Colorado River: Demonstration of the importance of institutional design

Abstract

nstitutional design is a subject that receives insufficient attention in discussions about water management. There is a lot of interest in the aims of policies but relatively little in how they should be delivered. What is a well-designed river management system? That is a complex question but we can be confident that it must be include structures and processes that can effectively take account of the particular hydrological characteristics of the river basin to be managed. In the case of a river basin a common requirement is for an institutional framework that can respond to climatic variability without experiencing a political crisis. The Colorado Basin provides an excellent case study that illustrates the benefits of good institutional design. For water management purposes the Colorado is divided into the upper and lower basins. The upper basin has a system that can handle climate variation without crisis. The management system in the lower basin, by contrast, cannot. Within the same basin there are two contrasting systems. Show more