Water Governance in Latin America and the Caribbean
By Peter Rogers (04/02, En) See also Environment and Natural Resources
As emphasis is increasingly focused on water in many parts of the globe as a crucial resource for economic advance, the quest is to understand the limiting factors which impede its sustainable development. Latin America, with enormous water resources in many parts of the continent, but extreme scarcity in others, faces particular water dilemmas. Having both the world?s wettest ecosystems and the driest deserts makes it very important to conceptualize the most advantageous use of the resource. Increasingly attention has turned to governance as the bottleneck, rather than the financial aspects of development. Clearly huge sums will still need to be spent in the water sector in the coming years, but there is a nagging suspicion that similar huge sums that have already been spent in the past decades have not been as wisely spent as they could have been. Most governments, as well as bilateral and multilateral financing agencies, and increasingly private financiers, are therefore looking toward improving the governance of the water sector in order to make investments in it more effective and efficient.
To choose better water investments we need to have a better appreciation of what is possible with improved governance, of how to identify improved governance, how to design institutions for it, and how to incorporate it into planning and investments. This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical bases for water governance in general and then presents five specific cases from Latin America which highlight different aspects of governance. The studies range from nation-wide and sector-wide cases in Brazil and Chile, to irrigation sector reform in Mexico, the private concession of municipal water supply and sanitation in Buenos Aires, to a very localized experience in Honduras which attempts to integrate all sectors of the local economy to protect and develop a lake ecosystem.
The views put forward here neither exclude or unanimously support any one political or social theory. They more or less conclude that ?it all depends upon the specific situation!? In some situations ?interest group theory? may help describe the outcomes of water policy, but in other cases the ?bureaucratic politics? model may be more appropriate. Certainly, we must always pay attention to politics and institutions; legislation and legal regimes traditionally follow from their interplay.
None of the cases reveal perfect outcomes, but each illuminates governance issues that will have to be faced by other countries trying to develop their water as an integrated resource for all users and uses now and far into the future. The Brazil and Mexico cases both show that the amount of detailed work and effort required to support user groups and local institutions is enormous. Therefore, the time needed to achieve policy outcomes is much greater than expected, and opportunities may still be missed to incorporate private sector elements into water management and finance. The Chile and Buenos Aires cases exemplify the issues arising from private property rights and privatization of public utilities. Both cases are widely quoted pro and contra privatization for such a sensitive resource as water. Our examination of the distributional aspects of these two cases brings out serious consequences of privatization for the poorer and less well organized sections of society, although we recognize that the institutional frameworks to regulate the new private entities were themselves immature and weak. No doubt their performance will improve over time as they gain experience by actually regulating the water rights and monopolies created. The Honduran case shows how complex the institutional needs become when organization is focused at the lowest levels of government.
In all the reported cases one should be careful not to judge the outcomes on short time horizons. Mature water governance systems on other continents have developed slowly, over decades or centuries. Situations with such stark social conflict as those in Chile or Buenos Aires are already beginning to adjust toward becoming more balanced and benign as the larger society rejects the extreme and harsh initial conditions. Who can say where these cases will be in 30 years time? The pragmatic, empirical method of trying an approach and then modifying it as problems become apparent, has a great deal to offer the countries of Latin America. Institutions, such as the Inter American Development Bank and the other multilateral and bilateral financing institutions, can help by encouraging Latin American countries to choose governance policies that address economic, environmental and social water issues in an integrated and holistic manner. Such encouragement can take the form of intellectual sharing, institutional capacity building, and even financial support for appropriate institutions. The encouragement should not, however, be short term, for as the cases demonstrate it takes a long time for policies to be implemented and consequences to be felt. It is in the long term that fruitful adjustment to meet local realities will occur.
Last updated: 05/08/07
