In the first half of 2020, GWP (Global Water Partnership) made an open call to finance research projects that had water management as their focus of study. From the SARAS Institute, an interdisciplinary team was formed that presented the project entitled: “Process of construction of the integrated management of water resources in Uruguay: status of situation and controversies”, which was selected for its development. The same was, despite the context of the pandemic, carried out between July to December of last year. The initiative was framed within one of the Institute’s strategic research-action lines. This is a project designed and coordinated with other initiatives currently underway: GovernAgua, an initiative funded by the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI) and which has GWP among its strategic partners. These projects, and others that you can consult on our website, are part of a fundamental line of research-action of SARAS linked to the governance of key components of natural capital in a multi-stakeholder and multi-level format.

IWRM (Integrated Management of Water Resources) is a management paradigm that proposes to integrate the actors involved in the administration and care of water in the territory. According to GWP, IWRM is “a process that promotes the coordinated development and management of water, territory and related resources, to maximize economic results and social well-being equitably without compromising the sustainability of vital ecosystems.”

The administration and care of water in Uruguay has a long and interesting history, where the idea of integrated management is present in a strong way in the social process that promotes and makes the approval of the so-called “water plebiscite” in 2004 effective. as well as the constitutional reform established through the approval of article 47, establishes water as a fundamental human right and promotes the integration of diverse actors for its management. From there, a process of institutional changes and legal regulations began, among them is the creation of multi-stakeholder spaces (for example, basin commissions), made up of representatives of different state agencies and civil society, whose role is to advise the different management bodies. At the national level, the advisory commission on sanitation and water is formed, at the regional or macro-basin level the regional councils of water resources are formed, and at the basin level, the basin commissions are established, which oversee integrating key actors (public and private) to the management in each territorial unit assimilated to the hydrographic basins.

In this context, the project financed by GWP addresses the study of the implementation of IWRM in Uruguay based on an approach that integrates the contributions of ecology, political science, and social psychology. For this, a qualitative investigation has been carried out on these processes, trying to identify the main divergences and controversies, those that have been overcome and those that persist. For this, the main changes between 2004 and 2020, the context, as well as the density of elements and interactions that make up this complex system were studied.

Controversies are discursive sets, communicative exercises that represent “hot spots” in the network of actors. This allows us to focus on what is becoming urgent, as well as on the manifestation of the network of actors that is in a degree of dispute about the truth and knowledge in a certain matter. Interesting elements were found, and progress was made in understanding a phenomenon that needs concrete research and related to the current and local characteristics of the problems related to the management of key components of natural capital such as water, soils, and biodiversity, among others.
The project is currently completing its final report, from which some outstanding results emerge. The persistence of attributes of fragmented and vertical management models, which does not coincide with the idea of integrated management. The new IWRM spaces, although consultative in nature, are places of experimentation and the creation of new governance logics. At the same time, it was found that decentralization processes are very weak now, with significant difficulties in deconcentrating the power of central agencies and the first level of government. These in turn, with great dependence on electoral cycles and the dynamics of political parties that directly condition the memory and learning capacities of the system. Also, the production and development models, or in more general terms the economic paradigms, are a fundamental in-depth debate and integrate key participants in the network of actors related to water, among other important findings.

This research seeks to generate a systemic vision of the challenge of governance of ecosystems and the goods and services they support. It is key to pay attention to building adaptive and integrated governance, discover emerging issues as you move along that path, and accept active work in complex uncertainty scenarios.

The team that carried out the project is made up of Dr. Cristina Zurbriggen (Department of Political Science, Faculty of Social Sciences, Udelar / SARAS Institute), Dr. Néstor Mazzeo (Eastern Regional University Center CURE – Udelar / SARAS Institute), and Mag. Daniel Pérez in Social Psychology (SARAS Institute)

To know more about the project click here