2.3 Institutional Resource Regimes II: Theoretical Framework

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En provenance du cours de University of Geneva

Water Resources Management and Policy

376 notes

University of Geneva

Water Resources Management and Policy

376 notes

Water management today is faced with new challenges such as climate change or the effects of human activity. Public and private stakeholders who are active in this field must develop new ways to better manage the water cycle "as a whole". The objective of this MOOC is to develop an understanding of the problems related to water management. Firstly, this course will define a resource and, more specifically, the resource of water. It will look at how water is used and the activities associated with it as well as any potential conflicts. The course will look at water management in detail through the analysis of the different types of rights and obligations associated with, for example, the development of a multi-sectorial regulation system or a watershed management approach. By the end of this course, our aim is to enable you to: 1) Identify the main issues and strategies linked to water resource management 2) Acquire the key reading material needed to understand the many variables (environmental, institutional and political) which affect water and which, in terms of management, may require adjustment. This course was developed by the Geneva Water Hub. Alongside researchers from the University of Geneva from a range of faculties, researchers from other universities and research centres will be involved in this course. Practitioners who deal daily with the political dimension of water management will also input into the course. This MOOC is designed for all those interested in the water sector. Prior training is not necessary to follow our program. The findings presented in this course can be easily reapplied to different contexts and to different scales of analysis. This MOOC is supported by the Geneva Water Hub and the University of Geneva along with the MOOC in « Ecosystem Services: a Method for Sustainable Development » (www.coursera.org/learn/ecosystem-services) and the one in "International Water Law" (www.coursera.org/learn/droit-eau). This course is funded by the Global Programme Water Initiatives of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC). This course is also available in French : www.coursera.org/learn/gestion-eau

À partir de la leçon

Module 2: The Rules of the Resource, their Uses and their Circumvention

Businesses that manage water are guided by property law and public policy designed to define and coordinate all the demands on the resource. This second module aims to better understand the complexity of these two bodies of law through the framework of the Institutional Resource Regime (IRR). This framework is presented and then applied to two case studies (Swiss and European) to understand the rules governing water management in these territories. Finally, we will go beyond this framework to address the implementation of these rules by looking at examples of how the law is applied and examples of localised regulation. The module is concluded by a quiz worth 20% of the final grade. You must have at least 80% of the responses correct to pass the module

2.2 Institutional Resource Regimes I: Theoretical Framework10:57

2.3 Institutional Resource Regimes II: Theoretical Framework10:15

2.4 Institutional Regimes Ressources III: the Swiss Case10:40

2.5 Institutionnal Regimes Resources IV: the European Case7:22

2.6 Water Regulation in the European Union according to the Water Framework Directive (WFD)9:33

2.7 From Institutional Resource Regimes to the Implementation Studies9:29

Rencontrer les enseignants

Christian Bréthaut
Assistant Professor
Institut des sciences de l'environnement, Université de Genève
Géraldine Pflieger
Professeure associée
Institut de Gouvernance de l'Environnement et de Développement Territorial

[MUSIC]

[MUSIC] We have

outlined the major components of the analytical framework: resources, uses

and the different rules that make up public or private law.

The objective of this section is to understand the meaning of this regime, the

framework of the regime, which actually allows us to explain how users behave.

So the authors who developed this framework

identified several regulatory processes,

which are demonstrated by the four arrows in the diagram.

The first is public policy regulation, shown by arrow number one,

by public policies without having an impact on property rights.

This forces all users, be they owners

or not, to conduct themselves equally vis-à-vis the resource.

For example, even if we own the resource, hydrocarbons should

not be dumped into a river or a stream,

Today in a developed society,

nobody has the right to dump a bucket of petrol into a river.

That’s obvious, even for the owner.

That's the first regulation, the regulation by public policy.

The second regulation is still under public policy

but it impacts the rights of property.

This means that if the content of property rights is modified

the type of use that can be made from this property is also modified.

These rights severely limit use rights, for example.

The authority to exploit the resource for irrigation,

for example, during a summer drought are typically public policies

that oblige the property rights,

no matter how they were previously invoked.

We witness a form of material expropriation

that is to say, there is a water resource

that can be used, but during a given period it can no longer be used

as a result of drought and to preserve the common resource.

This second type of regulation requires that even public policies which

are relatively powerful with respect to property rights and,

as we have already mentioned, this is not necessarily the case in all

political systems of northern countries.

The third type of regulation,

this is regulation through redefining property rights.

Defining the context that the owner may

use the resource.

One can take the example of a concession and it may mean

revising a concession, to renegotiate or reduce the duration.

In this case the availability of the right, the property right, limited in time,

allows the relatively limited use of resource and

once again, it is modified or altered.

In this case, it is not a law,

or public policy, but the concession contract

which gives us the opportunity to use the resource.

The fourth regulatory voice

is the regulation of the redistribution of the property rights.

This is undoubtedly the most aggressive voice of regulation.

It helps to redistribute who owns the resource,

either by nationalization of water resources

either by municipalization or even through privatization.

All these procedures involve dispossessing

the original owner of the resource.

The four main methods of regulation, through public policies

without impact or an impact to property rights

or through redistribution or reallocation of property rights,

can then be qualified as terms of extent or coherence.

The regime’s extent is its ability to effectively frame

all or a certain amount of goods and services that are

removed from the resource.

It is the number of uses or the percentage of relative use,

which is framed by the institutional regimes,

public policy and property rights.

This extent enables us to understand

the uses that are effectively allowed or forbidden

and uses that are free meaning they are not regulated at all. And,

then, we will also talk about the coherence of the regime.

Coherence is, above all, when there is no contradiction between

public policies. We will return to this in the next module with

many questions linked to intersectoriality - the fact that an agricultural public policy

can be in contradiction with environmental public policy.

It can happen, and above all consistency issues

within the regime between the body of public law and private law,

between public policy and the property rights.

For example, the fact that a public policy does not

contradict an inalienable property right

would stall its implementation.

On this basis, we can qualify

the extent, the coherence of a regime and its regulatory properties,

its ability to frame both uses and users.

With this analysis model, we can begin to grasp

a little more about user behaviour.

Take the case of a river that is polluted, and that we discussed earlier

in the previous section. Here is a user who pollutes the

Arve river next to us. In terms of an analytical framework

of institutional regimes, it can be explained in different ways.

The fact that contaminants are dumped in the system

is not at all regulated so the user

can pollute peacefully, freely. There is no rule against this.

In this case, the problem is linked to the extent of the regime,

the goods and services.

The fact that pollutants can be dumped in a river is not at all considered

by the regime. This is either because the regime

is contradictory, is not sufficiently coherent, that is to say the

property rights of the polluter are so strong that he can pollute in peace

without public policy preventing it. This is a problem of

incoherence between the property right and the policy to be applied.

There is a law but it is not respected because of the

structure of property rights, or because the regime

authorises pollution within a certain level and there,

clearly the regime is broad and coherent,

but this can explain problematic behaviour,

in a certain extent with respect to the resource.

However, things are not that simple.

If you could explain user behaviour, with

the amount of laws the framework of the regime,

part of the rules activated or to be activated, the whole body of objective law.

It would be too easy to consider that user behaviour

whether positive or negative, is simply dependent

on the ability to satisfactorily define a regime and a legal framework.

Of course things are much more complicated and

this is what we see with recently developed, localized arrangements of regulation

which allow users

some leeway within the regime.

This is known as the rules in use, the rules in action

which contrasts with the rules in force of the institutional regime itself.

The rules in action are the rules that we will already

effectively apply. They are the rules that we will circumvent or redirect,

use for a purpose other than the one that was initially envisaged.

They are the rules that we will add to complete the regime over

time and all form an arrangement of regulations,

not necessarily included within the legal framework of public policies

or the private body of law of property rights but which can all

explain users behaviour, whether positive or negative.

The rules in action or rules in use contrast with the rules in

force and define this arrangement of localized regulation. We'll

see a fine example with the issue of ecosystems in the canton of

Valais presented to us by Rémi Schweizer, but before that,

we will pause for a moment on the example or examples of

institutional resources regimes in Switzerland with Thomas Bolognesi.

He will focus on the case of Switzerland before expanding to the European case

and the very rich Water Framework Directive which

is a successful system for framing water resource uses.

is a successful system for framing water resource uses.

[MUSIC]

[MUSIC]

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