Search

Integrated water resources management is one of the major bottom-up alternatives that emerged during the 1980s in North America as part of the trend towards more holistic and participatory styles of environmental governance. It aims to protect surface and groundwater resources by focusing on the integrated and collaborative management of land and water resources and interests on a watershed basis. In this paper, we draw on the policy network perspective on governance to shed light on the strengths and weaknesses of watershed-based processes of collaboration and integration for water quality protection in agricultural areas. The policy network perspective focuses on the interaction of actors, institutions and ideas within and among policy sectors to capture the intricacies of the policy process in increasingly complex and fragmented societies. Empirically, this study is based on the analysis of agro-environmental strategies for water quality protection in the Province of Ontario over the last 15 years. The contamination of a rural municipal well in Ontario in 2000, with its tragic consequences, translated into an ongoing pluralistic debate and strong attempts to fundamentally change the provincial policy style for addressing drinking water threats, especially agricultural pollution. Based on our analysis, we suggest that meaningful scales for collaboration and integration of land and water resources and interests at the local level, from the point of view of Ontario's agricultural policy network, do not currently include the watershed. We conclude that, instead of forcing watershed-based governance structures, the exploration and examination of more creative and flexible ways of linking watershed imperatives to existing socially and politically meaningful scales in agricultural areas of Ontario and elsewhere is warranted.

The study of drought planning and water allocation in the State of Minnesota and the factors facilitating and constraining local capacity for draught planning are described. The analysis of experiences in Minnesota highlights problems that can occur when senior governments establish policy frameworks, which increase responsibilities at the level without taking note of local capacity.

Learning from the experiences of other jurisdictions has become a common strategy in the face of increasing severe environmental problems around the world. This phenomenon is very common in the water field, where surveys of institutions in other jurisdictions are widely used by practitioners to identify models that can be adopted. A precondition for success in policy transfer is careful consideration of the context within which institutions were developed. This paper explores the importance of context using the example of institutions for environmental water allocation (EWA) in the Murrumbidgee Catchment, in NSW, Australia. The case of EWA in the Murrumbidgee Catchment clearly demonstrates that, in the context of water policies, biophysical considerations must be considered alongside political, social, economic and cultural considerations when evaluating the extent to which water policies designed for one setting can be adopted elsewhere. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]