Contested governance of drinking water provisioning services in Nepal’s transboundary river basins

Highlights

• Insufficient research on the institutional aspects of the ecosystem service governance.

• How governance enables the ecosystem services approach to source water protection.

• Rural to urban water transfers in transboundary river basin management in central Nepal.

• Collaborative governance improves adversarial situations rather than empowerment.

• Ecosystem service governance should empower vulnerable communities.

Abstract

Governance and management of ecosystem services involve a diversity of institutional mechanisms and policy processes from voluntary to regulatory and collaborative approaches. The governance structures and policy processes are often contested, particularly when stakeholder concerns are insufficiently addressed, particularly of those who are most affected by policy decisions. This research examines how collaborative governance enables the ecosystem services approach to source water protection, thereby addressing contested governance problems and policy processes in transboundary river basins in central Nepal. The data were collected using key informant interviews, policy workshops, policy document review, and direct observation. Research results suggest that the state established collaborative governance institutions to improve already adversarial situations rather than in the co-management of water provisioning and other ecosystem services. We conclude that collaborative governance should focus on empowering vulnerable communities to speak for themselves and for the natural environment, particularly to maintain the sustainable flow of multiple ecosystem services for current and future generations.

Introduction

Besides water-induced casualties, nearly 2.1 billion people worldwide lack access to safe drinking water, 4.5 billion lack adequate sanitation, and 2.2 million people die from water-related diseases every year (WHO, 2017). Contrary to this grim statistics, it was proclaimed that Target C of the seventh Millennium Development Goal (MDG7), which aimed to halve the proportion of people without access to improved sources of water, was met five years ahead of schedule in 2010 (MDG, 2013). Globally, while rural areas struggle to secure clean drinking water, sanitation and other livelihood needs, rapidly growing urban municipalities face challenges with an adequate supply of safe water and appropriate infrastructure (Brooks, 2002). In order to address growing water crises, urban areas draw additional water from the surrounding rural areas to compensate for the loss of urban ecosystem services. Although rural to urban water transfers are often seen as just and legitimate state interventions, restrictions on customary use and reduced flows in the river can cause injustices to rural communities and the environment. The benefits of water extraction are, for the most part, accrued in urban places where the raw water is processed in treatment plants to generate added value in the form of clean and safe water to support the ‘flush and forget’ consumer culture. Contrary to this anthropocentric view on the use of water resources, water is an important service the natural ecosystem provides, among others. The 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA) identifies that water is an ecosystem service (with provisioning, regulating, cultural and supporting functions), and the need for responsible management of the finite supply of drinking water sources (MDG, 2013, MEA, 2005). As a follow up to the water related MDGs targets, the sixth Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 6) aims to ensure access to water and sanitation for all by 2030 (United Nations, 2015).

Stewardship of the environment and ecosystem services is normally left to the voluntary sector (Liarakou et al., 2011, Ryan et al., 2001), but it is often the case that regulations are also necessary, particularly when over extraction is imminent (EPA, 2009, Morrison and FitzGibbon, 2014). Besides self-motivated volunteers, environmental stewards also include state regulators, such as park wardens and law enforcement officials, and collaborative governance measures, such as forest stewardship, marine stewardship and fair trade certification (Kreutzwiser et al., 2011, Richter, 2008). Furthermore, as neither regulative nor voluntary governance is sufficiently effective in managing ecosystem services, scholars suggest to opt in for the collaboration of state and non-state actors (Ananda and Proctor, 2013, Ansell and Gash, 2008). Governance and management of ecosystem services entail a diversity of policy instruments, such as assessment and valuation of ecosystem services, but they are often controversial because different stakeholders could prioritize provisioning services (e.g., drinking water and food) and other serveries differently (Keune et al., 2015, Schleyer et al., 2015). Municipal water provisioning is often understood as a problem of physical water scarcity, which is rather a manifestation of inefficient management of ecosystem services (Sharp et al., 2011). Particularly in large-scale water diversion, it is a challenge to maintain environmental flow, which is the water regime provided within a river, wetland or coastal zone to sustain ecosystem health (Acreman, 2016, Dyson et al., 2003). Despite this fact, institutional aspects are insufficiently addressed in the development of water resources and infrastructures (Keune et al., 2015, Mann et al., 2015, Primmer et al., 2015). This research aims to addresses this gap by examining how collaborative governance and management enable the ecosystem services approach to source water protection in Nepal’s transboundary river basins that provide drinking water for the Kathmandu Valley, the national capital and the largest city of 2.5 million human population. This research creates new knowledge in the science and practice of ecosystem services, which would lead to better policy decisions to empower vulnerable communities most affected by natural resource development in Nepal and similar contexts across the developing countries. However, the findings should be interpreted within the context that the entry points for this research were two most significant, and yet highly controversial, rural to urban water transfer projects in the country with time frames spanning over eight decades and limited availability of longitudinal data.

The next section first reviews the literature on governance and management of ecosystem services and develops a conceptual framework for the analysis of empirical data. Then we describe study areas, including the two most significant rural to urban water supply transfers – the largest existing source in Sundarijal and the largest ongoing project in Melamchi. This section ends with a description of the procedure to collect empirical data on drinking water provisioning services. Then, in Section 3, we present research results and analyze the findings on the governance and management of ecosystem services in transboundary river basins in Nepal. Section 4 discusses research findings using the conceptual framework developed in Section 2, and the final section concludes the paper with an emphasis on the collaborative empowerment of local communities to govern ecosystem services.