How can Citizens Share Responsibility for a Polluted River Valley Basin?

By the middle of the 20th century, water pollution had become a major polit­ical issue. 

Embarrassed by what was portrayed by the national media as a loss of control over local authorities, the French government modified a system of regional planning adopted after the Second World War to create a new set of water resource management organiza­tions based on river basin boundaries, the basin agencies. The 1964 Water Law created one such agency for every major river basin in metropolitan France, and their powers and responsibilities have been progressively expanded through subsequent legislation.

Though initially opposed by local governments as a threat to their customary authority in the field of water management, the basin agencies were eventually implemented nationwide and have become powerful, mul­tipurpose institutions in their own right. Even more important, the active encouragement of nongovernmental participation has led to a genuinely participatory forum for water resource decision-making.

The water agencies are, in fact, only part of a sophisticated water governance in­frastructure arranged around river basin boundaries. Each of the six water agencies in metropolitan France covers a major river basin and exercises both executive and legislative functions. Each basin includes a river basin committee (sometimes called a "water parliament") with representatives from central and local government, in­dustry, farmers, municipal water users and nongovernmental organizations.

The agencies themselves effectively act as the administrative secretariat to support implementation of the committee’s decisions, including preparation of basin management plans, levying fees on water users and financing water infrastructure projects within each basin (Noel 1990).

The participation of nongovernmental stakeholders in agency decision-making has become institutionalized in the form of the Water Development and Management Master Plan, which must be periodically developed for each basin, along with sub­sidiary plans for each subbasin. Plans are formulated and reviewed every six to nine years through a series of public consultations between government and civil society organizations.

Nongovernmental participation is further reinforced through a series of contracts, which are awarded to environmental advocacy organizations to imple­ment specific features of each plan, such as water quality monitoring. Coordination between central and local levels of government in each basin is facilitated by regional offices of the Ministry of the Environment, Sustainable Development, Transport and Housing, which cooperates closely with each water agency (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development 2005).

The National Water Committee convenes water resource management stakeholders at the national level to make pe­riodic decisions with applicability to the whole of France. This robust institutional architecture has proven to be remarkably conducive to collaborative and partici­patory decision making. However, its development has been the product of sus­tained political bargaining and coalition-building between bureaucratic agencies, central and local levels of government and civil society organizations.

Read the full article at: GreenBiz

Media

Taxonomy

• Environment
• River Engineering
• River Basin management
• River Restoration
• River Engineering
• Governance & Planning
• Government