Water governance and agricultural management: Collaboratively dealing with complex policy problems

Abstract

It is not difficult to appreciate why ideas of ‘integrated’ and ‘joined-up’ planning have become key motifs of emerging approaches to the sustainable management of water and agricultural systems. Decision-makers with responsibility for this rapidly developing arena of cross-sectoral policy quite reasonably seek a future in which system interdependencies will be recognised, priorities for management assigned, and responsibilities for action borne fairly. In England, for instance, the government department with responsibility for sustainable rural development recently published its strategy for water (DEFRA 2008), setting out a vision that positions agricultural systems as central to the process of resolving competing issues of water supply and demand, and water quality and quantity by the year 2030. While priorities for action vary greatly according to political and material circumstances, parallel calls can be found elsewhere (Blanco 2008; Conca 2006; Faby et al. 2005; Lemos and Oliveira 2005; Swatuk 2005). Driven in part by the exigencies of an increasingly congested terrain of international agreements (such as the Convention on Biological Diversity) and laws (such as the pan-European Water Framework Directive), what holds this diversity together is the recognition that fragmented policymaking and implementation across the agricultural and water sectors continues to be a systematic and deeply institutionalised feature of natural resource management and, consequently, a major obstacle to the realisation of sustainable livelihoods and development.