Rule-Based Indicators for Assessing Water Governance Modes in Transboundary River Basins

In many transboundary river basins, shared water resources are formally regulated through water-related agreements, laws, and regulations. These institutional documents contain diverse types of water governance rules that shape strategies and opportunities for cooperation among stakeholders. Such rules may, for example, constrain water withdrawal limits, facilitate information sharing, or coordinate collective decision-making over the development and management of shared water resources. Understanding the content of these rules and their diverse functions is therefore essential for informed policy and institutional designs in transboundary water governance.

In this study, we propose a set of rule-based indicators for assessing water governance regimes, grounded in the rule concepts of the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework. By combining these indicators with the content analysis tool of the Institutional Grammar, which enables the systematic dissection of water agreements and legislation across different formats, the proposed approach is able to use institutional rules as core analytical elements for water governance analysis. This allows for the evaluation of both the level of cooperation and the distribution of water management authority within water governance systems, and ultimately, identify the water governance modes (i.e., polycentric, centralized, or decentralized) of the basins.

We demonstrate the application of this integrated approach through a comparative analysis of four interstate river basins: the Colorado River Basin and the Delaware River Basin in the United States, the Murray–Darling Basin in Australia, and the Yellow River Basin in China. The main rivers of these subnational transboundary river basins span multiple states or provinces and are governed by extensive rule systems embedded in water agreements and legislation. The results indicate that the governance regimes of the Delaware River Basin and the Murray–Darling Basin are predominantly polycentric, the Upper Colorado River Basin exhibits a hybrid regime combining centralized and polycentric characteristics, while the Yellow River Basin is characterized by a strongly centralized governance regime.