Leadership for Sustainable Water Management: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

Instream flow needs create leadership challenges because no single authority can control them totally and they result from the residuals of water management decisions made by multiple parties. Given that technical methods alone are not sufficient to provide solutions, leadership is needed to confront institutional barriers in the form of ineffective law and lack of integration, fragmented authority and difficulty in coordination, conflicting agendas and priorities, regulatory gridlock and proliferation of regulations, and market failure. This paper uses a small-scale western case and a large-scale eastern case to illustrate the need for optimum balancing of instream flow needs and ways to implement solutions without excessive gridlock, delay, and expense. Applying leadership to these instream flow issues will not be easy because theories about resource economics do not drill deeply into the specific issues and because instream flows are more complex than better-defined resource issues. Civil engineering leadership is required to exercise technical excellence and to help overcome institutional barriers that block consensus and win-win solutions in shared governance.