IWRA Proceedings

Abstract:

Existing global water problems are likely to increase in severity over time and current governance approaches may not be able to address the severity of the problems. This paper inquires into the relationship between global water institutional structures, with particular emphasis on those involving the UN, and their possible outcomes in terms of addressing the impending water crises. It does so through developing story lines of possible water futures building on existing scenarios developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and the Global Environment Outlook. These story lines are meant to help define the problems we are going to face, which global water governance institutions will have to address in the future. This will provide a general background for presenting the key institutional options for enhancing the governance necessary to address such water problems. These options include a high level advisory group, coordination mechanisms, a framework water treaty, and a single, global water organization. These four options are rather archetypal in nature and may neither capture the full spectrum of identifiable options nor be mutually exclusive. Hence, in a third step, the paper examines which institutional architectures may tend to facilitate achieving specific future outcomes, building upon the earlier steps of the analysis. The analysis takes different disciplinary rationales into account and backcasts from different futures to the current day to suggest why certain possible institutional structures might be more conducive toward realizing one possible future than another.