River basin governance enabling pathways for sustainable management: A comparative study between Australia, Brazil, China and France

Successful river basin governance is challenged by actor engagement in the various stages of planning and management. A governance approach for determining priorities for actors for sustainable management was developed, based on a river basin diagnostic framework consisting of four social-institutional and four biophysical indicators. It was applied in river basins in Australia, Brazil, China and France. Actors diagnosed current and target capacity for these indicators, and estimated synergistic influences of interacting indicators. The results reveal different priorities and transformative pathways to achieve basin plan outcomes, specific to each basin and actor groups. Priorities include biodiversity for the Murray-Darling, local water management needs for the São Francisco and Yellow rivers, and improved decision-making for the Adour-Garonne. This novel approach challenges entrenched views about key issues and actor engagement roles in co-implementation of the basin plan under existing prevailing governance models, with implications for engagement and international collaboration on basin governance

Improving the role of River Basin Organisations in sustainable river basin governance by linking social institutional capacity and basin biophysical capacity

The river basin organisation (RBO) model has been advocated as organisational best practice for sustainable river basin management, despite scant evidence of its effectiveness to manage complex river systems. This review provides a framework which combines functional social-institutional capacities with basin biophysical indicators in a diagnostic tool to determine RBO governance performance. Each of these two capacities are represented by four groups of indicators respectively covering social learning capacity and biophysical capacity. The distance and alignment between capacity and measure of performance scores can be used to prioritise program planning and resource allocation for improving river basin governance, and to undertake periodic evaluations as part of a trajectory analysis. The diagnostic functional framework provides tangible indicators of performance around key concepts in river basin governance. It offers a first attempt to strengthen the position and effectiveness of an RBO in dealing with complex adaptive systems

Characterization of microhabitat flow regimes in streams and rivers on the basis of near-bed velocity, shear stress and turbulence intensity measured with an Acoustic Doppler Velocimeter (ADV)

Near-bed flow regimes in streams and rivers remain a poorly researched topic, despite its importance for the distribution of benthic invertebrates. The poor characterization of macroinvertebrate microhabitat severely constrains the further understanding of instream flow requirements to protect the ecological integrity of streams and rivers, and may be responsible for the wide confidence intervals often associated with macroinvertebrate sampling. Traditionally, benthic habitats have been characterized by depth, substratum and mean velocity (measured at 0.4 of the depth from the bed) despite evidence that these parameters are insufficient to describe microflow regimes. Some researchers have introduced more complex hydraulic variables to characterize flow regimes. Yet many of those variables cannot be measured directly, and the inferred values are not sufficiently accurate to describe microflow in ·quantitative terms. The difficulties involved in measuring velocities close to the streambed have now been overcome by the development of an Acoustic Doppler Velocimeter (ADV) which enables the real-time three dimensional measurement of velocities within centimeters of the bed. The resolution of 25 Hz also enables the calculation of turbulence statistics, so that shear stress and turbulence intensity can be obtained at a spatial resolution small enough to quantify flow regimes within 5 mm from the bed. The objective of this study was to investigate the hypothesis that differences in the distribution of benthic macroinvertebrates in stream and rivers are partially or wholly related to differences in benthic flow regimes. To this aim, an ADV was used in an artificial stream channel to examine the effects of different (homogeneous) substrata on near-bed flow regimes under conditions of constant depth and mean velocity. Near-bed flow regimes were characterized by velocity, shear stress and turbulence intensity. Macroinvertebrate distributions were examined upstream and downstream of isolated roughness elements in a riffle of a stream section, and related to microflow characteristics obtained with the ADV. Under conditions of constant depth and velocity, homogeneous substrata of varying roughness resulted in significantly different microflow regimes. In the field, the distribution of benthic invertebrates contrasted significantly between upstream and downstream sampling sites, despite the absence of statistically significant differences in microflow regimes at those locations. It is suggested that the indirect effects of flow may sometimes be more important than the direct 'flow exposure' effects with regard to macroinvertebrate community composition. The ADV has enabled a quantitative characterization of microflow regimes, including the description of turbulent flow conditions. This will enable further research into tolerance ranges of microflow regimes for benthic invertebrates and may offer the possibility to investigate critical values for shear stress and turbulence intensity. The quantification of microflow regime will enable a more accurate definition of macroinvertebrate (micro )habitats. This knowledge will find applications in many other areas of limnological research and in the management of streams and rivers

Governing the Murray-Darling Basin: Integrating social and biophysical indicators for better environmental outcomes

River basin governance has become increasingly challenged in many river basins around the world. At heart is the poor understanding of governance performance and its interaction with biophysical restoration targets. This paper aims to improve the Murray-Darling Basin governance for better environmental outcomes by understanding the interactions between governance performance indicators and biophysical indicators. A diagnostic framework consisting of social indicators (Collaboration, Leadership, Institutions and Learning) and biophysical indicators (River Flows, Water Quality, Biodiversity and Species Recovery) was used to estimate condition and target for each indicator from a range of stakeholder groups representing different interests and perspectives. In addition, stakeholders also measured synergistic effects of indicator progress towards target on other indicators using strength of indicator interaction scores. A network analysis of indicator condition and interaction scores was used to determine a composite enabling pathway to suggest stakeholder contributing roles to polycentric governance. Leadership and its role in regulation, compliance and operating rules is a recurring challenge mentioned by multiple stakeholder groups, requiring clarification of roles and subsidiarity decision-making through enhanced collaboration and institutional reform. The enabling pathway proposes collaborative learning by assigning co-implementation priorities based on diagnostics rather than stakeholder specific identified key challenges. This novel approach offers a tangible way for developing sectorised stakeholder engagement strategies where participation is conceived as active collaboration towards decision-making and co-implementation.This research was made possible by APA scholarship 00025B/ 42209344 offered by the University of Queensland, Australi