Boundary Judgments in Water Governance: Diagnosing Internal and External Factors that Matter in a Complex World

Governance failures are widely recognized as a key reason why, despite sustained attention over previous decades, many longstanding water problems continue to go unsolved around the world. A major challenge in analyzing and addressing water governance problems is making “boundary judgments” in the face of complexity. Improving water governance requires accounting for a diverse and sometimes unclear set of internal and external factors that cause water problems. For example, drivers, actors, and institutions implicated may be both “internal” or “external” to a water governance system, depending on how problem boundaries are delineated. This problem confronts researchers and practitioners alike, and although recognition is growing, it remains extremely challenging to practically address. Diagnostic approaches are needed to deal with the complexity of contemporary water governance problems. In this paper, we propose a practical diagnostic approach to support structured, context-specific, critical diagnostic inquiry. We build on complementary initiatives emerging in other fields, paying particular attention to external factors that are often neglected, while being sensitive to the capacity constraints of policymakers and practitioners. The approach is flexible in allowing for either cursory or in-depth analysis as appropriate in a given situation. This allows for the identification of tangible improvements and “small wins” to improve water governance systems within a bigger-picture perspective of the diverse causes of water governance problems. Innovatively, we take a user-oriented perspective to support researchers and policymakers in practice, and break new ground in providing tractable tools for dealing with complexity in water governance.