Groundwater Governance: The Role of Legal Frameworks at the Local and National Level—Established Practice and Emerging Trends

Abstract

Legal frameworks play a crucial role for effective groundwater governance. They flank and support water policy and provide users and the administration with rights and obligations to use, manage, and protect vital resources in order to achieve the overall goal of equitable and sustainable water use. This paper discusses key challenges that have to be addressed in water law to manage and protect groundwater effectively. It will provide an overview of established practice in groundwater legislation and discuss recent trends and developments in light of current challenges. It focuses on permit-based systems of administrative water rights but will to a limited extent also deal with customary, community-based, and informal arrangements. It will show that increasingly domestic groundwater legislation is strengthened and ranked on a par with surface water regimes, ideally by dealing with all water resources in an integrated manner.

Modes and Approaches of Groundwater Governance: A Survey of Lessons Learned from Selected Cases across the Globe

“…This view of stakeholder engagement and participatory processes to support the engagement of diverse stakeholders is echoed and well-articulated in water-governance literature (e.g., [22,38,43,44]). Knowledge co-production processes are increasingly seen as important in not just building products-but building relationships between stakeholders [45].…”

“…Members of the scientific community (and the authors of our case studies) have noted that the role of the government should transform from "resource supplier" to "resource custodian" [38]. However, the role of resource custodian is problematic for many reasons; in particular, it offers an uneasy fit for most government agencies.…”

Water Governance, Stakeholder Engagement, and Sustainable Water Resources Management

“…[21]. As Mechlem and others have noted, contextual factors are the dominant influences on how groundwater is governed [20]. This finding was affirmed by Varady et al from multiple, diverse case studies in "Modes and Approaches of Groundwater Governance: A Survey of Lessons Learned from Selected Cases across the Globe" [22].…”

“…In "Groundwater Governance: The Role of Legal Frameworks at the Local and National Level-Established Practice and Emerging Trends", she notes that groundwater legislation is being developed that balances inherent uncertainty about availability and quality with the need for certainty about rights to water use [20]. These legal frameworks reflect context-based groundwater governance that accounts for the unique conditions of each country.…”

Institutional Feasibility of Managed Aquifer Recharge in Northeast Ghana

“…Apart from legal and regulatory issues, land rights, demand management of groundwater, and the conjunctive use of surface and groundwater are also given attention by institutions [17]. Mechlem [21] exemplified the situation by stating that prior authorization is a precondition for the success of MAR projects. Groundwater instruments like licenses are also needed to abstract, store, and recharge water with legislation dovetailing the conditions for the operation of such a project.…”