A rule-based approach for water governance regime assessment of interstate river basins

Water governance regimes in many subnational interstate river basins are undergoing transformation to cope with increasing risks of water conflict. Such efforts include modifying existing water governance rules or introducing new rules to change the institutional characteristics of water governance regimes. However, tools that can be used to assess the rules that form different types of water governance regimes structurally and quantitatively remain underdeveloped. Therefore, this study develops a set of rule-based indicators for water governance regime assessment with the rule concepts of the institutional analysis and development framework. Combining the indicators with the content analysis tool of institutional grammar that can parse interstate water agreements/legislation codified in different formats, a rule-based approach for water governance regime assessment in interstate river basins is proposed. This approach uses rules as core analytical elements to evaluate the distribution of water management power and the level of cooperation in water governance systems to determine the types of governance regimes (i.e., polycentric, centralized or fragmented). Both quantitative and qualitative analyses are supported by the number of various rule types that are structurally identified from water agreements/legislation. We apply this approach to assess water governance regimes in four different interstate river basins. The approach can generate deeper insights into their water governance characteristics. For example, the Murray-Darling Basin’s polycentric-dominated governance regime is found to contain the characteristic of centrality, resulting from its centralized decision-making mechanism during the development of the basin plan. This paper thus contributes to advancing tools for water governance analysis.