Groundwater governance discourse wo

Groundwater governance discourse worldwide is a product of the growing threat of water scarcity, which has put into bold relief the critical transition from resource development mode to resource management mode. Groundwater has proved to be particularly difficult to manage relative to other natural resources. Although the western USA, Spain, Mexico, and other countries offer lessons about how to craft groundwater governance regimes, nowhere are the outcomes fully satisfactory. So groundwater governance around the world is still a work in progress.


The Global Water Partnership (GWP) defines water governance in very broad terms as ‘the range of political, social, economic, and administrative systems that are in place to develop and manage water resources, and the delivery of water services, at different levels of society’ (Rogers and Hall, 2003). This view explicitly recognises that the water sector is part of broader social, political, and economic development and is thus also affected by decision-making outside the water sector6. Worldwide, governments have used a variety of instruments to govern agricultural groundwater use. Here we briefly review the experiences with major groundwater governance instruments, each of which seeks to directly influence the actions and behaviour of users.