Sustainability performance of water governance systems: a systematic review

The global water crisis, it has been argued by the United Nations (2006), is largely a crisis of governance. Put positively, it is the way water resources and ecosystems are governed – by state and non-state actors – that makes a difference for the sustainable use of water and the wellbeing of water ecosystems. With the recognition of social and ecological complexities and multifunctional characteristics of water and societal interdependencies, new and diverse governance forms started to evolve (Pahl-Wostl, 2019; Newig and Challies, 2014; Tropp, 2007). Although the body of literature on different water governance regimes and their performance in delivering water-related sustainability has been growing since the 1990s, there is no comprehensive synthesis which would allow to draw robust conclusions on what works and in which context. Such a synthesis would be critical for providing a sense of direction for the improvement of existing water governance institutions towards sustainability. Taking a global comparative perspective, our study aims to provide a broad synthesis by exploring the “success” and “failure” of water governance systems in terms of water-related sustainability. Our systematic review includes all published studies listed in Scopus that provide empirical data on water governance systems and their performance on water-related sustainability. Our search string yielded close to 10,000 publications up until the year 2020, around 700 of which were retained for final comparative analysis, covering governance structures and processes from the very local to the global. Informed by core frameworks on water governance, we present rich and nuanced findings on both the body of literature as a field of research, and on the link between elements (or modes) of governance and their performance in terms of environmental sustainability. For example, we graphically depict co-authorship and citation patterns and the geographical distribution of studies and authors. Our main results relate to patterns across modes of governance and sustainable outcomes. In particular, we investigate the performance of decentralized, centralized, polycentric or fragmented governance; of hydrological versus jurisdictional governance scales; of participatory and collaborative versus state-based governance and more generally of the role of particular private and civic actor groups in governance; of the role of adaptation, experimentation and learning; of sectorially integrated governance (as embodied in the principles of Integrated Water Resources Management and nexus thinking); and of the overall capacity of governance systems. All in all, the findings of our systematic review allow us to identify the water-related sustainability performance of existing water governance systems, including which (or combination of which) building blocks they consist of lead to a particular water-related sustainability outcome. Through this, we aim to contribute to a better understanding of how the design of a certain water governance system with multi-dimensional interactions and embedded complexities impacts its performance in delivering water-related sustainability.