What makes water tenure different?

How can the VGGT principles of transparency, participation, equity, justice, gender-equality and accountability in resource tenure hold for water tenure? We explore whether this differs for, on the one hand, the governance of the climate-dependent global hydrological cycle of precipitation, surface run-off, streams, lakes, wetlands, seas, evaporation or recharged aquifers, and, on the other hand, people’s governance to store, lift and convey water through infrastructure. With few exceptions of direct uses, such as fisheries, water-dependent life depends on both (Pollution prevention is not further considered here).

Water resources in the global hydrological cycle are given by nature for free. In most countries, governments are the public trustee of this precious national treasure both in transboundary water sharing and internally. Land location, upstream or downstream, or above aquifers, influences ease of access, but this rarely entitles to exclusive rights. Especially during dry seasons, spells and droughts, water resources may have to be ‘shared in’ within a community, or ‘shared out’ with neighbouring communities, or ‘shared out’ at higher and even transboundary scales. Equity and justice in such sharing often boils down to prioritization. According to the VGGT principles, water resources that contribute to realizing constitutional and human rights and national goals have a higher priority than other uses. This not only includes drinking water and other domestic uses, but also rights to food, adequate standard of living, culture, non-discrimination, gender and racial equity, good nutrition, etc. Prioritization becomes even more urgent when environmental flows require curtailment of existing or future uses.

Ensuring transparency, participation, and justice exposes the well-documented inequalities between the majority of citizens whose basic needs are still unmet and often relatively few high-impact users, who disproportionally benefit, often for luxury uses. For example, colonial water legislation overrode customary water tenure, a legacy that often continues, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Or in formerly colonized high-income countries, high-impact water users not only caused water resource scarcity but also claim that their entitlements to the national trust are tradable private property, excluding all other citizens. Similarly, in foreign investment contracts, corporate business can dictate governments to provide water resources, whatever the impacts on all citizens.

However, without infrastructure, even the strongest rights to water resources will be futile: water flows by or remains underground. Inequities in water resource sharing are preceded by unequal access to land-bound infrastructure to store and convey water in the right quantity, quality at the right time to the right site of use (premises, agricultural fields, and other sites of water use, such as cattle dams in pastures). Whether soil moisture retention, carrying water cans, small-scale irrigation or large-scale inter-basin transfers or desalination plants, Infrastructure always has a price: human efforts to construct/install, operate and maintain. Those deploying those efforts have stronger but, again, rarely exclusive, claims to the water stored and conveyed. (Co-)investors can be governments, NGOs or individual, self-organized sub-groups or entire communities of smallholders and pastoralists or in low-income informal rural economies. Overcoming the fragmented administrative silos, FAO’s Mapping Systems and Services for Multiple Uses of Water Services (MASSMUS) approach taps the benefits of multi-purpose infrastructure. In sum, under growing competition for water resources, VGGT principles in water tenure explore accelerated targeted, transparent, participatory and gender-equitable support for just infrastructure development and the public trustee’s priority allocation of water resources that flow into such existing or future infrastructure..