What can the United Nations do to preserve and promote freshwater resources? (Opinion).

Having studied in a comparative and historic manner the water policies of States members of the European Union, I'm not fully qualified to give any clear-cut answer to such a vast question. However, I think that the European experience has been overlooked in the debate on water and globalization. To summarize, water resources issues seem to be easier tackled in the old continent than, for instance, in western United States because we have never let water become a commodity to own, be it by private owners or Governments. Allocation of water resources is based on usage principles, increasingly done by communities under the guardianship of Governments. This increases flexibility in allocation rules and helps abandon former policies based on supply side and large hydraulic projects. But in southern Europe as in many developing countries, the biggest threat on freshwater is uncontrolled irrigation and intensive agriculture. Therefore, the United Nations should promote both a generalization of the concept of reason able and equitable use of water in a subsidiary manner and a world policy to reorganize food exchanges, rather than water transfers, in favour of deprived areas and poor populations.

In the public debate on water and globalization, there tends to be a confusion between water as a resource and water services. While the latter can eventually be privatized like in the United Kingdom, legal systems worldwide, except maybe in Chile, are at odds with the idea that water could be private goods. In Europe in particular, the general adoption of integrated water management corresponds to questioning the private status of all bodies of water, including groundwater in Latin American countries. A new "environmental" paradigm replaces the confrontation between public and private, which structured water management in the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries (particularly in positive law and the civil code): it confronts water as a public domain (owned by the State), to water as a common property (in French, patrimoine commun) to be shared by its users. Both river basin approaches and the promotion of public participation supplement traditional allocation by government regulations with communit y-based approaches and economic incentives. Common property approaches are not very well known to lawyers and economists because they were associated with undemocratic and inequitable water-resources sharing prior to the development of modern nation-States and democracy, and have been replaced by liberal approaches.

In the twentieth century, an increasing number of water uses provoked competition over water and gave the opportunity for the welfare State to develop unprecedented hydraulic projects, structural measures and supply-sided policies. It was particularly the case with dictatorships in Mediterranean countries. More recently, these policies have been criticized for their inefficiency, particularly in the United States, under the comeback of liberalism on top of environmental critique. Symmetrically, water services provision that had been initiated by private entrepreneurs was generalized through direct municipal involvement, supported by government subsidies. However, the crisis met by public procurement in the long-term maintenance and renewal of infrastructure allowed for a comeback of privatization. In Europe, apart from the extreme case of Great Britain, infrastructure has remained the ownership of local or supra-local authorities, which have invented a wide range of public-private partnerships to facilitate l ong-term reproduction of the enormous capital of water services. Mixed economy for services and common property for resources characterize the pragmatic European evolution in the last thirty years.

In Europe, it is largely the issue of water quality that led to new institutions for water resources management. Because it remains very difficult to model riverine ecosystems or aquifers to determine the responsibilities of each of the actors in the degraded State, it became crucial to bring them together to come to terms with better allocation and pollution control efforts. One crucial issue is to reintroduce community and qualitative representation of users (usage rules), but with possibilities for democratic (universal or one-man, one-vote) control. Besides, most European countries underwent a decentralization process in the 1970s, which later led to what is termed governance. Concerning water, it was not so difficult: both types of legal systems--those proceeding from Roman law and those more from Germanic customs--had kept a large part of flowing bodies of water in a category of common property not subject to any appropriation.

Sometimes very ancient water boards, like the Dutch Waterschappen or the irrigators' communities of the Iberian Peninsula, were rediscovered and became models of subsidiary and decentralized modern water administration. Thus, there is both complementarity and competition between increased centralization and community planning at the catchment level. This is particularly the case in Spain, which was the first country in Europe to generalize river basin administrations, but where the power of water engineers is now checked by the regional governments and possibly by aquifer-user communities. Fascinating is the case of France, where the famous Agences de l'eau were initially developed to do integrated water planning but ended up being the locus of a permanent mediation between categories of water users, economic incentives and contractorization. Even in the historically centralized United Kingdom, after the creation of the Regional Water Authorities in 1973 and subsequently of the national rivers authority 15 ye ars later, participatory planning at the catchment level has been maintained. In most other countries, traditional administrations at the regional level (or State level in federal governments) remain empowered by water policy. But they have learned to cooperate in project management when a common body of water is the issue.

Now, it is quite easy for the European Union to obtain acceptance for a water policy based on hydrographic districts, even for international rivers. Thus, Europe becomes a clear case of implementation of the 1997 UN Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Use of International Watercourses.

At this point, some people may argue that Europe is an exception because of its temperate climate. Yet, population density in some regions is such that they hit the scarcity index, Of course, this type of index is insufficient because it is typically trapped into the supply-sided policy for failing to analyze water demand and the possibilities to reuse water or shift crop patterns. It is much cheaper to import food than water to grow the food if the country is arid. However, the problem is not water--money and inequalities in world population are. Many large water projects have three flaws: they are, economically speaking, very inefficient; they have direct ecological impacts as well as indirect ones because they bring water to intensive and polluting agriculture; and this agriculture, which is for cash crop exportation, is usually grown in large farms and do not benefit poor peasants and the landless. Thus, subsidiary water management under democratic control, as well as the termination of the 1997 Conventio n, should be encouraged by the United Nations to make water a tool of peace, not of war.

Bernard Barraque, a civil engineer and city planner, is Research Director in an interdisciplinary laboratory Technology, Territories and Societies (LATTS), France. He has been co-opted as President of the French National Commission of the UNESCO International Hydrological Programme.