Efficiency, the para-commons, and being a waterist

So it’s now about a month since I met with Professor Bruce Lankford at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, but I think it’s worth touching on some of the interesting ideas that he shared with me. Bruce has just published a book, Resource Efficiency Complexity and the Commons, which examines resource efficiency from the perspective of common pool resources. One of the key questions is: who gets the saving when efficiency gains are made? Who wins, and just as importantly, who loses?

When we make an efficiency saving in water resource use, it means that water that was considered ‘unused’ is converted into useful resources. This includes situations like the irrigation infrastructure projects in Australia, where most of the savings so far have come from improving the delivery infrastructure, so that less water is lost through seepage from delivery channels. But where did those losses go? For the most part, they entered groundwater systems, and in some cases, ended up in rivers or wetlands.

In the western US, ‘unused’ extracted water, may end up being available for other users (via groundwater or returned flows to the river), at which point it may no longer be the property of the original extractor. In some states, and depending on the historical use data, efficiency on the part of the original extractor, by using more of the water that they pump from the river or their groundwater bore, may in fact be viewed as theft from the downstream users.

All water goes somewhere, and approaching these questions from the perspective of a common pool resource highlights the difficulty of efficiency as a solution to water scarcity. Bruce introduces the concept of the ‘paracommons’, which reflects the uncertain nature of the ownership of efficiency savings, and the uncertain nature of the benefits of efficiency.

This is not to say that there aren’t any, of course. But it does require you to engage with the question on a more nuanced scale. Returning to the Australian example of irrigation infrastructure improvements, one of the early elements of this project was to figure out where the leaked water was going: which of the wetlands and aquatic ecosystems was dependent on the system operating in its current form? Some of the high value ecosystems were insulated from the efficiency calculation: the water they depended on was not included in the calculation of the savings, and their water was protected. Further, the saved water was split three ways: one third to irrigators, one third to the city of Melbourne and one third went to the environment. This water has been made available as an entitlement in storage, which means it can be used in a more targeted fashion to deliver environmental outcomes: at the right time, in the right places, at the right flows.

Consumptive water users aren’t the only ones having to consider efficiency. As I discussed in an earlier post, there has been tremendous work to get the environment on the efficiency band wagon too. Bruce came up with one of the earliest statement of principles around environmental efficiency in 2003, and these principles are at work in Australia today, where environmental watering infrastructure is being used to deliver flood events that would otherwise require substantially higher flows (see, for example, my earlier post on the regulator at the Hattah Lakes in Victoria).

After all this, one of the big ideas that Bruce left me with was the idea of being a ‘waterist’. In chapter 7 of his book, he makes the point that when asked to find solutions to complex problems, most of us reach back to our career specialisation. For example, economists tend to reach for markets or pricing solutions, lawyers offer governance or legal solutions, and engineers can focus on the technical and physical aspects of the system. In a world where the interdisciplinarity of complex problems has been well-recognised, it’s important to be able to reach beyond our own preferred modes of thinking and find truly transdisciplinary solutions. Bruce’s suggestion here is to be a waterist: someone who seeks out water users who are already operating at the margins, and who have experience in managing their resources prudently, carefully and sometimes innovatively. By becoming the champion of the users of the resource, solutions can be embedded in what works, and can take advantage of innovations that have already emerged at the margins to deal with scarcity. For Bruce, being a waterist is about reaching beyond our ideological boundaries, investigating systems on the ground and engaging directly with those "least likely to represent themselves... but if engaged with might contribute their experience".

Privatisation, financialisation and neoliberalisation of water

Following on from my discussions with Sarah Hendry in Dundee, I’ve been exploring the idea of privatisation of water resources, and how this is playing out in the UK and around the world.

In London, I met with Dr Kate Bayliss, who has worked extensively on the issues surrounding the privatisation of water utilities, particularly in sub-Saharan African countries. Water has a dual nature: it is a human right, whilst also often being a commercial input, for the production of crops as well as industrial uses. Kate’s work highlights the challenge of retaining a focus on social justice and equity, when water utilities are privatised and operate under commercial principles. She has also recently engaged with the issue of financialization of water, when water utilities and water services are treated as financial products. She told me about a new trend in financial markets: water-related exchange traded funds. Water is an essential service, and exists in a highly specific local context – but these new financial instruments extend the process of commodification into financialization, further separating water from its context.

I went on to met with Dr Jessica Budds of the University of East Anglia. Jessica has been a critic of Chile’s water markets for many years, and one of her most recent papers examines the political ecology of water, and in particular, the relationship of water to power structures in Chile. Her historical analysis of the privatisation and creation of water markets in Chile demonstrates the link between not only the ideology of the powerful, but the way in which the privatisation of water strengthened their position. She also introduced me to the concept of the neoliberalization of nature. The tools that we use to manage our natural environment shape the discourse that we use to describe and engage with it – so the commodification of water can extend the neoliberal ideology to our relationship with nature. 

Jessica gave me a lot of new ideas to get my head around, and a new perspective from which to engage with the way that environmental water management in the context of a water market is changing the way that we perceive of and engage with the natural environment. Of course, political ecology always asks us 'what is the natural environment?', so I'm trying to disentangle the layers around that concept. In many ways, it's not really possible to separate the environment from humanity, as we define the environment as a social construct, as well as physically shaping it through our actions (even where and when we lived in it much more harmoniously than we do now).

Catchment management and conservation covenants

The UK is doing some very interesting things with their catchment management program. After my meeting with Chris Spray in Dundee, I was keen to hear more, so I met with Laurence Smith, head of the Centre for Development, Environment and Policy, at SOAS, University of London, who’s been exploring the response of farmers to NGOs seeking to arrange payment for ecosystem services, and in particular, what sort of legal arrangements they’d be willing to enter into and what sort of payments they would require. This work is feeding directly into the catchment management activities of the West Country Rivers Trust, as well as helping to inform the development of new legal instruments that enable the protection of changed land management practices in perpetuity, in the form of conservation covenants. We have similar legal instruments in Australia, but the current state of property law in the UK requires some substantial legal changes to make these instruments available. 

Laurence also shared some valuable insights into the way that farmers often prefer to work with a non-government organization, rather than the environmental regulator. This tendency is similar to what I’ve observed in the USA, and highlights the importance of separate decision-making roles. When one agency is responsible for regulating activities, it’s very hard for that agency to also explore other opportunities, as people can be unwilling to have open, frank discussions with an agency that has enforcement powers.

One of the fascinating aspects of the catchment management approach being piloted by the UK is that they are actively encouraging a diverse range of local agencies to take a lead role (called the catchment ‘host’ organisation) in the development of catchment management plans. Organizations interested in this role can ‘bid’ for the opportunity to host the plan development. This is a policy that creates space for non-government organizations to get involved, and really encourages the involvement of NGOs in catchment management. I’ll be really interested to see the results of the next round of catchment management planning, and see how the NGOs facilitate (or not!) the development of plans that the local community can embrace. 

Water reform in the UK: abstraction licences on unregulated rivers

London welcomed me with all its traditional charms: it rained. All day. Unceasingly. Coming from south-eastern Australia, I wasn’t entirely sure that such a thing could actually happen, so it had all the delights of novelty.

Fortunately, because as nice as my raincoat is, it’s not really a fashion piece, London then remembered that it was having the warmest, sunniest summer since 2006, and the rest of the week was glorious – golden, warm and lots of other words not usually associated with south-east England.

England and Wales are currently pursuing a range of water resource management reforms. I was lucky enough to meet with Henry Leveson-Gower, Head of Future Water Resource Management Project in DEFRA’s Water Availability and Quality Programme. He and his team are exploring policy options to facilitate water trading, and have been examining ways to unbundle water abstraction licences in England. This is quite similar to the water reform in Australia, where water licences have been separated into a permanent right (in Victorian parlance, a water share), a temporary right (a water allocation), a water use licence (which specifies where and how water can be used, and is attached to the land on which the water will be used) and a delivery share. However, in Australia, we’ve really only been successful at unbundling water licences on regulated systems, where water is held in large storages and called out for use. In England, they are attempting to do this for unregulated river systems, where the water licence gives you the right to extract a share of the available flow. This makes unbundling more complicated, as the location on the river is much more important in determining what the share of that flow will be, and the capacity to determine physical allocations of water (temporary rights) depends on predicting the flows in the river at a given period. I’m going to be very interested to see how they solve some of these problems, and whether any of those solutions might be transferable to Australia’s unregulated systems.

One of the components of the policy reform is using smart water metering technology, so that water meters provide water use data in real time to water managers, and access to water can be linked to real-time stream flow data. Australia has also been exploring the use of such smart meters in some rural catchments, and there’s a real opportunity to share some of these lessons with the UK. For example, in Victoria, Melbourne Water, in partnership with the Victorian State Government, have been piloting the use of smart meters in several of their rural catchments. I’m hoping that we can encourage policy makers everywhere to get better at sharing and learning from these sorts of projects.

Interestingly, there are some environmental charities (such as RSPB) who are purchasing land to restore and protect wetlands. In some cases, this includes a licence to extract water from the river to recreate flooding in the wetland. These environmental groups will also be able to trade their water under the new arrangements, and it will be interesting to see whether more environmental organizations enter this space and become environmental water managers in the UK. 

Murray Cod in the Murrumbidgee

This is a great little video released by the New South Wales Office of Environment and Heritage, showing how environmental flows have been used in the Murrumbidgee River (part of the Murray-Darling Basin) to help support and maintain populations of the Murray Cod, Australia's best-known freshwater fish.

For any international readers that I've introduced to the Murray Cod previously - I wasn't kidding! They really are that big, and they live for up to 80 years. 

Thanks to the Australian River Restoration Centre for the share. 

Flood risk management and Jane Austen: all part of a day out in Edinburgh

One of the serendipitous delights of this visit to the UK is the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The city is almost overwhelmed with visitors from all over the world, flocking through the streets in search of the fun and frivolity of the Fringe.

It can also be a bit much. The main streets and places like the Royal Mile are all but immovable, and the tourists (yes, that’s me too, I know) have taken over. I’m pretty sure that you’re not really supposed to pet police horses, for example, but the pair I observed yesterday were taking it all very patiently. Does it count as bribing a police officer if you’re making friends with his horse?

Luckily, I had the insights of an almost-local. Vanessa Collins lives just over the border in Newcastle and she braved the slightly dysfunctional rail network on Thursday morning to pop over for some brunch, a chat about water resource management and a viewing of Austentatious.

I think Edinburgh forgot it was still summer, and I woke up to mist snuggled up around the castle and the Scott monument. The Georgian terraces were equal parts obscured by mist and road works (apparently one must not mention the tram works. At all.), but the brunch was excellent (if you’re after something tasty and inexpensive, try Cafe Milk).

Vanessa is working for the Environment Agency, an extraordinarily large public agency in the UK responsible for sustainable development and environmental management, including water licensing and flood risk management. Apparently there are over 10,000 staff in the agency, working all over England. 

Vanessa is a civil engineer working as a project manager in the flood risk management area. England is trying to find ways to reduce flood risks to lower catchment towns, using a range of engineering solutions, including building bigger flood walls in towns, and finding ways to store more water in the upper catchment. What I find most interesting about this issue is that climate change is likely to make floods more frequent, and more extreme, but probably less predictable. So how do you invest in the flood mitigation measures, knowing that you’ll really need them at some future point, but until then, they aren’t really useful at all? Even more challenging: how do you hold space in a water storage to retain flood waters when storage levels are dropping? The corollary of increased flooding under climate change is that periods of low flow and drought are also likely to be more frequent. From what I can tell, this is less of a problem here in England than it is in Australia, for example, but it wasn’t so long ago that parts of England were drought stricken. Managing uncertainty and variability requires a new mindset, and it’s one that sits uncomfortably alongside accounting measures of capital investment. I think there’s going to be some interesting learning curves as our understanding of the new hydrology of many of our river systems develops over time.

I’m reminded of the work of Chris Spray at the University of Dundee in the Eddleston catchment, where upstream storage mechanisms are being enhanced using a combination of engineering solutions and ecosystem services like re-inserting meanders in the river, building wetlands and revegetating upper catchments. Researchers at the University of Newcastle are also working with the Environment Agency on a range of catchment management approaches to mitigate flooding in Belford (check out this and this).

None of these activities are cost free, and they all impose a trade-off between what you can use the water, space and money for now, as opposed to what you might need to use it for in the next flood. We don’t know when that will be, but we do know it will happen.

After all that, it seemed only logical to weave our way through Edinburgh’s mist-shrouded streets and parks, claim a space in the queue, and enjoy the hilarity of Austentatious. Improv comedy in the style of Jane Austen: who could ask for more?

Re-embedding economic relationships within the social context: what does this mean for environmental water trading?

When we use the market to facilitate the acquisition and management of environmental water, how much are we giving up to market norms? Are we redefining the environment in the context of the water market, and if so, what does that mean?

This tension between the drive to protect the environment, and the methods we can use to achieve this protection, is emerging as one of the critical issues for my research. I’m interested in what happens to legal and policy definitions and perceptions of the natural environment when it is clothed in a corporate form, given tradeable water assets and the legal and institutional capacity to operate within the water market and the water supply systems as just another user. In Australia, our environmental water holders are using the market to acquire and manage their water portfolios. I think there’s some evidence that this is changing the way that the environment itself is seen (and which I’ll explore another time), and it connects broadly to the behavioural economics research into the way that market norms can overwhelm and irreversibly replace social norms of interaction.

But is this tension always apparent? Is there a way of reconceptualising the market so that it operates within a social context? Can we use the market to strengthen social values around the environment, so that social norms are actually enhanced as a result of environmental water trading? I think this may be what is happening in the western USA, where environmental water trusts require a social relationship with the local community. Unless other water users can see that there is a win-win, then there is no support for trading water to the environment. In this context, the activities of the environmental water trusts are actually enhancing the understanding and support for environmental protection, in a non-confrontational way.

I’ve been searching for an analytical tool that can help me to understand the differences I can see in the way that environmental water is being managed in the US and Australia. On Wednesday, I was lucky enough to meet with Dr Bettina Lange, a specialist in socio-legal theories of regulation at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at Oxford University. She shared her insights into the way that markets can be seen as embedded within a social context. She edited a special issue of the Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly in 2011, which drew on the work of Karl Polanyi to discuss the way that capitalism can disembed the market from its social context, and whether there can be a corresponding ‘counter-movement’ to re-embed the market within social norms.

Bettina generously helped me to understand this approach, and the opportunities it offers to understand the shifting relationship between market norms and social norms. It’s early days, but I feel like this could be a watershed moment in the development of my thinking.

(And apologies for the pun. It’s just not possible to talk about water resource management without punning from time to time.)