Policies and tools for catchment management of water resources : field management, tradable permits and stakeholder participation

This dissertation is a set of related articles. The five articles deal with alternative tools and policies for adressing water quality management. The focus of the dissertation is on management decisions of three groups at the catchment level: farmers, other stakeholders and catchment authorities. The first two articles adress how field management decisions are made by farmers. The first of these two articles presents a linear cost method for calculating the economic impact of adopting particular 'best management practices' (BMPs) on individual fields. The second article describes how decision heuristics may be used by farmers for making management choices within a framework of bounded rationality. This article presents a decision support system (DSS) that has been developed for evaluation of best management practices (BMPs). The model presented here, called LENNART, is a net-based interactive data base that combines a natural science model, SOILNDB, with the linear cost method developed in the first article for the evaluation of BMPs. The model works with heuristics to support BMP implementation decisions by farmers. The second two articles take up the application of tradable discharge permit (TDP) policy to reduce nutrient losses from farmland from non-point sources (NPS) of pollution. The first of these two articles is reactive. This article surveys the status of discharge trading programs and concludes that the lack of success of these programs is due to design problems, specifically the lack of well-defined property rights to the discharges. The second article is proactive and describes how a composite market system for TDP may be designed to fulfill its primary purpose, the cost effective abatement of nutrient discharges. The fifth article describes a method for structuring stakeholder participation in the management of water resources at the catchment level. The model described in this article, CATCH, builds on the use of the principles of discourse and deliberation to define sets of socio-economic parameters for the evaluation of management plans.