Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Integration
to rely upon social power to influence the behav-
iour of those users. It does not appear possible for
some forms of intervention to be delivered by all
forms of governance relationship. In this analysis,
three conclusions emerge:
1
That delivering many of the interventions
depends upon social power - the ability to influ-
ence the behaviour of the end users.
2
The lack of a primary role for competition.
That is to say, it is difficult for a profit-seeking
company to build, operate and maintain a dike
system without breaching the rules of competi-
tion and giving a tax-raising power to a profit-
seeking company. Competition has a potential
secondary role; for example, in the construction,
operation and maintenance of interventions
undertaken cooperatively, collaboratively or
through coordination.
3
Insurance is only possible in the form of some
public-private partnership where the state bears
a significant fraction of the risk (CEA 2005; Korc-
zyk 2005). In most countries, the state acts as the
reinsurer of last resource, paying for all those
losses that the commercial retail insurer is unable
to transfer to the commercial reinsurance market
(GAO 2005). Examples of such systems include
flood insurance in the USA, where the federal
government carries all the risk (Insurance Infor-
mation Institute 2005), and catastrophe insurance
in France, where the French national government
carries the risk above the amount accumulated in
the catastrophe fund (de Marcellis-Warin and
Michel-Kerjan 2001). A similar system is found
in Spain (GAO 2005).
Conventional wisdom is that water must be
managed in an integratedway; hence, the concepts
of Integrated Water Resource Management
(GWP 2000) and Integrated Flood Management
(Technical Support Unit 2003). There is an imme-
diate contradiction between this desire for inte-
gration and the simultaneous call for stakeholder
engagement and subsidiarity. Equally, it is neces-
sary to ask what are the potential benefits from
integration, and what forms of integration are
therefore most likely to deliver those benefits.
The argument for integration is that we are seek-
ing to manage a system, one where there are
important interdependencies between the ele-
ments, and where we must manage the dynamic
response of that system. That is, action at any
point at any time will have consequences else-
where in the system. These are the economists'
externalities, and a characteristic of flood risk
management in the past is that we have simply
moved the flood around; by intervening at one
point to reduce the risk of flooding,we have simply
shifted that risk elsewhere. Secondly, we hope to
capture the economies of scale and scope that are
frequently possible in water management.
Ideally, therefore, we would like to have a series
of independent systems, each of which could be
managed in isolation. The obvious problem is that
in a modern society there is a high degree of
interdependence between the parts. Hence, we are
likely to find that we have to choose what is most
important to integrate - the achievement of one
form of integration requires that we sacrifice
another form of integration.
Governance in Practice
Collaboration
Old style water management involved setting up
coordinating agencies, in the form of river basin
commissions (Adams 1992). These were frequent-
ly scientific bureaucracies. The first problemwith
this approach was that they simply internalized
the boundary problems rather than resolved
them; secondly, they sought to deal with the
integration problem by accruing more powers.
So far, it has been argued that the two key require-
ments of governance are an ability to collaborate
across organizational boundaries and the effective
use of social power. The assumption has been
made that integrated or holistic management is
necessary for the delivery of sustainable water
management. This assumption needs to be exam-
ined more closely.
