Practice and Teaching of American Water Management in a Changing World

Water resource management in the United States has migrated from the heroic challenge of “building the water infrastructure platform” (Hoover Dam, the Columbia River Basin, and the TVA) required for a growing economy to a defensive posture of trying to find some space in an overdetermined legal and regulatory environment. In the words of Martin Reuss (2003), historian at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers: “[W]e have timorously entered a new era in planning. Replacing both the scientific efficiency model of the early twentieth century and the more recent economic efficiency model is an approach that I can characterize only as planning by constraints. Rather than maximizing economic efficiency or optimizing the opportunity to meet public objectives, it sets limits to growth.”

Water professionals seldom take a historical view of water, of how water practices necessarily and desirably change over time. Harvard historian David Blackbourn (2006) has captured this ahistorical worldview well. His book on the evolution of land and water in Germany shows that the natural landscape of Prussia, the preservation of which is so ardently defended by environmentally conscious Germans today, is in fact a manmade environment where drainage and flood-control projects converted an uninhabitable, malaria-ridden swamp into today’s more palatable landscape. Blackbourn shines light on the dialectic nature of water management, in which each successful response gives rise to new challenges and how each succeeding generation of water managers looked with disdain on the achievements of their predecessors: “The state of [the] art [of water management] is always provisional…. [s]omething that historians know well, but hydrological engineers [have] found hard to accept.” In the United States today, the manifestation of this ahistorical view—which afflicts environmentalists and policy analysts at least as much as engineers and hydrologists—is the implicit posture that harnessing water resources for economic growth was not such a great thing after all in the United States and is not something the United States should be recommending to others. The “modern, enlightened, view” is that environmental protection is the overarching objective, with pride of place given to regulatory instruments that constrain development. The archetype of such instruments is the Endangered Species Act (ESA), which is used, in the words of Doremus and Tarlock (2008), “as the equivalent of a nuclear strike” with environmentalists “pushing ESA enforcement to the point of a train wreck in the hopes of triggering structural change.”

This idea—that the noble aspiration of water managers is protection of the environment against the ravages of man—is, perhaps, the major message passed on by U.S. water educators to today’s students in the United States and around the world. It is also the main message that the United States carries through diplomatic and economic assistance channels in its relations with other countries. It does this directly and indirectly. A pertinent “direct” example is the proposed USAID Amazon Conservation Project (USAID 2007). This program “from the American people” was explicitly designed to equip NGOs to undercut the development of hydropower and navigation in the Amazon Basin, a program that was the highest priority of the democratically elected Government of President Lula. An important “indirect” channel is the U.S. influence on the World Bank, where the U.S. government (together with European governments) has long pushed for a host of regulations that make World Bank engagement in any major water infrastructure project virtually impossible (Mallaby, 2006). The effect has been profound: during the course of the 1990s World Bank lending for both hydropower and irrigation fell by about 80%.

There has been a reflexive, ahistoric translation of “if it’s good for us it must be good for them” view. This means that prominent U.S. water intellectuals advocate that developing countries (with orders-of-magnitude-less hydraulic infrastructure) “take the soft path” (nonstructural methods of water management). And it means that the United States uses its public tools (such as USAID), its private tools (such as the Ford, Rockefeller, and Gates Foundations) and its still-considerable muscle in international organizations (such as the World Bank), to advocate a development path in which the social cart is put before the economic horse (Briscoe 2009).

In the area of water this means: a strong prima facie stance against dams, hydropower, and irrigation projects; leadership in mounting the global equivalent of ESAs (“safeguards” in World Bank jargon); and leadership in ensuring that no sin of commission (a less than perfect project) remains unpunished and, further, that there be no accountability for sins of omission (benefits foregone because a good project was not done). This is all looked upon with incredulity by leaders of the developing world, who point out that the soft path might be fine for the United States where there is $\mathrm{6,000}{\mathrm{m}}^3$ of storage capacity per person, but rather different in India or Pakistan (where there is $120{\mathrm{m}}^3$ ) or Ethiopia (where there is $30{\mathrm{m}}^3$ of storage capacity per person). For our narrative there are three important reactions. Reaction one is that the rapidly growing middle income countries (MICs, including China, India, and Brazil), find this “postaffluent” stance ludicrous, simply going their own way and using their own resources to invest massively in building the water infrastructure platforms they consider essential for their growth. Reaction two is that the poor countries, which do not have that choice, chafe at the bit, railing at the hypocrisy of the rich countries (“all rich countries have developed over 70% of their hydroelectric potential, but do not allow Africa, which has developed just 3%, to follow the same path”). As a consequence poor counties welcome the offer of less-encumbered, can-do assistance from the now-flush-with-money MICs. While the United States and other rich countries will no longer finance major water infrastructure in the developing world, and the World Bank now supports the construction of less than a handful of dams, China is supporting the construction of over 200 dams in other countries of Africa and Asia. Reaction three is that MICs are demanding greater power in the governance structures of the IMF, World Bank, and other international organizations, and are using this power to ensure, inter alia, that these institutions reengage with infrastructure (Mallaby 2006).

A corollary of observation two is that funding in the United States for research and education on the critical issue of water security and economic growth has largely dried up. The State Department, USAID, the World Bank, and foundations such as Ford and Rockefeller once nourished engagement by U.S. universities in the water management challenges of the developing world. My own career was heavily influenced by the old worldview. In 1961 President Kennedy asked President Ayub Khan how the United States could help Pakistan. One of the highest priorities for Pakistan—then and now (Briscoe and Qamar 2006)—is development and management of the surface and groundwater resources of the Indus Basin. The intellectual capital of the Harvard Water Program (first, an ability to integrate engineers, economists, and institutionalists; and second, an ability to develop complex computer-based decision support systems) was supported by the U.S. government and the Ford Foundation, and spurred a new generation of (highly successful) policies and programs and the training of a new generation of American and South Asia water professionals. Today such healthy “transmission belts” no longer exist. There is little incentive now for U.S. universities to engage on issues considered critical by developing countries, and massive incentives to align with the “postaffluent” ideas agenda, which discounts economic development and focuses on environmental issues and, now, climate change. The net result is that research and teaching on water resource management in U.S. universities is increasingly parochial, and ever-less connected to the economic needs of developing countries. When developing countries want to learn about creating an infrastructure platform for growth, they look less and less to U.S. universities for guidance on either ideas or practice.

As an interested outside observer, it is my impression that water research and education in the United States has (in the terminology of Geertz 1969) become “involuted”—devoting ever-greater attention to internal refinements and ever-less attention to systemic issues, and unaware and generally uninterested in challenges elsewhere and in progress being made by other countries. It is rare to find a book that discusses U.S. water policy [even fine ones, such as Robert Glennon (2009)’s recent Unquenchable] while making any reference to the experience of other countries. And not one of the 86 reports produced by the Water Science and Technology Board of the National Research Council since 2000 focuses on water management in a country other than the United States.

The contrast between the United States and countries that have made major advances in water management is unflattering. Consider Australia, for example. Dramatic changes in water resource management practice have been undertaken with eyes wide open for external information, and has involved an integration of practice and thinking and enlightened public debate. The contrast between literacy on water economy in Australia and the United States is revealed in a recent New York Times piece (Bradsher 2008) on water markets and the cessation of rice growing in Australia. The indignant reporter and most readers who commented from the United States deplore the fact that water has been transferred from “essential-for-people” rice to “frivolous” grapes. Most Australian readers, on the other hand, laud the markets for finally ending the insanity of growing water-hungry rice in a desert.

As a professional in the World Bank it was striking to see countries face nothing but frustration when dealing with the United States. When water officials from Brazil wanted to learn about U.S. experience with navigation in the context of large-scale regional water projects, the implicit and often explicit message from the State Department is “you can’t really want to visit the TVA or the USACE, they are anachronistic embarrassments; but we can show you community-based watershed management programs.” There is a striking shift in places where developing countries go to learn–away from the United States (and Europe) and to countries like Australia and Mexico and Chile and Brazil.

U.S. universities still dominate world rankings. They remain beacons that attract the best and brightest from the rest of the world. But the model of engagement is increasingly anachronistic in a multipolar, globalizing world. First, what is “on offer” in an introspective United States is primarily the experience of the United States itself (with all the shortcomings previously described). Second, where the experience of other countries is addressed, it is primarily through faculty who have engaged in the paternalistic aid business in the poorest countries. The reaction of a group of students from the MICs in one of the country’s most prestigious professional programs is typical: “it is fine to hear about Burkina Faso once or twice, but we have heard of every aspect of that country, and we have learned virtually nothing about the experiences of China or Brazil….”

Partnerships between U.S. universities and intellectuals and professionals of the developing world are largely unchanged from the time in which these countries had little intellectual capacity and the United States was the dominant global power. These now-anachronistic “partnerships” implicitly say to the developing world: “send us your best and brightest and we will train them, keep the best, and send the rest back with the ideas we have given them.” Countries like India (where I lived for three of the last six years) and Brazil (where I spent the other three years) are less and less interested in such relationships. They have considerable intellectual and financial resources (“Who would have imagined that the IMF would come to beg Brazil for a loan?” was a recent observation by President Lula). The governments are concerned about sustainability, but only in conjunction with economic growth. They see the creation of a platform of water infrastructure and sound institutions as fundamental to their water security. They want partnerships of reciprocity, not paternalist, one-way interactions. This new generation of partnerships must involve, inter alia:Now is the time to reformulate the engagement model so that (1) the U.S. experience is understood and presented in a historic context rather than through the parochial lens of contemporary U.S. views and values; (2) the experience of other countries is recognized and is a source of research and learning; and (3) it is recognized that countries with different historical, political, economic, and environmental conditions will come to different conclusions on what constitutes appropriate water development and management. Such an approach would bring great benefits to many of the countries of the developing world. And water researchers and practitioners in the United States might learn something, too!