Creating collaborative hubs within, and among, the United nations.

• Author: Wolfe, Sarah
• Position: Networks - Water management

Traditional resource management strategies for poverty alleviation are often not effective for complex systems problems. In the twentieth century, the United States spent over $400 billion on massive water-engineering projects; internationally, this has been much greater. This construction was costly in many ways: destruction of ecosystems through pollution; salination of croplands; species' extinction; dislocation of human populations and devastation of cultural sites (Gleick 2000). The social, economic and environmental costs indicate that many of our conventional technical solutions do not work well for today's complex resource problems.

The organizations that implement technical water management strategies, for example conventional irrigation, water allocation and pricing strategies, are increasingly confronted with complex systems. These problems are characterized by high uncertainty and unexpected outcomes following policy intervention (Cillier 1998). To address these challenges, resource managers should practise adaptive management a flexible, systematic process that acknowledges uncertainty and encourages learning from outcomes. But such an adaptive response may be incompatible with the organizations' existing policies, programmes and project responses. There is an inherent tension between complex water management challenges that require adaptive, flexible responses and flexible organizations. One way to remedy this would be the removal or mitigation of barriers within United Nations organizations.

The United Nations is operating in "increasingly complex environments, as well as under conditions of rapid change, fewer resources and greater uncertainty" (Mitchell 1997); the characteristics of complex systems complicate decision-making in water management. Complex systems contain a high number of scaled entities, are self-organizing, constantly evolving and unpredictable. As part of this system, hydrological crises may exhibit emergent phenomena, where the whole (outcome) is greater than the sum of its parts (strategies)--for example in Central Asia, where river water extraction in the Aral Sea region resulted in a radically new and largely unexpected hydrological system. Positive feedbacks also play a role in complex systems: in India, where agricultural groundwater pumping and declining water tables lead to even more pumping, the feedback loop intensifies existing scarcity (Burke and Moench 2000), In complex systems, small variations can have very large systemic outcomes at an unknown time.

While the physical and social system can self-adjust (adapt) to a new equilibrium, the catalyst may be unknown and unexpected in existing environmental conditions. The complex system characteristics of water problems make effective responses and policy, programme and projects implemented by international organizations immensely difficult. The existing organizational structures, and their subsequent strategies, will be continuously challenged to respond to global freshwater problems.

A frequent approach to freshwater issues has been "technical cooperation" at regional and national levels. In 1999, international organizations spent $14.3...