Rebalancing the System: Acquiring Water and Trade

Internationally, water governance has covered three paradigms: state management, collective management, and more recently, water markets. Effectively regulated and mature water markets can have dual benefits of increasing water use efficiency and providing incentives for water conservation. When legislation allows for it, water markets also offer a unique mechanism to help rebalance fully allocated river basins by enabling water to be purchased for the environment. This chapter discusses how water markets can be used to return water to the environment and influence environmental watering objectives. To explore the progression and implementation of market-based reallocation, we draw on three case studies: Australias MurrayDarling Basin, the Mexican reaches of the Colorado River and the western US. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the institutional, economic and social challenges of market-based reallocation strategies. Overall, we show that environmental water markets, though challenging in design and implementation, have significant social and environmental value as a reallocation mechanism.