Hjorth Peder, Madani Kaveh
Division of Water Resources Engineering, Lund University, Lund, Sweden.
Institute for Integrated Management of Material Fluxes and of Resources, United Nations University (UNUFLORES), Dresden, Germany.
Water Resour Manag (Dordr). 2023;37(6-7):2247-2270. doi: 10.1007/s11269-022-03373-0. Epub 2023 Jan 2.
Although the UN concluded, already in 1997, that water would be the most contentious issue of the 21st century, water governance is still confused, nearly everywhere. Even the severe impacts of escalating water bankruptcy and global warming have so far failed to incur a marked improvement in governance systems. The global community has adopted sustainable development as a common vision and guide for the future. Yet, the adoption of the underlying principles of sustainable development has been slow in the water sector and elsewhere. Despite the realization that water governance is a political issue, the near-universal neoliberal agenda tends to only employ technologic and economic solutions to address water problems. This paper presents a historical overview, from the end of the Second World War (WWII) and onwards, of events that could, or should, have had an impact on water management frameworks. It evidences some important consequences of the institutional rigidity exposed during that period. The paper also turns to the fields of science, policy, and management, to pinpoint failures in the translation of political rhetoric as well as new scientific findings into change at the operational level. It explores how an updated knowledge base could serve a quest for sustainable water governance strategies. It is argued that a persistent failure to learn is an important reason behind the dire state that we are now in. As a result, water management is still based on century-old, technocratic, and instrumental methodologies that fail to take advantage of important scientific advancements since WWII and remain unable to properly deal with real-world complexities and uncertainties. The paper concludes that when it is linked to a transformation of the institutional superstructure, adaptive water management (AWM), a framework rooted in systems thinking, emerges as a prominent way to embark on a needed, radical transformation of the water governance systems.
尽管联合国早在1997年就得出结论，认为水将成为21世纪最具争议性的问题，但几乎在所有地方，水治理仍然混乱不堪。即便水荒加剧和全球变暖带来了严重影响，迄今为止，治理体系仍未得到显著改善。国际社会已将可持续发展作为共同愿景和未来指引。然而，可持续发展基本原则在水务部门及其他领域的采用进程一直缓慢。尽管人们认识到水治理是一个政治问题，但几乎普遍存在的新自由主义议程往往只采用技术和经济手段来解决水问题。本文呈现了从第二次世界大战结束至今可能或应该对水资源管理框架产生影响的事件的历史概述。它证明了这一时期所暴露出的制度僵化带来的一些重要后果。本文还探讨了科学、政策和管理领域，以查明在将政治言辞以及新的科学发现转化为实际行动层面的变革方面存在的失败之处。它探究了更新后的知识库如何有助于寻求可持续的水治理策略。有人认为，持续未能吸取教训是我们如今所处糟糕状况背后的一个重要原因。因此，水资源管理仍然基于百年前的技术官僚和实用主义方法，这些方法未能利用第二次世界大战以来的重要科学进展，仍然无法妥善应对现实世界的复杂性和不确定性。本文的结论是，当与制度上层建筑的变革相联系时，适应性水资源管理（AWM）作为一种植根于系统思维的框架，成为对水治理体系进行必要的彻底变革的一条突出途径。
