january/february 2009

EDITORIAL

• Editor's Column By Rod Macdonell
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• Pakistan struggles to restore democracy and end terrorism
• Italy’s fiscal devolution moves it towards federalism
• U.S. trade and commerce power shapes American federalism
• Indian states agree to create a value added tax

Special Section:
water and intergovernmental relations

• Ethiopia’s famines to decline with enhanced water management
• Forcefully flows the Nile: downstream
• Spain faces growing desertification
• Thirsty Australia: dealing with drought that crosses state lines
• Wildlife trumps money interests under U.S. federal water laws
• Waterway wrangles beset India’s federalism

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• Premier Peter Müller explains Saarland’s innovations
  as a German state

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introduction to special section

Managing water resources in five federations

“There is enough water for everyone. The problem we face today is largely one of governance: equitably sharing this water while ensuring the sustainability of Natural ecosystems.”

These upbeat words come from the United Nations’ 2006 World Water Development Report.

But elsewhere in the UN’s statistics, we are told that 1.1 billion people lack access to clean drinking water. Other UN water deprivation statistics are equally disturbing.

So, the world is facing a water crisis, but a crisis that can be attenuated by better sharing and managing this vital resource.

This issue of Federations magazine focuses on how five federations manage their water resources, how the intergovernmental machinery operates in Australia, Ethiopia, India, Spain and the United States to ensure that the central governments and the subnational units exercise their authority in ways that protect the interests of the country as a whole and those of the constituent units.

A common thread in these articles is that parts of all five countries currently face periodic water shortages or expect to soon be contending with alarmingly insufficient supply.

In Australia, where the constitution assigns authority over various aspects of water to the two orders of government, we learn that the federal government and the states recently came to a landmark agreement that enables the central authority to manage the water resources in an area the size of France and Germany, and potentially rescue the country’s food basket, known as the Murray-Darling Basin.

Ethiopia, a young federation, is hit with cyclical droughts and famines because it cannot capture and store its rainwater. The legal framework and the infrastructure is coming into place however for the central government and the states to better share responsibility over its waterways, and to extract greater benefit from the Blue Nile, before its waters flow to Egypt.

In India, where Gandhi skimped on water while bathing in the Sabarmati River almost 90 years ago, 15 of India’s 28 states have had internal water disputes or are squabbling over water projects. One main reason for the disputes is the doctrine that states “what falls on our roof is ours to use, without regard to any potential harm to downstream parties.”

Spain, we are told, is facing increasing water scarcity due to climate change and irresponsible use of the resource. In an example of classic subsidiarity, Spanish style, authority over its water has shifted from the centre to the autonomous communities and even to municipal authorities.

The United States follows an opposing path. There, when there is a federal-state conflict over the management of water resources, the federal law prevails. This is because the so-called Supremacy Clause of the Constitution which makes federal law supreme and trumps any notion of state primacy.

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