Focus on Interactions Between Science and Policy in Groundwater Systems

Concerns over groundwater depletion and ecosystem degradation have led to the incorporation of the concept of groundwater sustainability as a groundwater policy instrument in several water codes and management directives worldwide. Because sustainable groundwater management is embedded within integrated, co-evolving hydrological, ecological, and socioeconomic systems, implementing such policies remains a challenge for water managers and the scientific community. The problem is further exacerbated when participatory processes are lacking, resulting in a communication gap among water authorities, scientists, and the broader community. This paper provides a systematic review of the concept of groundwater sustainability, and situates this concept within the calls from the hydrologic literature for more participatory and integrated approaches to water security. We discuss the definition of groundwater sustainability from both a policy and scientific perspective, tracing the evolution of this concept from safe yield, to sustainable groundwater management. We focus on the diversity of societal values related to groundwater sustainability, and the typology of the aquifer performance and governance factors. In addition, we systematically review the main components of an effective scientific evaluation of groundwater sustainability policy, which are multi-process modeling, uncertainty analysis, and participation. We conclude that effective groundwater sustainability policy implementation requires an iterative scientific evaluation that (i) engages stakeholders in a participatory process through collaborative modeling and social learning; (ii) provides improved understanding of the coevolving scenarios between surface water-groundwater systems, ecosystems, and human activities; and (iii) acknowledges and addresses uncertainty in our scientific knowledge and the diversity of societal preferences using multi-model uncertainty analysis and adaptive management. Although the development of such a transdisciplinary research approach, which connects policy, science, and practice for groundwater sustainability evaluation, is still in its infancy worldwide, we find that research towards groundwater sustainability is growing at a much faster rate than groundwater research as a whole.

South Asia's groundwater economy stands at the threshold of a revolution in adoption of solar irrigation pumps (SIPs). This has potential to unlock the region's perverse energy-groundwater nexus. In much of South Asia, the price of energy used in irrigation, the only surrogate for water price, fails to signal the abundance or scarcity of groundwater, resulting in myriad distortions. We analyse these in South Asia's eight distinct energy-groundwater interaction settings. We then explore SIP promotion policies to ease pressure on scarce groundwater in South Asia's 'groundwater depletion zone' and accelerate groundwater irrigation for poverty reduction in its 'groundwater abundance zone'.

There is growing concern globally about the occurrence of anthropogenic organic contaminants in the environment, including pharmaceuticals and personal care products. This concern extends to groundwater, which is a critical water resource in Europe, and its protection is a priority to the European Commission, the European Union (EU) Member States and national agencies across Europe. Maintaining good groundwater status supports improved public health, economic growth and sustains groundwater dependant ecosystems. A range of measures have been introduced for regulating several substances that have impacted groundwater (e.g. nitrate and pesticides). However, these measures only cover a small fraction of anthropogenic substances that could pollute groundwater. Monitoring for these unregulated substances is currently very limited or not carried out at all. Therefore, a coordinated European-wide approach is needed to identify, monitor and characterise priority substances or groups of substances that have the potential to pollute groundwater. This evidence base is critical for policy development and controls on these currently unregulated substances. The European Commission highlighted this as a need during the review of the EU Groundwater Directive Annexes in 2014, when the requirement to develop a Groundwater Watch List (GWWL) was established. This paper describes the approach that has been developed through a voluntary initiative as part of the EU CIS Working Group Groundwater to establish the voluntary EU GWWL. The process for developing the GWWL is one that has brought together researchers, regulators and industry, and is described here for the first time. A summary of the key principles behind the methodology is presented as well as results from pilot studies using per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances and pharmaceuticals. These explore and support the viability of the GWWL process, an important step towards its adoption and its future use for groundwater protection across Europe.

California water law has traditionally treated groundwater and surface water as separate resources. The 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) broke with this tradition by requiring groundwater managers to avoid significant and unreasonable adverse impacts to beneficial uses of surface water. This paper considers the trajectory of this partial integration of science, law, and resource management policy. Drawing on legal analysis and participatory workshops with subject area experts, we describe the challenges of reconciling the separate legal systems that grew out of an artificial legal distinction between different aspects of the same resource. Our analysis offers two main contributions. First, it demonstrates that laws that subdivide an interconnected resource can have legacy effects that linger long after lawmakers begin dismantling the artificial divides. Using SGMA as a case study, the article illustrates the complexities of reconciling law with science, showing that reconciliation is a process that does not end with updating statutes, or with any other single intervention. Second, we introduce a framework for evaluating the elements of an effort to reconcile law with scientific understanding, whether that reform effort involves groundwater or some other resource. Applying that framework helps reveal where lingering legacy effects still need to be addressed. More generally, it reveals the need for literature addressing science-policy interactions to devote more attention to the multifaceted nature of law and policy reform. Much of that literature describes policy-making in broad and undifferentiated terms, often referring simply to 'the science-policy interface.' But as the SGMA case study illustrates, the complex and multi-layered nature of policy-making means that a successful reform effort may need to address many science-policy interfaces.

This study examines the performance of the policy of community management for rural groundwater supply in Africa. Across the continent, policies that promote community management have dominated the rural water supply sector for decades. As a result, hundreds of thousands of village-level committees have been formed to manage community boreholes equipped with handpumps. With a significant proportion of these handpumps non-functional at any one time, increasing effort is targeted toward understanding the interacting social and physical determinants of this 'hidden crisis'. We conducted a survey of community management arrangements across six hundred sites in rural Ethiopia, Malawi, and Uganda, examining the extent to which management capacity is related to borehole functionality whilst accounting for a range of contextual variables. The capacity of water management arrangements (WMAs) was assessed according to four dimensions: finance system; affordable maintenance and repair; decision making, rules, and leadership; and external support. The survey reveals that 73.3% of WMAs have medium or high capacity. However, we found no strong relationship between the capacity of the WMA and the functionality of the borehole. Of the four management dimensions, affordable maintenance and repair was the best predictor of borehole functionality. However, the capacity of this dimension was seen to be the lowest overall, with 61.9% of sites weak or non-existent. Our results provide very limited support for the policy of community management, and we suggest that evidence alone has not accounted for its persistence over decades. After a short historical analysis, we conclude that explanation for the endurance of this model can be found in the nexus between evidence, ideology, and policy. We argue that it is this same nexus that will likely ensure the popularity of community management for some time to come, despite new ideas and evidence to the contrary.

The rapid development of groundwater systems as part of urban water supplies around the globe is raising critical questions regarding the sustainable management of this essential resource. Yet, in many major cities, the absence of an effective policy regime means that the practice of groundwater exploitation is driven by the actions of domestic households and drilling contractors. Understanding what shapes the decisions and practices of these actors, their understandings of the groundwater resource and the extent to which scientific knowledge shapes this understanding, is an area of critical importance that is currently under-researched. Using a mixed-methods methodology, the paper explores domestic practices of groundwater abstraction in Lagos, Nigeria. It finds that there is a disjuncture between the households who are actively shaping exploitation of the groundwater resource on a day-to-day basis and science and state actors. This disjuncture results in household decisions that are influenced by commonly held, but potentially outdated, perceptions of the groundwater resource rather than scientific evidence or policy instruments. The unseen nature of groundwater resources effectively renders the scale of changing groundwater conditions invisible to households and the state, adding to the challenge of influencing practice. Addressing this disjuncture requires not just more scientific knowledge, but also the active construction of interfaces with, and between, non-state actors through which knowledge can be confronted, discussed and shared.