Water Policy during the Transition Period

Abstract

Water Policy of the development countries mostly composed of plans with objectives to respond to immediate or short term problems. Hence, the organizational structures are not well designed to cover all necessities except for the economic growth and efficiency for the quantitative water resources management, for examples, the development of reservoirs, dams, water gathering and distribution for the growth of agricultural products in the targeted areas.

For Thailand, Water Policy in the implementation linked to the National Development Plans, in the early stage, was mainly to increase the volume of the water storage by the construction of the hardware like dams, weirs. That was to support the needs for economic development. Later the awareness for environmental and water quality was added to the policy. However, the current situation has changed quite a lot, to a more complex one. The demand for water is likely to increase while water scarcity become more serious and occurred regularly. It was caused by the growing population, agricultural intensification, growing of industrialization and urbanization. This has resulted in the decrease for water in agriculture, and impacted the roles of the Royal Irrigation Department (RID) who mainly provided irrigated water for agricultural sector. The RID has to adjust their roles to undertake the water allocation to various stakeholders like industrial entrepreneurs, and urban consumers. This changing role is the challenging one for the RID as they do not have experiences dealing with new groups of stakeholders before. In addition, there were no guidelines or frameworks for the responsible line agencies to prioritize the needs for water use of various stakeholders in both quality, quantity and in different timing. Hence, equality and governance in water allocation still remain a crucial issues for water management in Thailand.