Institutional grammar as a text-based method for water governance analysis

Water governance systems in many river basins require improvement to adapt to changes in environmental and socioeconomic landscapes. However, water governance reformation is a complex and challenging process. In particular, policymakers and water managers need a comprehensive understanding of the fundamental components that form the current water governance systems. Only then can new rules be introduced to alter the governance characteristics of these systems. This process is especially challenging in the case of interstate rivers that flow across multiple states, where governance systems are characterized by complex interstate water agreements and/or laws that cover various cross-state water management affairs and regulate stakeholders from different states. We use the institutional grammar (IG) to parse water agreements and laws, generating text-based data for assessing the institutional characteristics of interstate water governance systems. The IG decomposes written statements in the documents into different syntactic components. Based on these components, the functions of the statements can be identified and categorized into one of seven types of institutional rules, as defined by the rule concepts of the institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework. By analyzing these findings with indicators of governance characteristics, we are able to assess the allocation of water governance responsibilities and the degree of coordination within a water governance system to identify its institutional characteristics. We applied this method to analyze the water-related laws that form the governance systems of the Yellow River Basin (YRB) in China. The findings reveal that the YRB’s water governance system has undergone five major stages of structural evolution since 1987. During this process, the basin’s focus in water governance has shifted from flow regulation to water consumption governance, as well as expanding its governance scope to include interstate water administration and drought management. Currently, the YRB’s water governance systems are dominated by centralized governance structures characterized by the centralization of water governance responsibilities and a high degree of stakeholder coordination. The method demonstrates that text-based data generated through parsing water agreements and laws can systematically analyze the complex institutional characteristics of water governance systems. This research contributes to the advancement of text-based method for water governance analysis.