What can the UK learn from other countries’ approach to water management?

In his acceptance speech for the Stockholm Water Prize, Professor Tony Allan described good governance as “when dot-gov, dot-com and dot-org work well together for the benefit of society”.

This pithy summary indicates that water management requires a blend of control, competition and collaboration.

In other words, it requires us to make the most of the strengths that government, the private sector and non-governmental organisations or other coordinating bodies possess.

Water as a system

The water sector is best understood as being an infrastructure system and one participant of many in a wider landscape system.

It is the management of water as part of a landscape that increases emphasis on collaboration, because landscapes are managed by a greater range of people for a wider range of outcomes.

With water sector reform underway, we must ask: what kind of institutional building blocks do we need to create a system that would be fit for purpose?

The art of good governance, then, is aligning the right kind of organisation and their strategies with the challenges they’re best suited to tackle.

The right governance model for the right challenge

A clear success story is the control of drinking water quality in England and Wales – the regulatory arrangements comprise the right governance for the right challenge.

By contrast, the sector has not achieved comparable success when it comes to water quality in the environment, across our rivers, seas and more.

The sector needs to collaborate more with other systems such as agriculture, highways and the cultural and economic landscapes that are important to rural economies (chalk streams, farmland, carbon-rich fens, etc).

Should water be managed at catchment level?

One recurring question in water governance is the scale at which water should be managed. There’s agreement in the industry that it should be at the catchment level, but this requires nuance.

Flooding and water quality reflect hydrological processes that occur within catchment boundaries, but resources also need management at regional and national levels.

Big businesses and those managing major infrastructure (e.g. road or rail assets) are more likely to engage in collaborative planning at a higher level.

Meanwhile, agriculture, as a sector, engages well at the catchment level, but is arguably underrepresented at higher levels in the UK.

Learning from other countries

France: multi-sector water management of river basins

France makes an interesting contrast to England. It manages its water in its six large river basins – the hydrological boundaries create units comparable to England’s regional water resource units.

In each basin, a catchment board is responsible for writing integrated water resources management plans.

The board has representation from agricultural and industrial water users as well as local authorities and the state.

A second organisation at the basin level, the Water Agency, collects revenues and redistributes funds to local authorities and groups of water users.

Local authorities, with responsibility for water supply, environmental water quality and flooding, may contract the private sector for specific roles.

South Africa: control of infrastructure and collaboration in catchments

When South Africa became a democracy, a minister was given authority over water, which provided control over its inter-regional transfers.

More locally, the emphasis was on collaborative management, where farmers were to co-manage water at the catchment level.

However, the plan was over-ambitious, and with some exceptions (including parts of the Cape where agricultural exports are significant), implementation was not widespread without the revenues or capacity to sustain it.

Australia: decentralisation enables local solutions

Australia’s federal system created challenges for national water management, in the absence of overarching control, but also opportunities as each region created arrangements reflecting its own priorities.

This decentralised approach has enabled innovation and investment, while also enabling place-based collaboration at the local level.

Australia has developed water markets to encourage efficient distribution in areas where agriculture is a major driver of the economy.

The Netherlands: consolidation and collaborative governance

The Netherlands is well known for its long history of collaborative water governance.

Over time it has consolidated the management for water into bigger geographical units which are better able to tackle new challenges and more complex financial management.

One size doesn’t fit all

No country provides a blueprint for water governance for another, as each country faces its own challenges.

Nonetheless, balancing top-down control of infrastructure to manage water supplies and regional transfers with more collaborative arrangements to reflect regional and local priorities remains an important model.

South Africa’s experience cautions that ambitious integrated planning must be proportional to government and supply chain capacity.

The experience of each country reflects the significance of addressing regional differences by focussing effort where it is needed.

Integrated planning in the UK

In England, we see pioneering efforts on integrated planning in Manchester, London and the Fens for good reason.

London developed a pilot concept of coordination rather than integration as an efficient way of achieving the desired synergies across water resources, flooding and water quality. These can be woven into current planning cycles rather than replacing them all with a single plan.

Manchester has adopted a partnership model managed by the Combined Authority, the Environment Agency and United Utilities.

The Future Fens Integrated Adaptation programme is exploring its broader ambitions across water and agriculture alongside major investment in reservoirs.

Having scope for a variety of targeted approaches in different regions reflecting different priorities across the country would seem appropriate.

Collaboration at the right level

These examples illustrate the relevance of Professor Allan’s framing of good governance.

Collaboration should be deployed at the right level to address issues beyond water such as agriculture, nature recovery and the use of nature-based solutions.

But, it’s also critical that we keep the benefits of top-down control and regulated markets for challenges where they can produce the best results.