A series of threats face campesino communities' water management practices in the Callejón de Huaylas (upper region of the Santa Watershed). Competition for water resources is escalating due to increasing demand, decreasing supply, and a rise in contamination levels, leaving campesino communities in a precarious state as a result of their marginalized position in Peruvian society. Competition for water resources occurs between upstream and downstream users and amongst sectors including mining, agriculture, hydropower, and domestic water users. The national government recently passed an integrated water resource management system to improve water governance. However, bureaucratic tendencies make it unlikely that campesinos will receive an adequate share of resources. Campesino communities in the Callejón need to adopt new strategies to improve their position vis á-vis other sectors and resist capture of resources. Campesinos are important to the discussion of water resource management because they have long established systems of self-regulated management and need to be included in the new system of watershed governance. This research first examines local water management strategies and integrated water management through four characteristics: 1) how is water framed, 2) is decision-making participatory, 3) is water management appropriate to the local and regional level, and 4) is it possible to monitor activity and impose consequences for unauthorized water usage. Interviews with campesino community members and leaders, local officials, regional representatives, and non-governmental organizations found opportunities to collaborate between groups and transfer some management responsibilities to a more regional watershed scale. Second, this research examines the opportunities and barriers to scaling up traditional management practices to meet regional needs while ensuring local water availability. Scaling decision-making is imperative for successful integrated water management and will allow campesino communities to continue to manage their water to meet local needs. Shifting the decision-making scale may facilitate more effective watershed governance with campesino community participation.

This research builds further on the existing conceptual framework of the relationship between decentralization and service delivery and provides a cross-country empirical examination of the core dimensions of decentralization reform on access to two key services: health care and improved drinking water sources. The regression results provide evidence supporting positive and significant effects of fiscal, administrative, and political decentralization, individually, on the variables used to measure access to health care, and improved water provision; although the size and robustness of such effects varies for each dimension of decentralization in relation to each service examined. The results obtained in this study suggest that there is an additional (or "extra") positive effect coming from the interaction of two decentralization dimensions on access to health care and water services (that is, a mutually-reinforcing effect additional to the individual effect of each dimension of decentralization). The results obtained also support the expectation that developing countries could benefit significantly more from decentralization reforms compared to developed countries. These findings underscore the importance of considering all dimensions of the decentralization process when investigating the effects of this reform on any economic, institutional, or social variable. The policy implications are highly relevant, particularly for developing countries: decentralization implemented only through one dimension may render fewer positive fruits in terms of access to services than a multi-dimensional approach. Moreover, learning more about the most beneficial mutually-reinforcing effects across dimensions of decentralization may also help strategically in how the overall decentralization reform is designed.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Central Florida, 2009. / Adviser: Arlen Chase. Includes bibliographical references (p. 60-68).

Thesis (M.Sc.(Epidemiology))--University of Pretoria, 2003. / Also available online.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of North Carolina at Wilmington, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves : 48-51).

 The past three decades have witnessed the fundamental achievements of China’s marketization. Through this process, state-owned enterprises have been restructured, monopoly is giving way to competition and private sectors are increasingly participating in public service provision. The concept of concession was first introduced in public utilities through the Circular on Questions Concerning the Ratification of Pilot Foreign Invested Concession Projects (1995), after which there were many experimental projects with BOTs and TOTs. In 2002, with the issuance of Opinions on Accelerating the Marketization of Urban Utilities, the concession system was officially introduced in public utility regulation. In the same year, the water pipelines were opened to foreign investment; concessions have since been extended into integrated municipal water groups. Concessions have become the major approach of public utility provision. In recent years, the accountability in concessions has raised wide concern. Problems exposed include fixed rate-of-return, state-owned assets losses, undue concession transfer, illegal concession award, unreasonable water tariff increase, and problematic service provision by private concessionaires. Commentators have claimed that an accountability gap exists in concessions. Taking water sector concessions as the subject of discussion, the author distinguishes three types of accountability: traditional bureaucratic accountability, legal accountability and public accountability. Through systematical examination of the problems, this dissertation attempts to achieve a better understanding of concession and its application in public utilities, and finds that the alleged accountability gap is attributed to traditional bureaucratic accountability and concession system per se. Four aspects of regulation in water concessions are considered: concessionaire selection; water pricing regulation; regulation by contract; and the regulatory framework. The findings suggest that under concessions, traditional bureaucratic accountability is neither adequate nor appropriate to hold the government accountable. More formal legal rules on transparency, due process and public participation should be explored. / published_or_final_version / Law / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Architecture / Master / Master of Landscape Architecture

A prototype raster geographic information system (GIS) for agricultural water quality analysis was developed considering the farm as an aggregation of spatial units with homogeneous physical and management characteristics. A crop model that simulates the farm and environment response to different management scenarios was integrated with the GIS. The integrated GIS-model is then run on each homogeneous area. The results of crop yield and chemical leaching are geographically referenced for further display and analysis, and to serve as an input to the decision model. A decision model based on maximization of expected utility (MEU) was also integrated to help assess and evaluate the impacts of fertilizer application on the faun system and the environment. By using utilities for both crop yield and chemical leaching the model circumvents the issue of assigning a monetary value to the environment. Accommodating both the farmers' goals, in terms of higher yield and the well being of the environment, in terms of lower chemical leaching, the model computes the expected utility of each management scenario. The management practice with the maximum expected utility is then recommended. The integrated model was tested with an example of lettuce production in Arizona. Results were compared to published field reports, the model recommendation matched well with the field results. The prototype model was simple to use, and very well integrated, which makes it an alternative to the more complex and expensive coupling of commercial GIS and simulation models.

A new Farm Package (FMP) was developed for using the U.S. Geological Survey's groundwater modeling program, MODFLOW-2000 (MF2K), to estimate irrigation water allocations to irrigation settings. The FMP dynamically integrates irrigation water demand, surface-water & groundwater supply, and return flow from excess irrigation. Routed surface-water delivery is optional, and can be simulated by coupling FMP with the Streamflow Routing Package (SFR1). MF2K with FMP and SFR1 allows estimating the allocation of surface-water and groundwater to farms for the following applications: (1) historic and future simulations, (2) water rights issues and operational decisions, (3) non-drought and drought situations. Irrigation demand, supply, and return flow are partly subject to head-dependent sinks and sources such as transpiration uptake from groundwater (formulated by FMP) and leakage between the conveyance system and the aquifer (formulated by SFR1). A steady state transpiration uptake, varying with changing water level, is stepwise linearly approximated by FMP. This was validated by ensembles of variably saturated soil column models using HYDRUS2D for different soil types, values of potential transpiration, and root zone depths. A restriction of transpiration uptake is proportional to a reduction of the active root zone. It is approximated in FMP by an analytical solution, which determines inactive ranges of the root zone with pressure heads typical for conditions of anoxia or wilting. At steady state, the transpiration uptake equaled the flux across the water table (plus the irrigation flux, if applied). Therefore, changes in soil water storage are assumed negligible. Based on this assumption, the irrigation flux required is determined in FMP by subtracting transpiratory components from natural sources (groundwater, precipitation) from a maximum transpiration uptake. This transpiratory irrigation requirement is calculated for each finite difference cell, and increased sufficiently to compensate for evaporative losses and for inefficient use. Accumulating the resulting cell delivery requirement over all cells in a farm yields the total farm delivery requirement, which is to be satisfied with surface- or groundwater. Five economic and non-economic drought response policies can be applied, if the potential supply of surface- and groundwater is insufficient to meet the crop demand. The code was verified by a hypothetical example problem run in 55 scenarios (5 drought policy scenarios x 11 parameter-group scenarios). Among all sources and sinks in a cumulative volumetric budget, 'farm well discharge,' and particularly 'farm net recharge,' were most sensitive to changes in drought policies or changes of parameters.

No description available.