Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The governance dimension of water resources management is complex and interconnected. It inherits this complexity from the interconnected nature of the hydrological cycle itself and the influence of multiple actors and sectors in managing water resources at multiple scales. Cooperation, coordination, and collaboration between the numerous and diverse stakeholders are considered imperative for sustainable development and management of water resources. Scholars and practitioners acknowledge that there is a need to understand the water governance arrangements and to develop research tools to analyze them.

The need to assess the efficacy of water governance is even greater in the rapidly urbanizing India, which is facing unprecedented challenges in water resource management and severe threats to water security. Unlike urban centers in developed countries where formal water economies and a central water management paradigm dominate, in Indian cities informal water markets and decentralized interventions still play a large role. In informal water economies, water users heavily rely on self-provision of water or on community-managed water sources or private water markets. City municipalities are increasingly using surface water, often from sources outside the city, to fulfill the increasing demand. Yet, the informal market continues to exploit the groundwater to fulfill unmet needs. The sheer number and diverse mandate of national, regional, state and city level formal and informal actors involved in the management of urban water supply make it complicated. However, urban water management in India is an understudied area and the knowledge in water governance is fragmented and lacks empirical validation.

This research uses Ahmedabad, a rapidly growing Indian city, as a case study to evaluate the urban water governance arrangements. It addresses two questions: (1) What are the various formal and informal institutions and mechanisms governing water supply in the city of Ahmedabad? (2) What are the strengths and weaknesses of the current institutional arrangements to foster sustainable development and management of urban water resources? The study uses Social Network Analysis (SNA), a well-established technique in network science to map, visualize and analyze complex institutional networks influencing the urban water management in the case study city. It uses SNA metrics to understand the structure and character of governance network; and to compare it with the indicators of preferred governance aspects like cooperation, coordination, and collaboration. Using public information, scholarly literature, observations and semi-structured interviews, I generated social network data of the (1) ward, city, district, state, and national level administration involved in city’s public water management; (2) dominant industrial, commercial, institutional and residential actors that rely on self-provision; and (3) representative set of private water supply vendors in the city. Preliminary results show a predominantly hierarchical structure in the government administration wherein multiple agencies work in parallel but lack collaboration. Moreover, there is no institution that coordinates or connects the formal and informal water suppliers in the city. Moving forward I will analyze the current network to identify points of intervention so as to improve the capacity of the governance network.