Abstract This paper describes the development of the Guanajuato State Water. Plan, Mexico, where a participatory structure and agenda were adopted, in a.
integrated Water Resources Management (Proceediniis of a symposium licld at Davis. California. April 2000). IAHS Publ. no. 2 7 2 . 2 0 0 1 . ~ '
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Capacity building for a participatory and decentralized water management model: the Guanajuato State Water Plan
RICARDO SANDOVAL-MINERO Guanajuato Guanajuato,
Stale Water Mexico
Commission,
Âiilopisla
Guanajitato-Siluo
Km. I. CP
36251.
e - m a i l : r s a n d o v a ( a ) , g u a n a i u a t o . g o b . m x or rsandovalmf5>infosel.com
Abstract This paper describes the development of the Guanajuato State Water Plan, Mexico, where a participatory structure and agenda were adopted, in a three-phase process. Soft-systems methodologies and participatory planning methods are applied and a systemic model for integrated planning is proposed. The background and rationale for this planning effort at the sub-basin scale are discussed, and more emphasis is given to the conceptual approaches applied to the different phases in the process. Some of the plan's shortcomings and accomplishments are highlighted. K e y w o r d s d e c e n t r a l i z a t i o n ; integrated w a t e r resource m a n a g e m e n t ; planning; social participation
BACKGROUND Guanajuato State, located at the geographic centre of Mexico, has experienced an accelerated agricultural and industrial development for the last half-century (Valencia, 1998). In Guanajuato, water has been over-allocated or is overused—in a 3:2 ratio for groundwater (with a yearly rate of depletion of 2 - 3 m), and 6:5 for surface water (CNA, 1995). Water pollution problems and conflicts for the use of water are increasing, and a dispute with the other states in the basin over the distribution of surface water keeps growing, since an agreement was signed in 1992 setting up limitations and supposedly favouring Guanajuato's irrigation districts. In 1995, the State's government decided to develop a local capacity for participatory water management; basic hydrological and related information is being updated, and information systems and simulation models have been developed. The strive for a new water management model, decentralized and highly participatory, has been behind the water programme in Guanajuato. For this model, the formulation of a long-term water resources plan was considered to be essential to enhance local capacity for water resource planning (WRP).
SETTING UP A R A T I O N A L E FOR A STATE W A T E R PLANNING PROCESS A research phase was carried out, where recent developments and international recommendations on WRP were reviewed (CNA, 1997; ECLAC, 1998; IADB, 1996; IWR, 1996; Le Moigne et al, 1994; World Bank, 1993), as well as its evolution in Mexico and in the Lerma-Chapala basin (Aguilar, 1995; Luna, 1998); Tables 1 and 2 synthesize the main issues encountered. Table 3 provides a reference framework for the W R P approach and scope.
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Table 1 Synthesis of the main recommendations on water resources planning from international meetings since 1977*. March 1977, UN Conference on Water, Mar del Plata, Argentina -
-
Information quality and availability should be improved; long term plans need to be developed applying systems analysis and mathematical models. Methods and objectives for each water use should be set up in a manner compatible with each region's resources and characteristics. Decisions on project building and operation should be based on the identification and assessment of environmental, social and economic costs, so appropriate methodologies should be developed. Planning is a continuous task, needing periodical adjustments and long-term guidelines; systematic project evaluation and assessment should be implemented, and planning experiences should be documented and shared between professionals. Water prices are instruments for demand management, and full cost recovery should be attained as much as possible. Institutional frameworks should be modified to promote an efficient water resource planning and management; as an "important and urgent issue", it is necessary to establish and strengthen river basin institutions, with integrated river basin planning (all water sectors within the basin).
January 1992, International Conference on Water and Environment, Dublin, Ireland -
-
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Water management should be integrated, ensuring simultaneously social and economic development with the protection of ecosystems, linking land use patterns and water use in the geographic space of a river basin or an aquifer. Water has an economic value and should be considered as an economic good. Water resources planning objectives are: poverty alleviation and water-related disease control; protection against natural disasters; water conservation and re-use; urban sustainable development; agricultural production; drinking water and sanitation in the rural communities; aquatic ecosystem protection and water conflicts solution. Emphases must be made on human and institutional capacity building, as well as on the proper measurement of water cycle components (climatic change is an issue). "Hydraulic development and water management must be based on a participatory approach, involving users, planners and policy makers in all levels"; "political commitment and involvement is required, from highest government levels to the smallest communities".
June 1992, UN Conference on Environment and Development, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil -
-
-
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Water resources integrated and ordered management, including integration of land and water issues, at the basin level or sub-basin, should be promoted; one main objective would be "planning for a sustainable and rational water use, protection, preservation and administration, according to local needs and priorities....". It is important to develop and strengthen co-operation at the lowest possible level, delegating water resources administration at that level, according to national legislation, including the decentralization of water services to local authorities, private firms and communities. Interactive databases, prediction methods and economic planning models adequate for water resources administration should be developed, based on new techniques such as GIS and expert systems to gather, analyse and disseminate multi-sector information to allow best possible decisions. Water resources planning is conceived with a dynamic approach, interactive, iterative and inter disciplinary.
March 1998, International Conference on Water and Sustainable Development, Paris, France -
-
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Knowledge and comprehension ofthe water resource at all levels should be increased; institutions, especially the local ones, should be strengthened, and all professionals' and users' capacities should be enhanced. Public powers at all levels, and civil society, should take part in this process and in the adoption of related decisions; governments should create proper conditions for local and national water management. Exchange of real practice acquired experiences should be favoured, as well as the information on institutions created, problems solved and innovative solutions adopted.
* Not verbatim quotations; developed and translated by the author based on ECLAC (1998) and Sandoval etal. (1999) (prior to World Water Forum at The Hague, March 2000).
Capacity
building for a participatory
and decentralized
water management
model
13 5
Table 2 WRP evolution in Mexico—brief description (classification based on Luna (1998) and Aguilar (1995)). Period
Stage
General description
1920--1947 1947- 1960
Primary hydraulic development River basin development
1960s -1972
Regional hydraulic development
1972--1975 1975--1989
Rational centralized planning Bureaucratic implementation
1989--1994
Institutional transition
1994--2000
Institutional consolidation
National Commission for Reclamation Water Resources Ministry Executive basin commissions Regional plans Infrastructure systems National Hydraulic Plan 1975 Programming instead of planning Institutional variations National Water Commission National Water Law Basin Councils Ministry for the Environment, Natural Resources and Fisheries "Hydrological" regions for water management Participatory planning
Table 3 Reference framework for WRP approach and scope. Management stage
Hydraulic development stage
Management objectives
Geographic scale/Planning scope River basin Sub-basin or region
Drainage basin
j
ï
W/N/R
W
ï
W/NR
W
W/NR
W
Previous Intermediate Permanent
Initial (developmental) I/R R I/R R T/l/R Intermediate I/R T/I/R Availability and T/I/R demand management Based on Dourojeanni (1994), Mitchell (1999) and author's analysis. Abbreviations: I integrated; W water; NR natural resources; T transactive; I incremental; R: rational; I/R mixed. Table 4 Guanajuato State Water Plan process—schedule. Date
Phase
June-December 1998
Development of a system dynamics prospective model Information gathering Initial assessment integration Presentation to the consultative committee Participatory planning process Presentation and participatory assessment of scenarios Integration and presentation of the proposed general strategy
April-December 1998 January-March 1999 25 March 1999 20-27 April 1999 April-June 1999 April-July 1999
July-September 1999 September-December 1999
December 1999 Year 2000
Integration of a general longterm programme Dissemination and "lobbying" with other levels of government and users SWP plan official presentation 2001-2006 programme preparation
Objectives/description
Negotiation witli federal government Public convocation of a consultative committee
Four meetings, 148 people registered Presentation to the governmental steering committee and the consultative committee Participatory planning sessions, 23 June; presentation to the consultative council, 21 July Participatory planning, 19 August; public presentation, 9 September Meetings with farmers, peasants, user's organisations (COTAS), water utilities, federal officials, interviews with opinion leaders in the State Promotion State information water system Permanent planning-programming structure for governmental and users co-ordination
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Table 5 Dimensions and categories considered for the morphological analysis of water problems and objectives in the Guanajuato SWP. Dimension
Description
Natural
Water resource and natural resources related to hydrological cycle; water quality and natural availability. Infrastructure, including levels of service, coverage, operation and maintenance, obsolescence and degree of adequacy for water user's habits and skills. Economic valuation of the water resource, economic mechanisms and incentives, short and long term financial issues, financial sustainability of water systems. Social values about water, habits and behavioural issues affecting water consumption and use. Local individuals', organizations' and formal institutions' capabilities to cope with water issues, from the private, social and public sector views. Legal framework, administrative structures, adaptability, resilience and degree of obsolescence. Research, development and technology transfer local, regional and national capabilities, related to local water problems; training and education issues.
Physical Financialeconomic Societal-cultural Institutional Legal-political Technological Category
Description
Water management
Water cycle monitoring Water rights administration Ecological preservation Extreme phenomena control and prevention Rural domestic consumption Urban systems for domestic consumption Agriculture Industrial use Commercial use Legal framework Governmental and social entities consolidation Communications and "water culture" State water financial system Technological research and development State water information system State water planning system (water committee)
Water users
Institutional support
T H E M A K I N G O F T H E G U A N A J U A T O STATE W A T E R PLAN (SWP) First, a planning structure in the State Water Commission (SWC) was set up; it followed a process of information and document gathering, execution of research projects, new information systematization and processing, simulation model develop ment, water use and availability assessment, participatory planning preparation, and the definition of monitoring-assessment procedures. At the same time, a three-stage process for the SWP was proposed: participatory evaluation, strategy development, and long-term programming (Table 4). For the participatory evaluation stage, a soft systems planning method named "interactive administration" was used for extracting participants' knowledge about the problems within the state water sector. Table 5 presents a short description of the dimensions and categories proposed, based on Collado (1998) and on the definition of sustainability proposed in ECLAC (1991). The classification and development of a problem structure was followed by the proposal of a first set of objectives, derived directly from the problem statements. Once this work had been done, a system dynamics model was used to "prove" the system's response to different policies and actions applied, in terms of a set of relevant issues.
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Several scenarios were presented to the steering committee and to a sub-set of the consultative council; this was an informal planning stage, where general guidelines for setting priorities and exploring alternatives were obtained. A long-term vision of water management in Guanajuato State was also presented and discussed within the consult ative council. Finally, once it was considered that there was a general consensus on the completeness and pertinence of the strategy, the planning team developed a long-term programme, with index costs and approximate goals. Two surveys were applied to the consultative council members for defining the priorities and viability of the proposed actions. Finally, a stage of "lobbying" the SWP proposals with federal, state, private and social actors was carried out, simultaneously with interviews with opinion leaders in the state water sector. The outputs of the process were integrated on a compact disc, along with two videos that had been released to disseminate the main parts of the participatory evaluation and the vision, as well as a State Water Atlas, a set of interviews and other related materials. An important issue was to fully acknowledge the participation of the different actors.
EVALUATION OF THE PROCESS
The most important conclusions of the process are: (a) The federal water authority did not share the state's vision of the importance of having a social participation as broad and plural as possible in the process. The vision of water planning "at the basin level" is understood as the last and only level of planning, leaving only programming tasks for geographical units inside the basin, even when in the Lerma-Chapala basin there are thousands of registered water users, (b) Many of the participants still conceive WRP as a merely technical problem for which there must be a unique optimal solution that society should, if ever, just sanction and accept, (c) Lack of good information was a difficult pitfall to address, mainly because of disorganization problems, dispersed information sources, lack of time and/or personnel to assist in the identification and recovery of documents, as well as deliberate practices of hiding information that was considered "dangerous", (d) There is some degree of bias and dispute in participatory planning exercises; time availability and schedule coordination is another frequent problem for participation. But there are gains from public participation, (e) The system dynamics model started from fieldwork and interviews with people who knew well the State's hydraulic system, so it allowed the planning team to learn about the rel ationship between the technical, societal and economic processes. Nevertheless, the resulting model was complex (almost 900 variables) and it was not easy to prove different scenarios and hypotheses without investing too much time, for the time available, in analysing and running the model. Another drawback was the expectation of most of the participants of a "linear" mental model of the future; the model was also judged as if its purpose was to "guess what the future will be like", and a few focused on it as a "what i f model. Dynamic systems, feedback processes and complex rel ationships between technical and non-technical variables, are not completely under stood concepts in the water sector, (f) Some of the water users showed limitations in their ability to participate in the process, maybe because of the long history of nonparticipatory water management and most probably because of the inadequacy of the participatory process for including the wide range of users, from poor peasants to
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agricultural or industrial products exporters, (g) Coordination between government officials is still a challenging pitfall; preserving jurisdiction limits or using the public budget in a more or less discretionary fashion, as well as the use of existing law to block any proposal considered too challenging, were very common attitudes. The most important positive outputs of this process were: (a) It enabled the creation of an informal network of water professionals and users and increased govern mental and social interest in the water problem, (b) The participants could constitute the first "critical mass" towards the spreading of new approaches to water usage and preservation in the State, (c) It was a forum of free expression of ideas and proposals; in the resulting document, issues like corruption, governmental inefficiency, and inno vative approaches for sustainable use of water appear and are addressed with specific proposals.
Acknowledgements I thank Dr Juan Huerta, Vicente Guerrero, Eduardo Mestre, Emiliano Rodriguez and Montserrat Serra for their fundamental insights in the process (the latter also for its coordination), and all the Planning Direction team for their pioneering efforts despite encountering some disappointments and problems.
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