Traditionally, rivers were controlled by no one. Even today, while nearly all large rivers have been dammed very few are governed as a single system. Society's technical prowess in breaking up rivers into pieces has developed far faster than our capacity to manage those pieces in a coordinated way. Whether small rivers and their watersheds, or large rivers and their basins, the challenge of coordinated management rests with negotiating among diverse and conflicting interests for some mutual goals.
Watershed institutions are being established in a growing number of countries as the many benefits of coordinated land and water management are seen to outweigh the costs of institution-building. The European Union, South Africa, and other countries mandate basin-level organizations for major rivers. Some of the world's largest rivers have attracted special institutional frameworks outside of normal water policies as a result of ecological crisis (e.g., the Rhine River Commission in Europe and.the Murray Darling Basin Commission in Australia) or as part of long-range economic development (e.g., the Mahaweli Authority in Sri Lanka).
While the challenges of coordinated governance are similar for small or large rivers, the institutional responses are very different depending on scale. In the United States, for example, there are many hundreds of stakeholder associations focused on small rivers, e.g., the Santa Fe Watershed Association in our home city of Santa Fe, New Mexico. [For links to many of the small watershed groups in the US, see the website of River Network.]
Large rivers in the United States, however, are rarely represented by a single organization, a prominant exception being the Delaware River Commission. The Rio Grande, for example, which flows some 2,000kms through three American and five Mexican states, has no single organization empowered to take river management decisions, or even to represent the stakeholders. [Note: The Water-Culture Institute is working with many other local groups along the Rio Grande Basin to develop a stakeholder council, as described in the project on Rio Grande Governance.]
What role do values and ethics play in river governance? Since governance entails negotiating competing interests of stakeholders, someone has to decide which stakeholder views (values) will count and which won't. Governance is where "the rubber hits the road" in the sense that values become expressed through the governance system. The values of indigenous tribal communities that the river is sacred and should never be dammed, for example, can only be expressed with the consent of the governance system. Understanding the cultural value systems within the river basin is a necessary first step towards reforming river governance.
Resources for River Basin Governance
International Network of Basin Organizations (website)
Performance and Capacity of River Basin Organizations.(CAPNET report)
A Handbook for Integrated Water Resources Management in Basins (GWP and INBO 2009).