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Now showing 1 - 10 of 2030
  • Conference Paper
    Co-creating Water Commons: Civics, Environmentality, and 'Power With'
    (2015) Bruns, Bryan
    "In Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, and other parts of India, the Foundation for Ecological Security is working with communities to develop better institutions for managing surface and groundwater. Sketch mapping, participatory hydrological monitoring, experimental games, crop-water budgeting, watershed conservation, and other activities develop shared knowledge of water resources, as citizens consider and carry out improvements. Habitations, containing dozens to hundreds of households, organize to work together, based on universal membership, within nested contexts of larger landscapes and social networks. From a practitioner's perspective, this paper explores ways of facilitating the co-creation of citizenship in water commons."
  • Conference Paper
    Challenges in Getting off the Ground the New Nicaraguan Water Law: From Farmer Groups to Formalized Irrigation Districts?
    (2011) Novo, P.; Garrido, A.; Meinzen-Dick, Ruth
    "The Nicaraguan Water Law was passed in September 2007. While all new Water Laws need time to be implemented, the progress in Nicaragua is meager. Nicaragua’s water sector, especially in rural areas, is highly informal and primarily based on small water supply systems and on local informal water institutions. The new Water Law foresees setting up irrigation districts to improve water management in the agricultural sector. Despite the lack of formal users’ organizations, there is evidence of farmer groups sharing and managing common irrigation systems without any formal bonds or statutes. The objective of this research is to assess the challenges in the formalization process of the agricultural water sector in a developing country, such as Nicaragua. Since major water-related problems have already been identified, the new Water Law still faces a number of barriers that may delay its implementation. It is essential to indentify the socioeconomic, institutional and environmental factors that structure incentives for farmers to willingly become involved in a formalization process. The theoretical framework is based on the literature on collective action and social capital. The empirical focus is given by 5 focus groups and 98 surveys hold in the Upper Rio Viejo Sub-basin in North Nicaragua. The study focuses on (i) the problems related to agricultural production that farmers face, (ii) how they are organized for irrigation, (iii) how they perceive public organizations and (iv) the pros and cons of formalizing in irrigation districts. The study attempts to contribute to the Water Law implementation by analyzing both the impact of the Water Law in agricultural water managed areas and the cooperative behavior of the different farmer groups considered in the Upper Rio Viejo Sub-basin."
  • Journal Article
    Water Rights Arenas in the Andes: Networks to Strengthen Local Water Control
    (2008) Boelens, Rutgerd
    "The threats that Andean water user collectives face are ever‐growing in a globalising society. Water is power and engenders social struggle. In the Andean region, water rights struggles involve not only disputes over the access to water, infrastructure and related resources, but also over the contents of water rules and rights, the recognition of legitimate authority, and the discourses that are mobilised to sustain water governance structures and rights orders. While open and large‐scale water battles such as Bolivia’s 'Water Wars' or nationwide mobilisations in Ecuador get the most public attention, low‐profile and more localised water rights encounters, ingrained in local territories, are far more widespread and have an enormous impact on the Andean waterscapes. This paper highlights both water arenas and the ways they operate between the legal and the extralegal. It shows how local collectives build on their own water rights foundations to manage internal water affairs but which simultaneously offer an important home‐base for strategising wider water defence manoeuvres. Hand‐in‐hand with inwardly reinforcing their rights bases, water user groups aim for horizontal and vertical linkages thereby creating strategic alliances. Sheltering an internal school for rights and identity development, reflection and organisation, these local community foundations, through open and subsurface linkages and fluxes, provide the groundwork for upscaling their water rights defence networks to national and transnational arenas."
  • Conference Paper
    Examining the Gendered Dimensions in Using Open Access Water for Production Among Rural Market Gardeners
    (2011) Gutsa, Ignatius
    " • 70% of Zimbabweans live in rural areas. • Rural livelihoods linked to access, use and management of natural resources (subsistence and income generation). • Water entry point to poverty alleviation and livelihoods protection. • Water strategic resource for development (IUCN 2005). • Women traditionally recognised and accepted as main users of water • However gender relations limit their access to, control and use of water. • Most households in Goromonzi depend on surface water to produce food and earn an income. • Mutsvati dam located in Goromonzi district • Irrigation infrastructure appears uniform (water pumped from dam or seasonal river to gardens) • Buckets, simple technology treadle pumps, hand pumps and motor powered water pumps used to apply water to the fields. • Gardens watered and cultivated by individuals or families (women mainly performing the work)."
  • Journal Article
    Two Eyes on Asia: Public-Private Partnerships for Water and Sanitation
    (2008) Thapan, Arjun
    "Asian water utilities have their work cut out for them. They are expected to provide water supply and sanitation services to Asia’s 4 billion people but are perpetually overwhelmed by challenges contributing to poor service — from artificially low tariffs to staff incapacity to insufficient budgets for infrastructure development. Delivery of sustained world class service will require considerable help from partners. Mr. Arjun Thapan of the the Asian Development Bank (ADB) shares the institution’s experience in making successful public-private partnerships."
  • Journal Article
    The SES Framework in a Marine Setting: Methodological Lessons
    (2012) Schlüter, Achim; Madrigal, Róger
    "The paper discusses the application of Elinor Ostrom’s Social Ecological Systems (SES)framework, using as example a community organization in Costa Rica, which collectively extracts turtle eggs. The paper does so with the particular aim of examining the coevolving relationship between political science and economics. The SES framework is understood as a useful exploratory tool, which was introduced into a joint research agenda from a political science perspective. The breadth of its approach enables it to capture empirically observable diversity. In this sense it provided a perfect complement to the more partial view that economics brought into the coevolving research process."
  • Conference Paper
    Towards Design Principals for Nesting in Australian Watershed Management
    (2004) Marshall, Graham R.
    "Despite the complexity of watershed management, policy-makers in Australia and other countries have given little systematic attention to the challenge of learning how to organise it effectively. Meanwhile, evidence has emerged that community-based organisational systems with enduring success in addressing complex problems of natural resource management are likely to consist of ‘multiple layers of nested enterprises’. This paper considers the contribution that organisational nesting of this kind could make to improving the performance of watershed management programs, particularly in Australia. After reviewing the theoretical advantages of the organisational nesting concept for complex problems, the focus of the paper shifts to identifying on the basis of a literature review a set of preliminary design principles that, after an appropriate process of ‘ground-truthing’ and refinement, might be used to guide application of the concept to watershed management, at least in Australia. The set identified contains 24 preliminary design principles. This includes 10 structure-related principles organised under four headings (i.e., base-level units, boundaries, rules, and subsidiarity) and 14 process-related principles organised under 12 headings (i.e., catalysing voluntary cooperation, formalising organisational processes, pacing organisational growth, purposefulness, recruiting leadership, learning, participation in decision-making, monitoring and enforcement, conflict resolution, government recognition, deliberative decision-making, and leading by example). The value of this set for actual watershed management programs in Australia is to be explored over the next few years through case studies of three such programs."
  • Conference Paper
    Aquaculture for Rural Development (ARD) in the Philippines: Privatization vs. Community Property Rights
    (2006) Escober, J.E.J.
    "In the Philippines, a de facto open-access situation in fisheries persists despite progressive fishery laws in recent years that allocate use of coastal and inland areas between artisanal fishers on the one hand, and commercial capture fishers and aquaculture operators on the other hand. Weak state institutions and lax implementation of laws have gone hand in hand with a threefold increase in the last twenty years in the population of artisanal fishers eking out subsistence from badly degraded fishery resources and coastal ecosystems. "Advocates and practitioners of community-based coastal resources management (CBCRM) in the country have pushed for the adoption of community property rights (CPR) systems that would address open access, bring cost and benefit decisions together, foster sustainable resource use and mitigate socioeconomic inequities in coastal communities. "However, a cause for concern is the gathering momentum in the implementation of the Aquaculture for Rural Development (ARD) program of the government. There has been widespread criticism to this approach among artisanal fishers, which they see as a reprise of shrimp aquaculture expansion that resulted in the clear cutting of mangrove forests from the 1960s to the mid 1990s. "The ARD program is likely to result in more negative externalities, heightened conflict over coastal resources, and increased income disparity and poverty for artisanal fishers and coastal communities. It will induce the entry of opportunistic "investors" interested in short- term financial gains but not in the sustainable utilization of resources over the long term. Thus, it is a looming threat to community property rights regimes that are still in the early stages of development by local fisherfolk organizations and their allied institutions. "In achieving community property rights, it is envisioned that negative externalities will be minimized or eliminated altogether, and the continuity of benefit streams (to the community and society as a whole) ensured in the long run. This framework can be effectively employed in countering trends towards privatization of coastal resources that is likely to accompany the implementation of the ARD program being bruited by the national government. "Amid projections of a slowdown of production growth in capture fisheries, government is putting priority on the establishment of marine aquaculture parks, initially in selected sites across the country but eventually on a widespread basis. Most, if not all, of these areas are within municipal waters and conflict between mariculture operators and municipal capture fishers is expected "To ensure sustainable and equitable management of fisheries and coastal resources, including both capture and culture activities in nearshore waters, municipal fisherfolk should effectively hold preferential use rights to these areas to which they are entitled based on existing laws. Further, any development leading towards the expansion of marine aquaculture must be within the context of comprehensive coastal resource management plans (RMPs), which would include limits to the extent of these areas, zonation of municipal waters, internalization of environmental costs to be borne by mariculture operators, support services for fisherfolk cooperatives engaged in aquaculture and measures such as environmental bonds to operationalize the precautionary principle."
  • Journal Article
    Access and Resilience: Analyzing the Construction of Social Resilience to the Threat of Water Scarcity
    (2006) Langridge, Ruth; Christian-Smith, Juliet; Lohse, Kathleen A.
    "Resilience is a vital attribute that characterizes a system's capacity to cope with stress. Researchers have examined the measurement of resilience in ecosystems and in social-ecological systems, and the comparative vulnerability of social groups. Our paper refocuses attention on the processes and relations that create social resilience. Our central proposition is that the creation of social resilience is linked to a community's ability to access critical resources. We explore this proposition through an analysis of how community resilience to the stress of water scarcity is influenced by historically contingent mechanisms to gain, control, and maintain access to water. Access is defined broadly as the ability of a community to actually benefit from a resource, and includes a wider range of relations than those derived from property rights alone. We provide a framework for assessing the construction of social resilience and use it to examine, first, the different processes and relations that enabled four communities in northern California to acquire access to water, and second, how access contributed to their differential levels of resilience to potential water scarcity. Legal water rights are extremely difficult to alter, and given the variety of mechanisms that can generate access, our study suggests that strengthening and diversifying a range of structural and relational mechanisms to access water can enhance a community's resilience to water scarcity."
  • Journal Article
    Quality of River Nile Sediments from Idfo to Cairo
    (2005) Abdel-Satar, Amaal
    "Ten sediment samples from the main channel of River Nile beside four from the banks were collected seasonally from Idfo to Cairo during autumn 2000 to summer 2001. The present study focuses on the levels of heavy metals (Fe, Mn, Zn, Cu, Ni, Co, Pb and Cd) beside major cations (Na, K, Ca and Mg) in River Nile sediments and the correlations between metal concentrations, sediment particle size, carbonate and organic matter contents. The sediment samples were also analyzed for the exchangeable nutrient groups. The study revealed that the sand comprised more than 80% of the studied Nile sediment. The exchangeable nutrient showed irregular seasonal trends and the exchangeable phosphate (3.79-18.31 μg/g) recorded low levels compared with nitrate (2.4-52.28 μg/g) and ammonia (27.90-595.5 μg/g). The Nile sediments are slightly enriched with the major cations and the elevated concentrations of heavy metals are often associated with the industrial pollution. Iron and manganese oxides beside organic matter seem to be the principal carrier phases for most studied heavy metals. Comparison of studied metals to freshwater sediment quality guidelines was cited and discussed."