Clothing the IWRM Emperor by Using Collaborative Modeling for Decision Support

Clothing the IWRM Emperor by Using Collaborative Modeling for Decision Support

Dr Jerome Delli Priscoli, IWR – USACE

Editor in Chief: Water Policy

Board of Governors: Word Water Council

Keynote Address

AWRA Specialty Conference on IWRM: Integrated Water Resources management: Emperor’s New Clothes or Indispensable Process?

June 27-29 201,1Snowbird, Utah

Ladies, Gentlemen and colleagues: I am honored and pleased to address you at this AWRA specialty conference, I have titled my remarks - Clothing the IWRM Emperor by Using Collaborative Modeling for Decision Support.

Like many here, I think that Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) may be the most used water resources term worldwide; so frequently used that many liken it to a Mantra more than professional tool. IWRM IS the Emperor of today’s water resources jargon. BUT is it and can it be more?

So this morning I would ask: Does the IWRM emperor have clothes? I think YES; however, we are only beginning the process of refitting the Emperor’s clothes for a new generation of water resources professional; a generation that works with marvelous new hard and soft technologies; technologies and processes which promise to help manage the gray area between the political and technical that is the water resources professional’s life and which holds the key to achieving IWRM – we broadly call such processes collaborative modeling; they are a major part of the emperor’s new clothing.

Let me explain.

What is IWRM? How do you define it? As Editor in Chief of Water Policy, I see hundreds of articles paying homage to IWRM; while IWRM is rarely defined, it is continually cited. It is as if authors feel the need to pay IWRM homage or kneel before its rhetorical altar to allow them legitimacy to proceed.

Now - that IS a powerful Emperor!

I see articles that describe public participation processes; pricing experiments; integrating land use and water; watershed and basin management, and; many topics, each calling their project IWRM. Like many ideological words, IWRM has come to mean many things to many people. It servespurposes of a binding ideology, or a theology or a belief system that connects like mindedpeople. When such rhetoric reaches the elevated status of a profession’s self evidentreference point it is useful to reach back to its origins.

In our modern era the Global Water Partnership (GWP) under the guidance of my friend and colleague Torkil Clausenhas catapulted IWRM to world visibility. The GWP defines IWRM as:

“….a process which promotes the coordinated development and management of water, land and related resources, in order to maximize the resultant economic and social welfare in an equitable manner without compromising the sustainability of vital ecosystems…”

Because I facilitated the Global Water partnerships (GWP’s)process in Copenhagen which gave birth to this concept; originally defined as the “comb” of water management activities, I know this well. The GWP itself was a negotiated agreement among major world lenders, donors and stakeholders in the water and aid business in the mid 1990s. Its common interest was an understanding that water related aid was declining and those interested in water for the poor needed to find better ways to coordinate and prioritize water aid to developing world. Both the GWP and its eventual definition of IWRM were built on the foundations of the Dublin water principles which emerged from the 1992 Dublin water conference.

The 1992 Dublin Conference established four guiding principles for managing freshwater resources:

1. Fresh water is a finite and vulnerable resource, essential to sustain life, development and the environment.
2. Water development and management should be based on a participatory approach, involving users, planners and policy makers at all levels.
3. Women play a central part in the provision, management and safeguarding of water.
4. Water has an economic value in all its competing uses and should be recognized as an economic good.

The World Water community called the Dublin conference because water professionals worldwide realized that the 1993 Rio environment Conference was unlikely to include water and that water underpinned much of the environmental concerns of that landmark event. In short, it was called to integrate water resources into the world’s ongoing political processes. Since I was privileged to mediate the negotiation process which created the GWP and to design and facilitate the process which produced the Dublin principles, I also know them well.

These landmark water events formed a substantive basis for the next decade’s water policies of many lenders and donors and all the world’s regional development banks. But notice their essence: water management is a means to achieving macro societal goals and its management must be integrated with other macro social activities along with the technical and the political.

To me, a political scientist and economist,who had spent his professional life both studying and practicing water resourcesmanagementin the U.S., I found all this fascinating. After all, water resources planning and management is a process of integrating the political and technical. We, in the U.S., do it by using accepted engineering standards and technical rules for economics and sciences nested within thedecentralized federalist system of the U.S. Actually, we behavein a practical way, much like that which is called for in theoretical IWRM frameworks. We start fromdecentralization as our states have first sovereignty over water. Then we build technical and socio-political dialog from; the bottom up as well as top down; across jurisdictions; across agencies and with broadening stakeholder participation.

The resultant “process cauldron” can be manipulated but it is a structured venue for political-technical dialog that is decentralized and done within a legitimate and accountable political process.

I remember asking my colleagues around the world, “…are you sure you want this decentralized IWRM and its consequent political technical dialog…look at us... is this the type of system you want?”

Concepts of Integrating Water as a means to achieving societal goals have been with us from our nation’s origins. General Washington used integrating the Potomac to the Ohio as an appeal to attend the constitutional convention. In the early 1800’s President Jefferson commissioned the Gallatin report which outlined how the continent’s waterways should be used: to achieve national security; to build one nation and to facilitate socio- economic development – objectives that sound close to many foreign aid claims of how IWRM will help today’s poor. Most of us know about John Wesley Powell and his warnings that the social welfare of the West must be tied to its rivers as a whole. In 1910 Teddy Roosevelt stated:

“…each river system, from its headwaters in the forest to its mouth on the coast is a single unit and should be treated as such.”

In the early 1920s, Congress, concerned that growing single purpose hydropower licensing was endangering the health of the continent’s rivers, directed the USACE to assess our major rivers for their potential multiple uses. These were called 308 reports. We think over 250 308 reports were done over a sixty year period. Some have provided the framework for regional water management that is arguably some of the most significant IWRM in the modern area: the Columbia River system, the Ohio basin, the TVA, the Northeast water supply studies, and others.

In 1937 FDR addressed the US Congress, he said:

“I am presenting herewith for your consideration a comprehensive national plan for the conservation and development of our water resources……..Changing public interest, first in navigation, then in irrigation, and then in flood-control, water power or pollution, has produced a collection of unrelated water policies. The recommendations in this report define in broad strokes an integrated water policy for the country as a whole. Such a Federal water policy is needed.” (8/18/37 FDR to US Congress)

With such a water history, you can imagine my bewilderment and amusement at a UNDP sponsored gathering a few years go. Its purpose was to designa questionnaire to be sent to all countries on their “progress” in reaching IWRM. When it came time to ask the U.S., represented by State Department, for its contribution there was dull nervous laughter. Somehow an unspoken assumption permeated the room: the U.S. would have little to say and little to report. Indeed, the eventual UN report showed the US far behind all other countries dutifully reporting what they perceived the UN wanted on IWRM. Feeling a little mischievous and wanting to lighten the group up, I tried to help our State Department by asking, “….well how many trucks loads of IWRM reports do you want?….’ The 308 reports alone (assuming we could find them) would fill a few trucks - to say nothing of regional and state plans along with the Title II RB plans of the 1970s and several others.

I asked colleagues from GWP and the World Bank, colleagues who were educated in the US; “…tell me, was the TVA IWRM? Is the Columbia system and the Columbia River treaty IWRM?” I got one “yes” from a former VP of the World Bank and declines to answer from others; only a polite reference that these were something else – something else?

Over the last ten years, many articles on IWRM methodology and history have been submitted to Water Policy. Rarely do they include included bibliography older then the late 1990s; the period when GWP and others have launched IWRM worldwide. Do not get me wrong - this launching and visibility for IWRM is a great service to the world water community. However, my experience does beg the question: what are we talking about? Are we chanting aIWRM mantra as one former Chair of the GWP once quipped? Was IWRM invented by GWP in the late 1990s?

Some explained to me that this bibliographic observation occursbecause the internetonly came into play at that time. Perhaps – but I think there is more. First there seems to be a general historical amnesia when it comes to water policies. Second, in some ways much of the world was undergoing the upheavals the US witnessed in the 1970s – environmental and ecological challenges to traditional ways of looking at water.

I have observed that for many IWRM was coming to primarily mean; including/addingecology. But as we, in the U.S., learned though the long perturbationsofPrinciples and Standards (P&S)for water resources planning in the 1970s, to Principles and Guidance (P&G)in the 1980s and now with P&G “light,” you should not set up one objective called environmental quality (EQ) and then sub-optimize against all else; just as it was not best to set one economic function – national economic development (NED) to sub optimize all else against it.

No: the essence of IWRM was to achieve clear trade-off understanding as basis to make better decisions – not to trade-off only after a predetermined objective was met. Indeed, we continually rediscover that water, which can be used in many ways, is a means to achieving social goals – and those social goals change over time as societies change; as they grow richer or poor – and thus demand different mixes of uses for water.

Many here remember the initial P&S of 4 objectives (NED, OSE, RD and EQ) and 4 accounts (ED, OSE, RD and EG): it is hard to imagine clearer attempts to integrate macro social objectives and water management. Political realities essentially “did-in” this wonderful academic framework, there was not enough “buy in” fromdecentralizedpolitical system and competing sectoral interests; despite its academic elegance.

In the 1980s, P&S was streamlined into 2 objectives and 4 accounts and was eventually lost in a sort of anarchy of standards for water planning. Now we see resurgence of a new P&S which once again is presented as reforming traditional water management to include ecological concerns.

In many ways this multi-decadal evolution can be seen as finding a new balance point for integrating macro social goals, ultimately set by our accountable political system, with the best and brightest technical thinking on water management.

I think that articulating and being transparent on trade-offs among interests of technical stakeholders, NGOs, political entities and other interested persons, is the essence of IWRM. But how can that be done?

After all, is it quixotic to try to bring political sphere into the technical sphere of planning, management andanalysis? Actually as a young PhD student writing a dissertation I saw this more a problem of making politicians better planners then of making planners better politicians. After 35+ years I see planning, analysis and management as both technical and political.

When I started with IWR- USACE in the mid 1970s, I was asked to form the public participation and the social impact programs for the Corps. I remember we at IWR called a social scientists conference in Memphis. After we argued over whether economists were to be called social scientists, we designed a questionnaire for the few hundred social scientists then working in the Corps amidst this turmoil of changing water management under P&S guidelines. The results revealed much about the effort to achieve that nexus of political and technical. The prevailing myth was that the Corps needed the social scientists to describe these “new” values and “preferences” being added to the mix of water management; that they would do the participation and get all this new data.

None of this was the case. You can analyze someone’s preferences, put them on a preference curve/scale and calculate trade-off values among others. However, reality, revealed in actual behavior of persons confronted with trade-offs, invariably differs. Thus we rapidly came to understand that public involvement of stakeholders was critical to understanding the implementability of options.

Our questionnaire found that the analytical social scientists were the least likely to want to do participation processes and far more interested in studying people rather than actually mixing it up with them in processes. Indeed, those willing and able to mix with stakeholders came from diverse backgrounds; determined far more by personality traits then academic background. The hope that the new social scientists or as I was called by more than one chief of engineering- the new “socialists” – could provide what was needed for creating new options and enhancing implementability.

At that time I wrote an IWR - USACE white paper, “Public Involvement and Social Impact, Union Seeing Marriage.” The union was our understanding that we needed both the technical analytical impact assessment and the ‘process” participation of stakeholders but the marriage was how do to achieve real buy in between the analytical and the process.

To meet this gap between the analytical and process approaches; indeed to achieve more IWRM; many initiated new forms of modeling systems to help interests understand tradeoffs. Meanwhile the “process” world started making great advances in how to convene, negotiate, debate and reach consensus. In many ways the “process” and modeling worlds diverged only to meet in “one-off” processes. Stakeholders assumed the black boxes, the inside workings of which they rarely understand, would ultimately produce results reflecting the values of their creators. Since they often did not like the values of the black box creators, the models often did more to create research and PhD theses then to actually inform decision makers’ recommendations.

But persistently our political culture of decentralization, forced dialog among technical and political and demands for transparency with stakeholders pushed always for more integrations of the social, ecological and traditional technical dimensions.

Almost simultaneously, significant breakthroughs in computer hardware and software, new ways to visually display data,emergedalong with the growing change water resources worldwide. To my great surprise, I found myself extolling the virtues of interactive collaborative modeling; modeling that invites stakeholders to jointly create the algorithms used to jointly describe water resources systems and the trade-offs.Such modeling brings hope that joint ownership in descriptive algorithms can help parties make requisite trade-offs. It can create a new awareness and empathy among parties as how their desires affect and are affected by the others.

Bill Werick at IWR and Rick Palmer at U of Washington launched what seemed to be a significant new generation of tools that combined process and analyticaltools so as to make the quixotic vision of IWRM more of a reality; we have been calling it shared vision planning (SVP) and now collaborative modeling. SVP integrated traditional water resources planning, system dynamics modeling and the best that had been learned from participatory processes; such as bringing circle of influence into the model building. SVP, itself, was similar to what process professionals often called “single text” negotiating document. Actually, in many ways SVP is most modern generation of the old social concepts - planning as social learning.