CONVERGENT READINGS OF GROUNDWATER GOVERNANCE? ENGAGING EXCHANGES BETWEEN DIFFERENT RESEARCH PERSPECTIVES

IRRIGATION AND DRAINAGE

Irrig. and Drain. 61 (Suppl. 1): 106–114 (2012)

Published online 8 March 2012 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/ird.1654

CONVERGENT READINGS OF GROUNDWATER GOVERNANCE? ENGAGINGEXCHANGES BETWEEN DIFFERENT RESEARCH PERSPECTIVES†

NICOLAS FAYSSE1* AND OLIVIER PETIT2

1UMR G-EAU, CIRAD, National Agricultural College of Meknès, Meknès, Morocco2Université d’Artois and Centre Lillois d’Etudes et Recherches Sociologiques et Economiques, Arras, France

ABSTRACT

In the last 50 years, the study of groundwater governance has given rise to rich and differentiated analytical approaches. Thisarticle proposes an exchange between the main heuristic viewpoints, results and theses of three approaches which studiedgroundwater governance: the study of groundwater governance as collective action initiated by Ostrom, the analysis madeby Shah on informal groundwater economies and the works of Prakash, Mukherji and Birkenholtz drawing on political ecol-ogy. The aquifers on which each approach originally built its analysis played a key role in the design of analytical frameworkswhich, in the case of the first two approaches, were later applied to a much larger set of cases. The three approaches share manycommonalities in their heuristic methods. However, they differ in the content of governance systems recommended to achievesustainable groundwater use, and especially in the benefits of involving water users in the implementation of governance.Therefore, they also differ on what should be the focus of academic analyses. It is thus of interest to organize joint readingsof cases of groundwater governance and to discuss the contents of research programmes able to provide fruitful analyses ofthese cases, based on local specificities. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

key words: demand management; heuristic viewpoint; groundwater governance

Received 4 January 2012; Revised 9 January 2012; Accepted 10 January 2012

RÉSUMÉ

Durant les 50 dernières années, l’étude de la gouvernance des eaux souterraines a donné naissance à des approches analytiquesriches et différenciées. L’article propose un échange entre les principaux points de vue heuristiques, les résultats et les thèses detrois approches qui ont étudié la gouvernance des eaux souterraines: l’étude de la gouvernance des eaux souterraines vuecomme action collective telle qu’initiée par Ostrom, l’analyse faite par Shah des secteurs économiques informels permis parl’usage des eaux souterraines et les travaux de Prakash, Mukherji et Birkenholtz qui se sont inspirés de l’écologie politique.Les aquifères pour lesquels chaque approche a été initialement conçue ont joué un rôle capital dans la conception d’un cadred’analyse qui, pour les deux premières approches, a ensuite été mis en œuvre dans un grand nombre de cas. Les trois approchespartagent de nombreux éléments de leurs méthodes heuristiques. Elles diffèrent cependant dans le contenu des systèmes degouvernance préconisés pour permettre un usage durable des eaux souterraines, et en particulier en ce qui concerne le bénéficed’impliquer les usagers dans la mise en œuvre de la gouvernance. De ce fait, ces approches diffèrent aussi sur ce qui devrait êtreau cœur d’analyses académiques. Il serait ainsi intéressant d’organiser des lectures communes de cas de gouvernance des eauxsouterraines et de discuter du contenu de programmes de recherche qui permettent des analyses fructueuses de tels cas, enprenant en compte les spécificités locales. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

mots clés: gestion de la demande; point de vue heuristique; gouvernance des eaux souterraines

* Correspondence to: Nicolas Faysse, CIRAD, G-EAU Research Unit,National Agricultural College of Meknès, km 10, Haj Kaddour RoadMeknes BP S/40, Morocco. E-mail: [email protected]†Des lectures convergentes de la gouvernance des eaux souterraines?Echanges entre différentes perspectives de recherche.

Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

INTRODUCTION

Groundwater has a particular position in studies of naturalresources management. While the ‘social dilemmas’(Ostrom, 2007) inherent in the use of groundwater resources

†Groundwater basin, aquifer and aquifer system will be used as synonymsin this paper.{The book by Mancur Olson (1965) was published during the same period.

107EXCHANGES BETWEEN READINGS OF GROUNDWATER GOVERNANCE

are broadly similar around the world, the contexts of thedefinition and implementation of institutions (understoodhere broadly as formal and informal rules and socialnorms) to face these dilemmas vary considerably. Thisdiversity in contexts encompasses the legal setting, thenumber of users, the costs of monitoring the uses, themeans available to public organizations in charge of waterresources management, the available information ongroundwater resources, etc. Consider the huge differencebetween the case of a small group of large-scale ground-water users in California, whose direct negotiationsreceive technical support from state services, and theIndus plain, where public authorities with limited meansface millions of small-scale farmers using unregisteredwells and boreholes.

Since the mid-1960s, many authors have studied the insti-tutions established to access and possibly manage the use ofthis resource. Among these studies, two approaches standout as being particularly well structured: the ‘groundwatergovernance as collective action’ approach, which developedits analyses around the figure of E. Ostrom, and the analysismade by Shah of informal groundwater economies. A thirdgroup of authors (Prakash, Mukherji and Birkenholtz) donot form per se a school of thought but they share manycommonalities in their studies of groundwater governance,in particular the use of a political ecology approach. Whilethe analytic frameworks developed by these approacheswere designed in specific contexts, the two first latermatured into broader theories, aiming at covering a muchlarger set of situations.

The three approaches share a willingness to analyse andunderstand situations of groundwater governance. How-ever, few papers have identified links between theseapproaches. When such connections were made (e.g.Mukherji and Shah, 2005; Schlager, 2007), the authorsrarely made an explicit comparison of the analyticalframeworks and main theses nor did they position themface to face. At first sight, the approaches may appear dis-connected and even to produce contradictory results. Theaim of this article is to engage an exchange between thethree approaches, through a comparative analysis of theirmain heuristic viewpoints, research programmes, resultsand theses.

Here we make use of the concept of governance, eventhough its use for the analysis of natural resources manage-ment precedes the earliest works cited here. However, theideas that this concept conveys have been debated and ap-plied in surface water and groundwater studies for manyyears. In fact, this concept is close to what V. Ostrom (1971)referred to as ‘institutional arrangements’. Governance refershere to the wide spectrum of forms of coordination betweenactors for allocating and managing resources that goesbeyond the dichotomy between market and state regulations.


THREEDISTINCTREADINGSOFGROUNDWATERGOVERNANCE

Groundwater governance as collective action: under-standing the performance and robustness of institutions

Ostrom is mostly known for her analysis of the governanceof common pool resources. The international recognition of herworks is mainly linked to the methodological approach shehelped develop at the University of Indiana in the frameworkof the ‘Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis’(the so-called ‘Bloomington school’; Aligica and Boettke,2009). Much less known is the fact that, at the beginning ofher career, she studied groundwater management in southernCalifornia.

Indeed, during her PhD in political science (Ostrom,1965), she tried to understand the emergence of institutionalarrangements made to govern a groundwater basin† in theLos Angeles metropolitan area facing increasing saltwaterintrusion. She described the process of emergence of publicenterprises designed to manage this issue and providerelated public goods and services. She also stressed the roleof public entrepreneurs in the process. Whereas privateentrepreneurs are free to follow their interests and make aprofit in a market-based system, the capacity of involvementof public entrepreneurs depends, more fundamentally, onthe political system in which they operate, i.e. the set ofrules that organizes life in society. Moreover, she explainedthe way institutional arrangements were negotiated betweenthe stakeholders, and the technical and economic solutionswhich were suggested and implemented to pursue the devel-opment of the metropolitan area, in the context of risksgenerated by water scarcity.

Thus, even if she did not refer to the debates, which wereunderway at that time concerning collective action{ orgovernance, she already insisted on the capacity ofself-organization of groups created to collectively manage acommon problem. During the same period, Weschler(1968) was also working on groundwater management, inthe same geographical area, but in different groundwaterbasins. He showed that different management solutions hadbeen found by actors in situations that appeared to be quiteanalogous in climatic and organizational terms. Fifteen yearslater, this assessment of such a wide range of locally craftedinstitutions led Ostrom to ask Blomquist to make a detailedanalysis of the management of four groundwater basinslocated in southern California. The aim was to analyse theway institutions were built and to understand the factorswhich influenced the variety of institutional responses, inquite similar situations (Blomquist, 1987). Another important


108 N. FAYSSE AND O. PETIT

point of Blomquist’s work was to understand why many ofthese institutions had survived, i.e. the factors that contributedto the success and longevity of these institutions.

The analysis was later expanded to four other groundwa-ter basins in California (Blomquist, 1992). In almost all,local actors managed to draw up rules to ensure that ground-water uses matched recharge, and, in the case of coastalaquifers, prevented salt intrusion. Despite a wide range ofnegotiation processes and a variety of outcomes in termsof management rules, these cases shared similar charac-teristics, such as their polycentrism and local control overgroundwater governance. The performance of the manage-ment rules designed by groundwater users was assessedusing three criteria: effectiveness, adaptability and equity.Only one of the cases analysed by Blomquist was clearly afailure, whereas the other cases studied could more or lessbe considered as performing with regard to these criteria.

This initial work was later followed with some evolutionin the research programme. Blomquist et al. (2004) assessedthe legal frameworks, the judiciary decisions and thecollective actions for groundwater governance in the south-western United States. They paid specific attention to theway institutional processes enable the conjunctive use andmanagement of groundwater and surface water resources.More recently, Steed (2010) assessed the factors involved inthe stability and evolution of the institutions for groundwatergovernance since the 1930s in some of the basins formerlystudied by Blomquist.

Ostrom often argued that using case-specific combina-tions of analytical methods would be more effective thanattempting to devise a single method that would be relevantin all situations (Poteete et al., 2010). While pragmatism isthus acknowledged, the Bloomington school progressivelystabilized a heuristic method at the interface between publiceconomics (especially the public choice approach) and aninstitutional analysis built around the Institutional Analysisand Development framework (Aligica and Boettke, 2009).More recent developments of the Bloomington schoolresearch programme put more importance on the analysisof social ecological systems and the factors which contributeto the performance and the robustness of the institutions(Steed, 2010). Robustness of a system refers to the mainte-nance of the performance of this system despite internalstress or external disturbance (Anderies et al., 2004). ‘Robustinstitutions (. . .) allow for changes in rules to respond toshocks, newly perceived threats, or changes in design objec-tives’ (Steed, 2010).

The original case studies were the first on a list thatsubsequently became much longer and concerned manymore different types of common pool resources, to informthe general research programme of the Bloomington school.One of the goals of the programme was to define conditionsunder which common pool resources users are likely to set up


sustainable management of these resources. This programmeled to theses about the principles onwhich long-enduring rulesfor user-managed common pool resources are generally based(Ostrom, 1990), as well as the conditions regarding the re-source and the users’ characteristics which provide a favour-able context to draw up such rules (Ostrom, 2000). Otheranalyses of cases involving users in groundwater governancelater used these such theses. Ross and Martinez-Santos(2010) found that the principles for user-based managementrules provided a valuable insight to complex systems involv-ing both users and the administration for the governance ofaquifers in Australia and Spain. Lopez-Gunn and Martinez-Cortina (2006) used the conditions regarding users’ character-istics to understand the performance of groundwater user asso-ciations in Spain and added to these conditions others on theattributes of higher-level authorities.

Dynamics of informal groundwater economies: oppor-tunities for practical policies

Shah originally analysed the potential of informal ground-water markets for regional economic development in India(Shah and Raju, 1988). Later on, he expanded his analysisto the co-evolution of the economy created by intensiveagricultural groundwater use and groundwater resources inSouth Asia. He revealed the extremely important rolegroundwater now plays in South Asian rural areas, but alsothe increasing fragility of these groundwater economies(Shah et al., 2003).

Shah’s main thesis is that governance systems used forSouth Asian aquifers are not ready for the integrated waterresources management (IWRM) approach (Shah, 2009). In-deed, the three important pillars of the IWRM approach,namely water policy, law and administration, are currentlynot implementable, and consequently, the tools developedin such approaches are simply not practicable. For instance,the transaction costs of registering thousands of small-scalefarmers would be simply too high. Instead of continuing totry to implement a governance system based on IWRM prin-ciples, policy makers should be more pragmatic and look formechanisms that account for the informality of groundwatereconomies from the outset. These pragmatic approachescould be defined based on typologies of groundwater econ-omies, particularly the characteristics of the aquifers. Whilegroundwater recharge programmes are successful in hardrock aquifers, approaches based on more indirect demandmanagement could be used in alluvial aquifers (Shah,2012). An interesting example of such an approach is theJyotirgram system in Gujarat, where the state set up a spe-cific electrical network for agricultural water use, that meantwater use could be controlled through the power supply.Shah et al. (2008) judged such initiatives to be successfulin indirectly controlling water use while not harming the



groundwater economy, thanks to an increase in the reliabilityof the power supply.

Shah later extended his research to other countries and inparticular to comparisons with Mexico (Scott and Shah,2004), China and Spain (Mukherji and Shah, 2005). Shahet al. (2007) proposed a worldwide assessment of groundwateruse andmanagement based on this conceptual andmethodolog-ical construct, leading to a general typology of groundwatereconomies. While Shah stands as the core author of such anapproach, other authors including Moench (2007) share his as-sessment that direct implementation of the formal managementtools from the IWRM toolbox is not the best way to tacklegroundwater overuse in developing countries.

Political ecology of groundwater

Here we bring together three authors: Prakash (2005),Mukherji (2006) and Birkenholtz (2009). Although theydo not form a well-structured school of thought, their heuris-tic methods share many commonalities, and in particularthey all draw much on political ecology, as proposed byGreenberg and Park (1994). Their approaches are alsoaffiliated with Marxist political economy (Mollinga, 2010)and with Foucauldian analyses of power.

The authors analysed aquifers which are intensively usedfor irrigation in India. The core focus of their work was tostudy groundwater as a contested resource within socialand political arenas, both at village and state levels. First,they analysed the diversity of actors’ interests and resources,of the power relations and of possible coalitions amongactors. Second, they assessed the way groundwater gover-nance (from farmer-to-farmer agreements to public policies)is designed, legitimized, implemented and possibly con-tested. Third, the consequences of farmers’ different abilitiesto access groundwater on their choices and on differentia-tion among farms were analysed.

Prakash (2005) studied social differentiation as a conse-quence of groundwater overdraft in a village in Gujarat.He argued that decreasing water availability in the boreholesled to further differentiation between farmers, since the rich-est farmers, who were shareholders of collective boreholes,stopped selling surplus water to poorer farmers, who werethus compelled to farm on the richer farmers’ land underconditions that were unfavourable for them. In such condi-tions, supporting increased development of water transac-tions between farmers (for instance by setting up a low flatelectricity tariff for water) may help reinforce the skeweddistribution of the added value. Mukherji (2006) analysedthe design and implementation of groundwater governancepolicies in West Bengal and Gujarat. The structure andpower of farmers’ organizations and the political history ofeach state led to a situation in which there was no regulationof groundwater use in Gujarat, where groundwater was


overexploited, whereas strict regulations were enforced inWest Bengal, where only limited groundwater overdrafthad been diagnosed. Finally, Birkenholtz (2009) analysedan institutional groundwater reform in Rajasthan. The aimof the reform, which was encouraged by the World Bank,was to establish stricter regulations and individual propertyrights. The government of Rajasthan attempted to convincefarmers of the relevance of the reform. Elite farmers gener-ally agreed with the reform, particularly because theythought they could influence local groundwater regulatorybodies. By contrast, grassroots farmers were likely to see fur-ther limits imposed on their water use, while not having avoice in future decision-making on groundwater governance.

All these studies identified flaws in several groundwatergovernance policies, such as regulation and water markets,which are widely considered to be good practices. Theauthors proposed limited–and different–arguments for im-proved groundwater governance. Birkenholtz (2009) arguedthat, to counter the top-down implementation of regulationsfor groundwater use, bottom-up accountable institutionscould give more voice to marginalized farmers. By contrast,Mukherji (2006) considered that strong farmer organiza-tions, at least like those that exist in Gujarat, did not help findsolutions for the sustainable use of groundwater.

COMPARING THE READINGS IN TERMS OFMETHODS AND RESULTS

Our comparison of the approaches is structured in terms ofthe original cases studied, the components of the governancesystem that were analysed, the domain of validity of eachapproach, the heuristic methods and the suggested implica-tions of the research results. To facilitate the comparison,the three approaches are summarized in Table I.

The structuring role of the original case studies

Even though two of the three approaches were usedworldwide, the analytical frameworks and research objectswere initially based on in-depth investigations of specificcase studies taking place in quite different contexts. First,the authors of the Bloomington school built their analysisin the south-western United States, where many (mainlyurban) groundwater users are able and willing to participatein designing groundwater management rules. Moreover, theCalifornian and federal administrations provided support fornegotiations by supplying hydrogeological data, generallyaccepted locally designed agreements and monitoredimplementation of agreed-upon rules. In contrast, SouthAsia, where the two other approaches were built, is charac-terized by numerous informal small-scale (mainly rural)groundwater users who have no voice in the decision-makingprocess, public authorities who do not have the capacity to


Table

I.Com

parisonof

threeapproaches

used

tostudygroundwater

governance

Groundw

ater

governance

ascollectiveactio

nDynam

icsof

inform

algroundwater

econom

ies:

opportunities

forpractical

policies

Politicalecologyof

groundwater

Geographicallocatio

nof

theinitial

analysis

SouthernCalifornia

South

Asia

India

Som

ecase

stud

iesforwhich

theanalytical

fram

eworkwas

laterused

US(A

rizona,C

olorado,

Oregon),A

ustralia,S

pain

Mexico,

China

Focus

oftheanalysis

The

links

betweenthecharacteristicsof

the

resource–actorssystem

andtheoutcom

esin

term

sof

governance

The

links

betweenthecharacteristicsof

the

resource–actorssystem

andtheoutcom

esin

term

sof

governance

The

processthrough

which

governance

issetup

Mainsubjectof

study

Institu

tionaldevelopm

ent:Collectiveactio

nand

rulesforself-governing

aquifersystem

sGroundw

ater

econom

yPoliticalcoalitions

Methodof

analysis

Manycases,in

orderto

extractgenerictheses

which

explaintheperformance

androbustness

ofinstitu

tions

Manycases,in

orderto

producetypologies

ofsituations

Casestudyapproaches.

Som

etim

escomparison,

butno

attemptsat

generalization

Elementsstudiedto

accountforhow

governance

isachieved

Managem

entrulesandcharacteristicsof

the

resource

andtheactors

which

increase

the

likelihoodof

cooperationbetweenusers

Roleof

inform

alandlocalinstitu

tions

(water

markets,groundwater

recharge

movem

ents)

Governanceas

acase-specificresultof

coalitionsof

actors

Mainprinciples

behind

theinstitu

tional

design

toachieveeffectivegovernance

Polycentricity

andinvolvem

entof

usersin

groundwater

managem

ent.

Opportunitiesforpragmatic

andindirect

approaches

Noattempt

todefine

‘effectiv

egovernance’

Principlesthat

rulesused

inenduring

self-organized

governance

system

sarelik

elyto

bebasedon

Proposeduseof

thesetheses

tosupport

effectivegroundwater

governance

Understanding

theobstaclesthat

have

tobe

removed

toim

plem

entsustainableself-governing

managem

ent

Defining

relevant

managem

entobjectives

and

approaches

which

depend

onthespecificcharacteristicsand

constraintsof

each

case

Generally

notan

objectiveof

the

research


Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Irrig. and Drain. 61 (Suppl. 1): 106–114 (2012)


directly monitor groundwater use, and most of the time, avery weak de facto enforcement of legal regulations. More-over, in South Asia, the power inequalities between thefarmers themselves, and between farmers and the local eliteand the state administration, are much greater than inCalifornia. These differences in the original case studiesplayed a key role in the differences in the analysed compo-nents of effective governance and in the heuristic methodschosen.

Different elements analysed to achieve effectivegovernance

The Bloomington school and Shah agree that the mini-mum that can be expected from governance is that the aqui-fer should not be overused.} We denote governance systemsthat enable such sustainable use as ‘effective’. The authorsmaking use of political ecology generally do not provide adefinition of effective governance, because the outcomesof the social processes they study are usually not comparedwith a reference situation. The aim of their approach is moreto deconstruct the proposed solutions. Thus, these authorsfocus more on understanding failures to reach effectivegovernance.

Where the Bloomington school and Shah differ is in themain elements they consider to ensure effective governance,in particular: (i) the participation of water users and (ii) toolsfor demand management. Ostrom (1990) placed special impor-tance on the participation of water users and, more generally,argued that common-pool resource users should take part inthe design of management rules, against theories advocatingstate management or privatisation.} And indeed, three out ofthe four aquifer management cases she reviewed showed thatsuch participation enabled sustainable long-term use of theaquifer. In the cases she reviewed, governance involved theformally defined regulation of water uses and especially con-trol of individual water consumption. Apart from showing thattheir costs were reasonable in the local context, she did notconduct an in-depth analysis of the management tools used,since they were not a hotly debated issue. In a sense,Ostrom’s analysis is focused on the conditions of the designof a governance system for groundwater resources thatinvolves users in decision-making. Schlager confirmed thisposition when she claimed that ‘a growing body of ground-water case studies demonstrates that groundwater users arecapable of devising solutions to common pool resourcedilemmas that are local in nature’ (Schlager, 2007).

}A detailed discussion of the relevance of the overexploitation concept isbeyond the scope of this paper (see Custodio, 2006).}The Bloomington school did not compare the efficiency between ground-water governance systems where users are involved and where they are not.They undertook such analysis on irrigation systems the results of whichwere favourable to users’ involvement (Lam, 1998).


Constraints were analysed to see how they could be over-come to reach participatory management involving directdemand management. Ostrom also looked (followed laterby Blomquist, 1992 and Steed, 2010) at the performanceof the institutions that were created. Thus, even if theBloomington school does not look at the efficiency of thegovernance structures (in the economic sense of the term),it is interested in the performance and robustness of institu-tions governed by water users.

Shah (2009), on the other hand, focused on the tools fordemand management and paid particular attention to man-agement tools that are (in)compatible with the informalityof groundwater uses. The way he took initial constraints intoaccount is thus radically different from the Bloomingtonschool’s approach: Shah (2009) started from an analysis ofthe constraints that prevent effective governance of ground-water–in the sense of using the IWRM toolkit, and thenconsidered what could be done. Given that manyconstraints may not be removed, at least in the short term,in South Asia, governance systems should be designed toadapt to these constraints. Incidentally, he considered thatfarmers are often not interested or able to play a prominentrole in monitoring groundwater use, and gave a bleakaccount of attempts to let farmers control their own wateruse in both developed and developing countries.

Increasing overlap in the proposed ‘domains of validity’

Both Ostrom and Shah acknowledged that otherapproaches may be valid in contexts that differ from thosethey investigated in their original analyses. Nevertheless,they also used their analytical framework in much broadercontexts than was originally the case, leading to an increas-ing overlap in the proposed ‘domains of validity’ of thethree approaches. Such overlap is expected to increase be-cause the number of cases of groundwater governance in-volving some form of user participation is also likely toincrease. In contrast, the three authors inspired by politicalecology were focused on groundwater governance in India.While political ecology was also used to study aquifers inother countries, there has been no attempt at generalization.This increasing overlap leads to two major differences in thereadings of cases of groundwater governance.

First, Shah (2009) acknowledged that formalized ground-water governance can succeed in developed countries, butpointed out that the results of initiatives for regulation ofgroundwater use in the developed countries concerned wereat best lukewarm. In particular, while Ostrom (1990) consid-ered that the governance systems set up in California hadproved their capacity to ensure sustainable use of the aqui-fers (an analysis confirmed by Steed, 2010), Shah arguedthat the aquifers were much better protected by supplymanagement than by actual regulation of groundwater use,



and that these aquifers are islands of management in a sea ofopen access situations in all aquifers in south-westernCalifornia.

Second, Ostrom (1990) claimed that her approach was notapplicable in large-scale common-pool resources wherethere is no communication between users. This said, lateron she applied her approach to larger commons. Eventhough she did not work on aquifers in developingcountries, she worked on global commons, such as climatechange, which shows similarities with these aquifers in theabsence of strong organizations able to enforce agreementsand the high cost of enforcing regulations. She generallyused the same approach, which involves attempting to limitfree-rider behaviour and building up polycentric governancesystems, where users of the global commons remain actorsat the lower levels of nested institutions (Ostrom, 2010).These two proposals are in stark contrast to that of Shahconcerning relevant governance of informal groundwatereconomies.

Convergences and divergences in heuristic approaches

The approaches differ in terms of the contour of the sys-tem analysed. In the Bloomington school, the system con-sidered is the water sector at large, taking into accountsurface and groundwater, quality and quantity issues, shortterm and long term, the wide range of stakeholders, etc.(an approach which is not so far from IWRM approaches).The other two approaches take a broader perspective, with,for instance, the inclusion of the energy–irrigation nexusor the local political scene, in that sense shifting from a‘watershed’ to a ‘problemshed’ definition of the system(Mollinga et al., 2007).

The research programmes of Shah and of the Bloomingtonschool are firmly anchored in institutional analysis and newinstitutional economics. Both aim at identifying certain regu-larities in the relation between the initial characteristics ofthe resources and the actors on the one hand, and the outcomesin terms of governance on the other. They attempt to achievethis by studying large sets of case studies. The threeapproaches also share an explicit interest in path dependency,but with very different definitions of the concept. The threeauthors drawing on political ecology focus on the way the ne-gotiation processes lead to case-specific results, and state thatthe characteristics of the aquifer are not so important. AsMukherji (2006: 393) pointed out: ‘groundwater-related poli-cies in India have very little to do with the scarcity, depletionor quality of groundwater, and more to do with rural politicsmanifested, among other things, in terms of the presence orabsence of farmer lobbies’. It thus takes a position explicitlyopposed to the above-mentioned ambitions of the two otherresearch programmes. The Bloomington school also gives im-portance to path dependency (Blomquist, 1992; Steed, 2010)


as a factor which explains the creation and sustainability ofinstitutions to govern groundwater. Steed (2010) stated thatinstitutional change is rather difficult to achieve, because ofthe weight of culture and informal institutions and becauseof the transaction costs it generates. Shah (2009) pointed tothe weight of path dependency, but more from a long-termperspective and considering the narratives used for groundwa-ter governance, and not so much on the processes used to de-sign groundwater governance in specific cases.

Shah and the three authors inspired by political ecologyplace much more importance on power relationships ingroundwater governance than the Bloomington school.Moreover, the authors of the political ecology approachoften use the Foucauldian concept of governmentality, i.e.the state attempts to ‘conduct the conducts’. In particular,Birkenholtz (2009) studied the way the state aimed to influ-ence groundwater use by influencing the ideas being de-bated and the behavioural norms concerning groundwateruse. The interest paid by Shah to indirect management toolsbrings his approach surprisingly close to this concept ofgovernmentality. Indeed, in a context where direct demandmanagement is not possible, he looked at ways to indirectlyinfluence the behaviour of farmers. The difference lies in thefact that the political ecology approach places more impor-tance on political or cognitive ways of influencing behav-iour, while Shah focuses more on economic means. Suchinterest in governmentality is in stark contrast with the Bloo-mington school’s approach in which water users are invitedto directly participate in the design of institutions. Finally,Shah and the authors using the political ecology approachhave studied much more than the Bloomington school whathappens when governance fails, but with a difference: Shahlooked at the evolution of the groundwater economy at a ter-ritorial level, while authors using political ecology paidmore attention to the impacts of the groundwater crisis athousehold and village levels.

Contrasted proposals for supporting effective governance

Both Ostrom’s and Shah’s approaches claimed to seek tolink academic studies with more practical reflections (some-thing that authors drawing on political ecology generallyrefrained from doing). However, their heuristic methodsand research results led to differing theses on the compo-nents of effective governance and how to achieve it. In par-ticular, both approaches cited the success stories theyidentified in their original case studies. Ostrom (1990) con-sidered that resource users need to be fully involved in thedefinition of rules, and that the main role of the state shouldbe the one played by the US Geological Survey in the designof south-western California groundwater basin governance,which was to facilitate and provide information to users sothat they can reach agreement. Ostrom’s criteria for rules



for long-enduring systems have indeed reached a muchwider audience than the academic community (WRD,2009, for instance). By contrast, Shah (2009) called for theuse of more indirect management tools and for attention tobe paid to locally build informal institutions for groundwateraccess and management. It is important to make it clear thatShah criticizes traditional and formalist ways of implement-ing demand management, both in terms of the tools used andof the expectations that handing the issue to groundwaterusers will be sufficient for demand management to takeplace. Shah does not criticize involvement of groundwaterusers in the design of governance systems (even though itis not the focus of his analyses), as long as these users arenot expected to participate in the implementation of thesegovernance systems. As mentioned above, the question ofthe implementation of an effective governance system tomanage groundwater is not the ambition of the group ofscholars drawing on political ecology.

CONCLUSIONS AND PERSPECTIVES

The issue of groundwater governance has given rise to veryrich and diverse analytical frameworks. The analysis wehave undertaken here stresses the importance of the aquiferseach author originally used to build their analysis. Since twoof the approaches aimed to reach a wider audience, the his-torical link between the original cases studied and the laterbroader framework needs to be made explicit so that otherscholars who wish to use these frameworks understand theorigin and rationale of each heuristic method.

While the Bloomington school and Shah converge on theneed for joint involvement of the various stakeholders inthe design of groundwater governance, they clearly differ onthe components of governance systems required to achievesustainable groundwater use, and especially the benefits ofinvolving users in the implementation of the governance sys-tems. For that reason, and more importantly, they differ onwhat should be the focus of academic analyses. It may be thusof interest to organize joint ‘readings’ of groundwater gover-nance, seen not somuch as analytical results, but rather as pro-cesses to understand local situations. It would also be useful todiscuss the content of research programmes that enable fruit-ful reading of situations of groundwater governance basedon local specificities. This could concern the choice of criteriato be analysed for assessing effective governance and thosethat influence the achievement of effective governance.

These approaches have already evolved and will probablycontinue to do so, both in terms of the topics addressed andin terms of their analytical stand. With regards to the topics,all three approaches were historically based on quantitativeaspects of groundwater governance. In Europe, groundwateroverdraft problems have sometimes produced innovative


solutions (e.g. Petit, 2009), but the issue of groundwater qual-ity is acquiring increasing importance, and the indirect man-agement approaches advocated by Shah will probably play auseful role in the management of agricultural pollution. Re-garding the analytical stand, the notion of ‘adaptive manage-ment’ of the governance system plays an increasinglyimportant role in the analyses of the Bloomington schooland Shah. The concept of adaptability, proposed by Blomquist(1992) as one of the performance indicators, is of funda-mental importance in recent analyses of robust institutions(Blomquist and Ostrom, 2008; Steed, 2010). This idea echoesShah’s assessment (2009: 209): ‘Transforming chaos intostability may prove impossible, but transforming inhumane an-archy into humane anarchy through adaptive approaches maybewell within the realm of possibility.’Thus, studying the resil-ience of a groundwater territory, defined as a social ecologicalsystem, and assessing the adaptive nature of the governanceprocesses implemented, is one of the issues that would proba-bly benefit from a cross-reading of the authors studied here.

While scholars have long showed an interest in groundwa-ter governance of specific cases, the worldwide developmentof groundwater use has, by and large, been a ‘silent revolu-tion’ (Lopez-Gunn and Llamas, 2008). The situation is nowchanging in both developed and developing countries: in re-cent years, many management experiments have been con-ducted in new groundwater governance contexts which arenot exactly the same as the cases on which the threeapproaches were historically built. Therefore, as much as thereis an interest for more dynamic exchanges between authors us-ing different approaches, it would be useful to increase docu-mentation of the many ongoing experiments around the world,to continue and strengthen the two-way link between theoriesand case study analyses, which is a core element in the interestand success of the three approaches analysed in this paper.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors wish to thank F. Aguilera-Klink, O. Aubriot, M.Kuper, E. Ostrom, T. Shah and two anonymous reviewers fortheir reading and comments on initial versions of the paper.

NOTES

1. Groundwater basin, aquifer and aquifer system will beused as synonyms in this paper.

2. The book by Mancur Olson (1965) was published duringthe same period.

3. A detailed discussion of the relevance of the overexploi-tation concept is beyond the scope of this paper (seeCustodio, 2006).

4. The Bloomington school did not compare the efficiencybetween groundwater governance systems where users



are involved and where they are not. They undertooksuch analysis on irrigation systems the results of whichwere favourable to users’ involvement (Lam, 1998).

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare. [Correctionadded after online publication 8 March 2012.]

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Documents

CONVERGENT READINGS OF GROUNDWATER GOVERNANCE? ENGAGING EXCHANGES BETWEEN DIFFERENT RESEARCH PERSPECTIVES