Water governance and community involvement are key factors to ensure the success of an integrated water resource management across the country, an expert says.
Michael Hantke-Domas, the honorary associate at UNESCO's Center for Water Law, Policy and Science at the University of Dundee in Scotland, said Thursday that integrated water resource management was a set of ideas that promoted a holistic approach to manage water resources.
"It means that when we talk about water, we're not only talking about water, but forestry, tourism, health and more," he said on the sidelines of a water governance workshop in Bandung, West Java, where he was a speaker.
Water governance is another mechanism to assure the process of integrated water resource management is implemented, he added.
"So, when integrated water resource management invites everyone to discuss, water governance protects the whole process in producing more transparency, accountability and more participation and access to justice," he said.
"Water governance is essentially a tool to promote the government as open."
Community involvement, Hantke-Domas said, was another key factor to ensure the success of integrated water management.
The involvement, he added, could be through the formation of focus groups of water users, such as marginalized people, to learn about what they need about water.
"Water is essential for life, it means everyone needs to be together to think about the future of the community."
Indonesia, he said, already had a set of institutions, which were ready to plunge into integrated water resource management and governance.
The government has passed the 2004 Water Resource Law and set up the National Water Resource Council in 2008, both at the national and provincial levels. Only 15 provinces have set up the council so far.
"Water governance is not only law-driven, but also community-driven and civil society-driven. It needs the political and society's will," Hantke-Domas said.
"The water council, for instance, needs to start thinking about water policies for the next five, 10 and 20 years. What's going to happen *by that time*."
People, he said, should also start taking into account other water-related issues such as disasters linked to climate change, including those cited in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC)'s report, the authoritative scientific account of the scale of global warming.
"Climate change *impacts* will hit us either as floods or drought. Climate change is a problem of water. Here, Indonesia is not suffering a water shortage water *but* people take it for granted and most water is polluted," Hantke-Domas said.
Rita Mustikasari, an activist from Telapak environment organization, said it would take a long time before water governance and integrated water resource management could work side by side in the country.
