idea of the aridity and the elevation in the western part of the United

States. Then, where the rivers drain on the bottom. You can see that the Colorado River

drains the southwestern part of the United States, seven states more or less, and into

Mexico. When you think about the dependence of that part of the country on that river,

you get an idea of how critical it is that we can resolve those conflicts and manage

the river. What you're going to see on the Colorado River is conflicts between water

users, conflicts between different states, and even conflicts between the United States

as a nation and Mexico as a nation. I don't think I mentioned conflicts between value

systems of these different uses, but it's quite (as you can imagine) quite a long story

about the conflicts on the Colorado River and how these mechanisms of governance and

conflict resolution have been implemented to try and resolve them.

Here's another map of the Colorado River Basin. It's got a little more detail in it. I just

wanted to show this one to illustrate some of the features of the river and some the

aspects of the conflict resolution. It even comes into play up in the part of the basin

where we live. If you look and see the cursor of the computer up near Fort Collins, then

in Denver here. We have large interbasin transfers of water out of the upper Colorado River before

the water even starts to flow downstream. Then you have a group of states that are referred