Approaches to Planning Water Resources

AbstractWater resource problems and management are complex, confusing, and controversial for participants in technical, policy, and public water deliberations. A thoughtful planning approach can re...


Introduction
The plan is nothing. Planning is everything." -Dwight Eisenhower Water resources planning is an ancient problem, dating back to flood control and water supply activities of the earliest civilizations. The success of most civilizations has rested, in part, on their ability to manage water (China, Indus, Europe, South and Central America). The demise of several civilizations has been traced directly to failed regional water management (Peru, Mesopotamia) (Artzy and Hillel 1988;Ortloff et al. 1985). In the United States, water resource planning has evolved historically with changing economic and political circumstances (White 1969;Shad 1979;Kelley 1989;Lund 2006). Quantitative analysis and even economic thinking in water planning date at least to Roman times (Frontinus 97 AD;Leveau 1993) and has been vital to successful water management in modern times, being formalized by early 19 th century French engineers (Ekelund and Hébert 1999;Morgan 1951). Lack of planning or poor planning often are blamed for continued controversies, expense, and inefficiencies in water management. The complexity and controversy of water problems should lead water planners and policy makers to seek fundamental principles and approaches for organizing the technical aspects of preparing solutions. This paper attempts to summarize and organize a range of planning approaches often seen or advocated for water planning.
The paper begins with a review of rational planning, the fundamental process aspired to by most planning efforts. This is followed by a review of various technical approaches common or commonly discussed for water resources planning. Practical problems for effectively completing planning processes are then reviewed. In light of these practical problems of water management, some realistic and limited objectives are suggested for water resources plans. Finally, analytical and organizational aspects for each planning approach are compared and some conclusions are suggested for contemporary water resource problems. Statement of Objectives, followed by Identification of Solution Alternatives and Evaluation of Alternatives on Stated Objectives are the core of rational planning. This reduced set of steps parallels more formal and mathematical definitions of rationality and mathematical optimization (Von Neumann and Morgenstern 1944;Tribus 1969;Hillier and Lieberman 1995).
Limitations of rational planning are evident (Banfield 1959;Simon 1947;Braybrooke and Lindblom 1970). It is often difficult or impossible for policy makers and stakeholders to clearly state their objectives in quantifiable ways, particularly for objectives involving reliability and risks. In its idealized form, the identification and comparison of "all possible alternatives" on all relevant objectives is clearly impossible in practice. Only a limited number of alternatives can ever be identified, much less developed into a form that allows comparison of alternatives. In analysis, evaluations contain uncertain assumptions and unavoidable simplifications. Ultimately, any analysis must serve an institutional or political framework that works, however slowly, to make decisions regarding the "best" solution.
The strengths of rational planning are its relative transparency, logic, and the considerable lack of effective technical alternatives to planning. Many variations for implementing rational planning have arisen to help respond to specific circumstances. Often, planning's greatest contribution to problemsolving is the structure and systematic approach it imposes on information-gathering, deliberation, and decision-making. Without such a structured approach, the complexity of water resource problems often leads to levels of confusion which contribute to controversy and policy paralysis. Both rational planning variations and non-rational alternatives to planning should be compared based on how well they might satisfy policy objectives.

Approaches to Water Planning
This section reviews six major approaches for water planning, most of which are variations on rational planning. Each approach addresses technical aspects of water problems within a decision-making context. The political decision-making context of a water problem can be more important than its technical aspects for determining the success of a particular planning approach. Indeed, as discussed later, many political circumstances will greatly limit the practical potential of any planning effort. These six basic approaches are presented in a rough order of their historical formalization for modern applications: 1. Requirements-based planning, 2. Benefit-Cost-based planning, 3. Multi-objective planning, 4. Conflict resolution planning, 5. Market-based planning, and 6. Muddling through.
For each approach to planning, the following aspects are discussed, a) history, b) methods, analysis, use of models, c) data and computational requirements, d) role of public participation, e) how it helps decision-makers, and f) circumstances when it seems more likely to succeed or fail.

Requirements-based Planning
Sometimes referred to as "project and provide," requirements-based planning is a traditional approach to formulating engineering problems. First, define functional specifications that the system must satisfy, perhaps with appropriate factors of safety. Then, design (plan), build, and operate the system to meet these requirements (or loads) at the lowest cost or with the greatest reliability for a given budget (Suh 1990). An outstanding characteristic of requirements-based planning in the water resources context is that it typically assumes given and fixed demands, and limits planning efforts to "supply-side" options. This is reasonable when demands are outside the control of the planner or of such great importance that the costs of meeting demands are less than the costs of any water shortages or demand reductions.
The history, practicality, and method of requirements-based water resources planning are exemplified by the classical Rippl method (1883) for reservoir sizing. Here, future use of water is estimated from forecasting and is assumed fixed. The size of the supply is then determined by finding the reservoir size or combination of water sources that would always meet this demand with a repeat of the historical streamflow record. The sum of water supplies must always meet or exceed forecast use. This so-called "firm yield" approach to water planning has dominated water planning until very recently, when the costs of providing supply reliability have grown to exceed the costs of reducing water use and the external environmental costs of water supplies have become more highly valued.
Requirements-based planning is very effective and appropriate for many water system components (pump stations, distribution lines, local drainage, etc.). For these components performance expectations are relatively fixed and standardized, and more detailed planning analysis might be too expensive relative to potential resulting improvements. However, for large components and overall system planning, requirements-based approaches often result in controversial and overly expensive solutions and can neglect important external costs of water supplies and demand, such as environmental consequences.

Benefit-Cost-based Planning
Benefit-cost analysis attempts to consolidate the many supply, demand, and other impacts of each alternative into monetary benefits and costs. The 1936 federal Flood Control Act neatly summarizes the germ of benefit-cost analysis, that a proposed project should have "… benefits to whomsoever they may accrue … in excess of the estimated costs …". Since this time, benefit-cost analysis has expanded steadily beyond flood control to include greater varieties of water uses and impacts (Griffin 1998;Russell et al 1970;Howe 1971;James and Lee 1971;Jenkins and Lund 2000;US Water Resources Council 1983;Boardman et al 1996). Flood control, navigation, water supply, hydropower, recreation, and even some environmental water uses have been incorporated into benefit-cost analyses (Loomis 1987). The limitations of benefit-cost analysis are well known, including monetizing all effects of alternatives, selecting discount rates, incorporating social equity, and representing risk preferences. Nevertheless, its application has helped eliminate unworthy projects, justify worthy ones, and raise the quality of discussion for ambiguous cases. Benefit-cost analysis has strong technical aspects, including a broad and potentially rigorous integrating economic perspective with abilities to incorporate variability, reliability, and uncertainty, either as mean economic values or probability distributions of net economic value.

Multi-objective Planning
In reaction to the narrow economic focus of benefit-cost evaluations, multi-objective approaches to planning attempt to display to decision-makers the trade-offs inherent in selecting alternatives where all objectives cannot be measured in the same units (US Water Resources Council 1983;Cohon 1978;Cohon and Marks 1975). Such a trade-off display appears in Figure 1, separating Pareto-optimal alternatives that represent efficient trade-offs from inferior alternatives. Tables are often used to help sort better from inferior alternatives where there are more than two objectives. Some authors attempt to go beyond the development and display of efficient trade-offs to propose rational bases for making decisions with these trade-offs identifying optimal solutions through multi-dimensional concepts of utility (Keeney and Raiffa 1976;Haimes and Hall 1974).
While the analysis approach of multi-objective planning is technically attractive, it typically lacks a formal institutional mechanism to establish the trade-offs needed to identify a most desirable alternative from a set of "Pareto-optimal" solutions ( Figure 1). Thus, in practice for multiple stakeholder problems, multi-objective planning is limited to informing decision-makers or stakeholders on the relevant tradeoffs involved in their decisions or to helping identify promising alternatives that satisfy a range of likely objective weights (Brill et al 1982). Difficulties visualizing or communicating trade-offs among more than a few objectives often hamper the practical value of multi-objective methods. Where the water resource problem involves fundamental political conflicts among objectives, multi-objective analysis cannot resolve those conflicts, only make them clearer. Planning to resolve conflicts differs fundamentally from other planning settings. The objective is to create a process where groups with conflicting objectives can negotiate a common plan or strategy. In most conflict settings, planning occurs in a political environment where parties have alternatives to participating in a formal planning process, posing a constant threat to such processes. Several forms of conflict resolution-based planning have emerged to respond to the common difficulties of planning in many institutional and political situations (Viessman and Smerton 1990; Delli Priscoli 1990). These approaches typically emphasize the need of various parties or stakeholders to communicate, understand, and negotiate as necessary conditions for any solution to be accepted politically (Raiffa 1982). Often considerable emphasis, effort, and time is required to establish broad confidence and communication in both technical and policy-making processes as part of developing and implementing solutions.
Conflict resolution-based planning typically gages its success based on how well a "consensus" solution is achieved, and may less concerned with the Pareto-optimal rationality of a solution. Any plan agreed upon by the diverse stakeholders is generally thought to be a good plan. While consensus-based conflictresolution processes appear to be useful, they have been far from universally successful, perhaps because such problems are tremendously messy and difficult (Walters 1997). Conflict resolution is often a long process and consensus is often difficult for a large number of diverse and competing interests having a history of conflict and distrust, within an unstable political context and changes in individual representation. Where decision-making authority is highly decentralized, incentives or threats from outsiders are usually required, such as promises of Federal or state funding or credible threats of regulatory or court action. Even where formally unsuccessful, such processes can serve an important long-term role in improving communications, information, and other conditions needed to work on solutions in the future.
Two broad categories of these still-emerging planning approaches are summarized below.

Adaptive Management and Shared Vision Modeling
Adaptive environmental management was first proposed in the late 1970s by a group of ecologists (Holling 1978;Walters and Holling 1990;Walters 1997;Walters and Green 1997;Environmental Management 1996). The objective was to support ongoing environmental management with consideration of uncertainties and incorporating an ability to change management of the system as more was learned of the system's behavior and response to management. A central tenet of this school of thought is that computer modeling has a central role for synthesizing knowledge of environmental problems, integrating new knowledge of the problem, and developing promising management strategies. In adaptive management, the development of computer models is a collaborative exercise among different disciplines and stakeholders. The intent of modeling is to aid development and negotiation of management alternatives, with both management and model-represented understanding adapting to new information over long periods of time, and to use modeling to design management experiments. The approach has had mixed success (Walters 1997;Lee 1999;Richards and Rago 1999).
A similar approach has taken hold recently among water resources engineers, often called "shared vision planning" (USACE 2007;Palmer, et al. 1999;Keyes and Palmer 1995;Werrick and Whipple 1994;Reitsma et al 1996). This approach also uses a group of stakeholders and technical experts to develop a computer model to represent a common understanding of the problem and develop, quantitatively compare, and negotiate potential solutions. Shared vision planning makes a greater effort at placing the modeling within a more traditional rational planning process with extensive facilitated public participation, merging aspects of rational planning and multi-objective analysis with aspects of facilitated conflict resolution processes (Imwiko et al. 2007). The approach is a modern expression of ideas for planning large complex public systems with public transparency and participation (Geddes 1915).
"Watershed" Planning "Watershed planning" has been widely advocated by federal, state, and local agencies, though with less formal guidance of how it should be done (Kenney 1999;Gelt 1998). This concept differs fundamentally from long-standing ideas of relatively centralized planning for water at a watershed scale (White 1969;Goodman 1984). The most common tenets of current usage of "watershed planning" are that all stakeholders in the watershed should be involved in discussions of its management, all aspects of water quality and quantity in the watershed should be considered, and that the parties should have great flexibility in arriving at a consensus solution. The emphasis is on developing consensus-based water plans, involving all major stakeholders and agencies. As with adaptive management, mutual education among parties and stakeholders is a major aspect of watershed planning, although documentation of understanding is less quantitative. Watershed planning seems to be more successful where there is a balance between expectations and resources/funding, effective leadership and management, interpersonal trust, committed participants, and a flexible and informal structure (Leach and Pelkey 2001). A relatively formalized and comprehensive application of watershed planning principles is the Texas water plan, which was based on watershed plans for 16 regions of Texas (TWDB 2002).
A common problem with consensus-based planning conflict-resolution planning, especially its adaptive management forms, is the need for extended studies, funding, and attention from parties involved. While the exchange of ideas in these processes can produce valuable results, the long time frame often causes many good efforts to lapse due to budgetary variability, management and personnel transitions, and short attention spans at funding, managerial, and political levels. However, for controversial systems with decentralized decision authority, conflict resolution approaches are sometimes the only approaches that political authorities can support. Any positive results of a conflict resolution process are likely to be welcomed by agency and political leaders seeking to make an improvement with minimal controversy.

Market-Based Planning
Markets are a decentralized form of planning, which can accomplish planning objectives very effectively in some circumstances (von Hayek 1945). Markets, negotiated contracts, and exchanges have long been important components of water planning, providing flexibility at local scales to adapt to short-term hydrologic, economic, and water demand variability. In recent years, the use of markets and other negotiated transfers in water planning and management has received increased interest and application to provide short and long-term flexibility in water allocation and operations (Lund and Israel 1995). Market-based planning often includes water contracts, markets for spot, dry-year, or permanent water transfers, transferable discharge permits, or privatization of facilities or operations. Often water markets are exclusively among public agencies or districts. In addition to providing a means for efficient and flexible operations, markets also provide financial incentives to adapt management policies to hydrologic and economic conditions. In California, water markets have provided incentives for local agencies in diverse parts of the state to sponsor conjunctive use and water conservation programs which would not have occurred without the financial incentives of water markets (Pulido, et al. 2004).
There are obvious limits and disadvantages of market-based solutions to public resource problems. The assignment and accounting of rights and real water, third-party and externality effects, and other classical market imperfections all pose problems. Nevertheless, markets are often effective and efficient components of water and environmental management (Anon. 1995;Howe, et al. 1986;Eheart and Lyon 1983;Lund et al. 1992).

"Muddling Through"
Political and economic circumstances often do not support long-term planning, particularly plans that recommend major changes to the current situation. When the political situation is unstable and not supportive of long-term planning, it is often more effective for planning efforts to seek small short-term improvements in a desirable long term direction. This approach is sometimes called disjoint incrementalism or "muddling through" (Lindblom 1959(Lindblom , 1979Braybrooke and Lindblom 1970). Often, plans developed with the intent of following other planning approaches end up merely contributing to "muddling through." Numerous advantages have been ascribed to incremental actions and alternative evaluations in a pluralistic political environment (Braybrooke and Lindblom 1970), including improved responsiveness to perceived problems, ability to identify important consequences, and diffusion of decision and evaluation responsibilities. In this situation, incremental decisions can be more effective than more formal plans based on formal decision-making calculations (such as elaborate benefit-cost analysis).

Comparison of Approaches
While exposition requires making distinctions among major approaches to planning, actual planning often reflects several approaches. Real planning situations often require an artful mix of approaches tailored to achieve practical political, technical, and legal objectives through practical political and technical means. Table 2 is a summary comparison of water planning approaches in terms of the three most fundamental steps of rational planning. Each of the approaches reviewed employs rational planning core ideas in different ways. Requirements-based, benefit-cost, and multi-objective approaches apply rational planning methods most directly for settings with a more centralized and formal decision process. However, where centralized processes are unavailable politically, conflict resolution, market, and muddling through approaches each seek to accomplish similar rational planning objectives through very different means.

Practical Problems
"Planning is an unnatural process; it is much more fun to do something. The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise, rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression." -Sir John Harvey-Jones The problems of planning are not restricted to water resource systems, but are common for urban and other infrastructure system (Wildavsky 1973) as well as other problems, even robot control systems (Agre and Chapman 1990). The practical problems of planning often govern which approaches can or should be taken for a particular situation. Some major practical problems are discussed below.

Conflicting Water Uses and Objectives
Conflict among uses and users of water is the dominant characteristic of contemporary water planning. Agricultural water supply, environmental water uses, urban water supply, flood control, hydropower, recreation and other uses all compete in economic, legal, and political forums over the management of water, at local, regional, state, and federal levels. Even within each common water use, individual users or user groups often disagree on allocation of water, financial costs, and environmental impacts. Table 3 compares how each planning approach addresses conflicts over water use objectives. Where conflicts are least intense, requirements-based, benefit-cost, and multi-objective approaches are suitable, as they allow for a very direct and technical analysis of more focused problems. With greater levels of conflict, conflict resolution, market, and incremental approaches are more likely to be successful. Usually not attempted Limited Authority to Implement Options Regional water planners have very limited ability to directly affect the vast majority of water management decisions because most water management decisions are made locally. The effectiveness of regional water plans would be greater if they could be integrated with local water management efforts and activities. In the past, State and Federal governments often intervened in water problems to facilitate regional solutions. In recent times, State and Federal ability and willingness to fund regional options is now greatly reduced, particularly in the face of controversy. Each approach's treatment of limited planning authority is summarized in Table 3.
The need for centralized authority in water management has long been debated, and is central to political theories of water management. Wittfogel (1957) argued that the historical origin of centralized government and political authority arose from the need for a central authority to develop and manage irrigation and flood control in early Mesopotamia (so-called "hydraulic civilizations"). More recent studies also point to the importance of centralized planning authority for water management (Kelley 1989;Worster 1985). However, others point to greater effectiveness and efficiency in many highly decentralized water management systems, in studies of Puget Sound (Bish 1982) and Southern California groundwater management (Blomquist 1992). Decentralized management can better utilize local knowledge, maintain local accountability and performance objectives, widen the range of options considered, and ensure widespread review and comment on intermediate and final policy and planning products. Effective decentralized management requires informal or formal coordinating mechanisms, such as coordinating committees, agreements and contracts, a regional agency of local agency members, regulations, markets, or the courts. A water plan for a region with decentralized water management is likely to be more educational and define a framework or direction for common activity, and less likely to define a direct plan of action.
Integrating Local, Regional, State, and National Plans and Policies Most water management decisions are local. For every State or Federal water planner, there are dozens of local water utility planners. And for each local water planner, there are thousands of agricultural, residential, commercial, and industrial water users, each making long and short-term water management decisions. Integrating these local and user decisions with regional and state water management decisions is both difficult and essential for effective regional water management. Some summary thoughts on how each approach pursues this function appear in Table 3.
Water planning can rarely be undertaken with the precision and comprehensiveness of an industrial or military enterprise. More commonly, regional water planning must consider policies and plans already existing at local, regional, state, and federal scales. Thus, plans sometimes resemble to the "exquisite corpse" of early 20 th century surrealist art circles, as illustrated by the quote below from an early housing study.
"The process by which a housing program for Chicago was formulated resembled somewhat the parlor game in which each player adds a word to a sentence which is passed around the circle of players: the player acts as if the words that are handed to him express some intention (i.e., as if the sentence that comes to him were planned) and he does his part to sustain the illusion. In playing this game the staff of the Authority was bound by the previous moves. The sentence was already largely formed when it was handed to it; Congress had written the first words, the Public Housing Administration had written the next several, and then the Illinois Legislature, the State Housing Board, the Mayor and City Council, and the CHA Board of Commissioners had each in turn written a few. It was up to the staff to finish the sentence in a way that would seem to be rational, but this may have been an impossibility." Meyerson and Banfield (1955), p. 269.
A larger framework is needed to integrate requirements-based plans, establishing compatible requirement specifications; this is difficult, though it is commonly done with water quality standards. Benefit-cost analysis provides a consistent economic criterion across all levels of decisions, although decision makers at different levels are unlikely to agree to such a common criterion, as realized (albeit often futilely) in multi-objective approaches. Conflict resolution approaches provide a forum where conflicts among different decision-makers and decision scales can be worked out. Whereas market and muddling-through approaches provide means to plan where explicit collaboration is difficult or impossible.

Data, Time, and Resources for Analysis
Most planning analysis is limited by the quantity and quality of data available, as well as the political circumstances of planning. Moreover, much important data, such as long-term water demands, regulations, and climate change, become reliable only after their quantities are no longer relevant for planning. Large amounts of data do not necessarily contain useful information. Poorly or unsystematically collected or estimated data often contain less useful planning information than simple more transparent estimations. Data often must be digested and reconciled to be useful analytically or conceptually, with understood limitations.
Data problems are compounded when scientific controversy exists over how empirical data should be assembled or interpreted. This is common with biological problems with significant variability in field data and fundamental questions regarding how particular biological and ecological systems work. The lack of data, or useful data, tends to encourage some forms of planning relative to others. These are summarized in Table 4. Small amounts of data tend to encourage market, muddling-through, and requirements-based planning. Conflict resolution planning is the most flexible regarding data availability. The cost and time required for collection, digestion, and use of data will always place technical limits on planning.
Few planners complain of having too much time, funding, or expertise. The lack of time is often imposed by statutory limitations or the attention period of governing political bodies and reduces the level of analysis undertaken, with implications for the approach taken to planning. Nevertheless, the time and resources allocated for plan or study completion often extends beyond the likely time of political attention or importance for a subject. Long-term in-depth plans often have difficulty gaining attention from political leadership.

Variability and Uncertainty
Many aspects of real water problems are highly uncertain or variable, particularly over planning time frames. Many fundamental uncertainties exist regarding how water management affects specific environmental resources. Hydrologic uncertainty, from "usual" variations between drought and flood to prospects for climate change; water demand uncertainty, from changes in population and wealth, changes in water use efficiency, and changes in weather; and changes in water quality and demands for water quality all are central to regional water planning and must be treated carefully in planning analysis (Lund 1991). Unavoidable uncertainties exist for long-term prediction in most of these areas.
The formal understanding and analysis of uncertainties involves the use of probabilities. Probabilities are a very powerful and rigorous analysis tool for such problems. However, the use and results of studies using probabilities are difficult to explain to decision-makers, the public, and even most technical people. The treatment of variability and uncertainty for each planning approach is compared in Table 4. Some planning approaches seek to avoid variability and uncertainty (muddling through), while others (benefitcost analysis) can rigorously incorporate them; however, no approach can handle variability and uncertainty without difficulty.

Limited Range of Alternatives
Consider a water system with only 20 water management options, including various water supply and demand actions to be combined into alternatives for evaluation. Each combination of options is a possible alternative. Mathematically, if each option can either be included or excluded from an alternative, there are 2 20 = 1,048,576 possible alternatives. Real water management systems have many thousands of possible decision options and many many more possible alternatives. It is impossible to explicitly enumerate and evaluate all possible alternatives.
It is possible to develop, refine, and evaluate only a limited number of alternatives. Practically, each new alternative, particularly creative or novel alternatives, requires considerable effort for development and education of stakeholders. It is often difficult to develop promising alternatives in an atmosphere of controversy and political maneuvering. Stakeholders often perceive an interest in limiting the range of alternatives to be considered.

Assessing Performance for Each Objective
In planning we would like to quantitatively evaluate proposed alternatives on each performance objective. Several common difficulties commonly arise: 1) Stakeholders often find it difficult to specify their performance objectives, sometimes for political reasons, but also because it is a difficult intellectual and technical problem. 2) Given reasonable verbal statements of performance objectives, it is often difficult to derive quantitative mathematical analogs. 3) Fundamental uncertainties often exist in knowing how a particular performance objective (such as salmon populations) will be affected by specific water management decisions.
Performance assessment is made more difficult by the variability in hydrologic conditions and operations. How well can a particular water use tolerate or benefit from variability in flows? How should various probability distributions of water availability for specific uses be compared? Table 4 summarizes performance assessment problems for each planning approach. Much of the selection of a planning approach should be driven by the types of evaluation results which the political planning process can absorb. Thus, the most fragmented planning processes are most likely to accept market or muddlingthrough types of analysis. More organized or centralized political planning approaches can employ other approaches.
Transparency: Can We Understand and Communicate It All? Regional water systems are complex, so reasonable transparent representations also will be complex. Even among experienced water managers, few individuals have both broad and detailed knowledge of any large regional water system. One career usually cannot encompass complete and up-to-date detailed knowledge of a system and deep thinking about how to improve the system over the long term. No one can understand it all. This problem is compounded by the employment transience at technical, managerial, and political levels; in any planning meeting, many people must be "brought up to speed." With the diverse audiences and objectives of regional water planning, can we ever make our thinking and analysis understood? Given the real limitations and realistic expectations of planning, a simplified analysis that more clearly communicates water management guidance might more effectively improve a region's water management than presentation of sophisticated methods and results (Geoffrion 1976). However, more sophisticated and detailed analyses are likely to be needed to develop and detail much of a regional plan. A plan or analysis that cannot be understood is unlikely to attract the confidence or readership needed for implementation.

Some Realistic Objectives for Regional Water Planning
We all have ideas of what a water plan should accomplish. Popularly, water plans lead directly to the solution for water problems. Alas, this is often not the case. In reality, water plans serve a variety of related and important functions, only some of which lead directly to resolving water problems. Other plan functions are useful informational steps for long-term water management.
1. Education. Local, regional and statewide water plans educate the public, political leadership, and water policy professional staff and leadership about water problems and options. Water plans are a regularly updated practical and authoritative overview of a region's water problems, with some directions for improvement. Each individual party concerned with a region's water problems will have a narrower view of the subject, and so cannot provide the integrated perspective of a regional plan. The public education role of the plan is rarely direct; a tiny proportion of the population reads plans. But an authoritative water plan document can provide a reasoned, informed, and readable perspective on regional water problems for the media and "opinion leaders" to improve policy decisions and the accuracy of public perceptions.
The political leadership of general and water-related governments is tremendously distracted by many issues and their own political dynamics. Even the best political leaders can devote little time to technical aspects of decisions. Political leaders must rely on advice from others and authoritative accounts of the problem. Water plans can inform decision-makers and their advisers on relevant aspects of water problems and provide some assurance to statewide, regional, and local stakeholders and water managers that their problems and alternative solutions have been fairly presented for consideration.
New water professionals often use local, regional, and statewide water plans to orient themselves in the practice and context of their work. For these people, regional and local plans provide an authoritative view of the context of their activities as well as perspectives on the overall direction of water management activities and examples of accepted planning methods and options.

2.
A reference document. Regional water plans are central reference documents for statewide, regional, and local water management and planning activities and decisions. In one location, a regional plan provides authoritative estimates of water demands and forecasts (dissaggregated by use type), information on storage, conveyance, and water supply availability, an inventory of water distribution systems and their organization, an authoritative inventory of water problems, and a wealth of other information, including where additional information can be found. Plan estimates, data, and discussions have everyday uses for local, regional, statewide, and private water management and user activities. An organized authoritative source of such information provides a common benefit. significant "leadership" for the many water management decisions in a region. The options and objectives considered and the methods used in a plan set an example for other local and regional planning efforts. At regional and statewide scales, and for federal agencies, planning practices set precedence and expectations for other levels of government that are more active and have more resources and jurisdiction to implement water management options. This leadership in content and method has great potential to help integrate and improve the planning efforts of lower units of government, increasing the number of promising alternatives examined and solidifying their evaluations of alternatives. Such leadership must be responsible. Its leadership rests on neither lagging too far behind the advanced state of practice, nor being so far ahead of advanced practice as to risk being misunderstood or ignored.

Planning fosters discussion and negotiations.
While plans might or might not lead directly to the solution of water problems, any planning process provides long-term opportunities to discuss and negotiate water problems as well as opportunities for public input, feedback, and support. These opportunities can help in long-term development of solutions and understandings of stakeholder concerns, even when plan recommendations are ignored.

Specific recommended actions and their implementation.
We normally think of water plans as recommending particular thought-through actions for improving a region's water management. However, practically, this is often not the functional case. The specifics of a water plan usually are most relevant at local levels, where agencies tend to have more financial resources and independent implementation authority. For higher regional authorities, including state authority, the financial, jurisdictional, and political wherewithal to implement plan specifics often diminishes. Historically, State and Federal agencies have dominated water development only for short periods. In California, for example, Federal water projects dominated regional water development from the 1940s until 1982 and State projects from 1967-1982. This occurred despite Federal and State planning studies dating from 1873 (Pisani 1984). Before and since these periods, almost all major water supply projects in California have been instigated, financed, owned, and operated locally or sometimes regionally. Now and for the foreseeable future, regional water plans are likely to be effective only where they help integrate activities across jurisdictions and users. This will be a difficult and prolonged process.
6. Following the Law. Planning processes often exist to meet relevant state or federal legislation, such as the federal National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) or state acts such as the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Such legislation requires various procedures for involving different units of government and the public, specification of objectives and identification and evaluation of alternatives. Such legislation helps standardize planning across many types of planning problems. For example, NEPA requires that federal agencies develop and consider alternative courses of action and evaluate them in terms of environmental impacts. Implementing regulations for NEPA further specify how these and other planning activities are to be accomplished. In addition, more specific legislation exists for particular water problems, such as the federal Clean Water Act or Endangered Species Act and their state variants. Any water management or development proposal or project will be expected to comply with relevant legal requirements. These legal requirements often explicitly or implicitly require a planning process.
Given the increasingly public nature of planning and the decentralized nature of water management, the educational, leadership, and procedural roles of plans and planning processes can have great long-term significance, even where their short-term effects are limited. In terms of rational decision-making, the purpose of a plan is to convince a broad audience of decision-makers and publics that: 1) the problem is relatively well considered, including the implications of uncertainties, 2) a wide range of potentially promising alternatives has been identified with reasonable thoroughness, 3) unreasonable alternatives have been reasonably eliminated, 4) remaining alternatives have been developed to provide desirable performance, and 5) the final plan was judged the "best" of these well-performing alternatives. For long term water problems, plan contributions to any of these aspects can be valuable.

Technical Analysis in Planning
Water planning is a complex business involving moving and storing millions of tons of liquid every day with substantial economic impacts and financial costs. So most regional water planning and management activities have a heavily technical component. Lund and Palmer (1997) present a more detailed overview of the roles of computer modeling in planning and conflict resolution in water resources.
The role of technical planning expertise can vary greatly between planning approaches. For requirements and benefit-cost based approaches, engineers and planners are largely isolated technicians, toiling in response to a problem defined by others and offering specific recommendations. Multi-objective planning requires engineers to interact more with stakeholders or their representatives to define and clarify plan objectives and communicate performance estimates to decision-makers. Conflict resolution and muddling through forms of planning place engineers and planners in a far more demanding (and interesting) situation near the center of political decision-making. Here, technical study management must interact directly and interactively with opposing stakeholders, often for prolonged periods. As technical mediators and staff, engineers and planners are often aided by professional facilitators overseeing the conflict resolution discourse, and must become familiar with stakeholder objectives to better represent them, as well as to identify promising consensus solutions. In market-based planning, the engineer often retires somewhat from the public fray, but still must understand market actors and conditions so as to advise in the negotiation of purchases, sales, and exchanges, as well as related legal and regulatory activities.
The purpose of analysis is usually not numbers, but insight (Geoffrion 1976). Under practical conditions and political limitations, it is often difficult to develop policy analysis from technical studies. Often, strategic analytical insight are more readily developed by more independent analysis by internal agency "skunk works", universities, or others with diminished political accountability.

When to Plan How
Considerable public and professional controversy exists regarding how water planning should be done. Each planning approach presented has been successfully applied in some situations, and has failed in others. No planning approach succeeds in all circumstances. In developing regional and statewide plans, often it will be necessary to integrate plans developed under different planning philosophies.
For discussion, three broad sets of planning circumstances are used to illustrate the likely suitability of different planning approaches. The first circumstance is where only rapid and inexpensive studies are possible. There may be few resources for conducting the study, the pace of political events may limit the time available for planning, or the problem might not merit much attention. The second set of circumstances is where planning resources are greater and a single formal decision-making process exists to adopt and implement a plan. Planning details for most engineered water facilities traditionally fall into these first two categories and represent most day-to-day engineering planning. The third set of circumstances, multi-party decision-making can occur in the midst of considerable controversy and conflict. Table 5 presents some hypothetical ideas on the suitability of each approach for each set of circumstances.
In an era when federal and state governments lack the funding and will to impose or persuade formal planning outcomes on stakeholders, conflict resolution, marketing, and muddling through approaches are all that remain for stakeholders wishing to solve regional water problems. However, even within this less formalized and more pluralistic setting, requirements-based, benefit-cost-based, and multi-objective planning and techniques can be informative and useful. Probably not good Often the only possible approach; success limited and incremental Figure 2 attempts to place the theories discussed along two commonly relevant dimensions, the problem's specificity and the political leadership available to implement any plan. Other dimensions could have been used, and the placements or each approach are inexact, but the figure serves to illustrate how muddling through, doubtless the most common approach to planning in practice, can often result from a collapse of conditions suitable for more formal planning methods. Even in the worst cases, attempts at more formal planning can generate insights, alternatives, coalitions, and information useful for muddling through more effectively.
The rational selection of a planning approach should be based on the likely success of alternative approaches in achieving practical objectives for a planning effort. This selection process itself illustrates many practical problems in water resources planning.

Problem Specificity
Muddling Through

Conflict Resolution
Adaptive Management

Conclusions
Water problems are often complex and controversial. Confusion, controversy, expense, and delay can be magnified if the approach to planning for these problems is unclear or ineffective. A clearly structured approach to planning for water resources problems is often necessary, or at least valuable.
A variety of planning approaches are available for different types and contexts of planning problems. While the general concepts of rational planning reflect fundamentals of rational decision-making and are of broad utility, no specific planning approach is suitable for every planning problem and context. Planning problems vary greatly, with each one being arguably unique. The specifics of planning for a particular problem should attempt to reflect problem peculiarities.
Local and intra-agency water plans with well-defined problems and significant political and financial wherewithal are most likely to apply traditional planning notions. Larger-scale regional water plans usually have more tenuous political support and less well-defined problems, usually will require newer forms of planning, and are less likely to lead directly to implemented solutions. Regional water plans typically serve longer-term educational functions for regional water management. For planning to fulfill most educational, leadership, policy, and project development roles, it must be transparent and comprehensible, "rational", and not require unavailable time and financial resources.
The selection of an appropriate planning approach or mixture of approaches should reflect the objectives and context of addressing the particular planning problem.
Approaches to Planning Water Resources. Abstract. Jay R. Lund, Professor Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. University of California, Davis jrlund@ucdavis.edu 31 March 2008. Water resource systems are complex and their management can be confusing for both technical and policy participants. Such confusion can be reduced with the development and application of a planning approach. This paper attempts to summarize and organize various technical approaches to water resources planning. The basic approach of rational planning is presented, followed by brief reviews of Requirements-ba Water resources professionals prepare integrated, multipurpose â€oemasterâ€ development plans with alternative structural and non-structural management options. There is dominance of professionals and little participation of stakeholders. In this approach, one or more institutions have the ability and authority to develop and implement the plan. However, nowadays, since public have active participation in planning and management activities, top-down approaches are becoming less desirable or acceptable. Bottom up approach: In this approach there is active participation of interested stakeholders â€" This National Water Resources Management Strategy (NWRMS) was prepared to outline the objectives and strategies that address the major issues and challenges currently facing Kenya. The Strategy appreciates that integrated water resources management must be elevated and recognized as a national priority, which underpins all of Kenyaâ€™s social and economic development, and requires massive investment.Â (iv) To create mechanisms for an integrated approach to land and water resources planning and management on a catchment basis It is noted that there is currently a lack of integration of land and water use at the planning stage resulting in the mismatch of resources and demands on a catchment basis. Keywords: water resources, sustainable water systems, water use, water goods and services, scenarios, Foresight, Russia. 1 Leading researcher, Research Laboratory for Science and Technology Studies, National Research University â€oeHigher School of Economics, Email: osaritas@hse.ru.Â Scenarios can suit well a variety of methodological approaches applied in studies and documents, including those related to water (FlÃ ¶rke et al., 2011;UNESCO, 2015;World Business Council for Sustainable Development, 2006). Therefore, the present study also adopts the scenario approach, which takes future trends and uncertainties into consideration, and builds the basis for strategic responses to future challenges that may play out in different directions.