Crafting Spaces for Good Water Governance in Pakistan

Abstract

The most significant investment in improved water governance for Pakistan in recent decades—irrigation management transfer under the PIDA Act of 1997—ended with repeal in 2019 in the province of Punjab. Before embarking on the next major experiment, we wish to examine what the opportunity space for improvement in Pakistan’s water governance is. We develop a conceptual model that maps the roles of hydrology, infrastructure, management, governance, and learning in shaping water supply. We are motivated by the overarching question of where the best opportunities to improve water governance in Pakistan lie, and suggest in our analysis that the hydraulic constraints of the Indus Basin Irrigation System (IBIS) that have previously been the basis for consideration of scale in water (irrigation) governance are inappropriate. Our key recommendation is instead to identify the key “problemsheds” for the IBIS as a vehicle for identifying scales of intervention and communities of common water interest (possibly at village, union, or tehsil administrative levels) that can allow irrigators to transcend the rigid hydraulic user groupings that irrigation channels impose, and contribute more meaningfully to good local water governance.