Applying institutional grammar to analyze the institutional structure of water resources governance in interstate river basins

Due to increased climate uncertainty, political instability and economic turbulence, many interstate river basins are in the midst of transforming their water governance strategies to embrace the aforementioned challenges. A prerequisite of achieving such transformation is to understand various types of rules that build the water governance structure of the river basins. Therefore, we demonstrate an institutional analysis approach that combines the institutional grammar and the institutional analysis and development framework’s rule typology to identify the various type of formal rules regulating the water resources in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin (MDB). The institutional feature and key actors of the basin’s water governance structure under different water governance situations are also explored. The approach is built on an institutional content analysis tool named institutional grammar and the institutional analysis and development framework’s rule typology. Using the approach, we dissect the Murray-Darling Basin Agreement of Australian Government’s Water Act 2007 to generate data for institutional analysis and subsequently, identifying the number and types of rules that form MDB’s water governance structure. We identify that MDB’s water governance structure stresses on choice rules and information rules that regulate actors’ choice of actions and the flow of information. Nevertheless, there are rules that only present in certain water governance situations, which indicating its institutional features. For instance, the position rules that create the basin’s water resource administrative units are found only in the action situation of administration. The scope rules that delineate the physical outcome to be produced are found dominating the action situations of water resource appropriation. The co-thinking type of aggregation rules that control the requirement of stakeholder consultation are mostly found in the situation of basin planning. In conclusion, the proposed approach able to generate the quantitative and qualitative information that can be used to analyze the complex structure of water resource governance in a river basin. Therefore, the research contributes to the development of a systematic water institution analysis tool.