ments and legislation, nationally and internation- ally, to protect what remains and restore where
possible. At an international level, the govern- ment signed the Ramsar Convention, which aims
to promote the conservation of wetlands. The EC Birds Directive and the EC Habitats Directive
require the designation of special protection areas and special areas of conservation, respectively. At
a national level, under the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act, wetlands may be notified as sites
of Special Scientific Interest SSSIs.
The need to curb over-production, while also recognising the important role of farmers as man-
agers of the countryside, has provided the ratio- nale for the various agri-environment schemes
that have grown in importance since the initial designation of Environmentally Sensitive Areas
ESA in the UK in 1987. Several of the 22 areas now designated in England and Wales contain
wetland habitats, where the aim is to maintain or enhance the wetland resource by paying farmers
to pursue appropriate agricultural practices.
There has been much debate over the appropri- ate mechanism to ensure that farmers deliver the
public benefit of nature conservation or enhance- ment at least economic cost Colman et al., 1992;
Whitby and Saunders, 1996; Smith and Colman, 1997. However, there has been little discussion of
the importance of collective action among farmers in delivering this public good and the role water
management institutions in facilitating this pro- cess. There has been some attention in the media
given to the lack of co-operation among farmers. This is perceived as a significant impediment to
the effective conservation of wet grassland in the Somerset Levels; compulsion has been proposed
as an alternative approach The Times 24298.
In this paper, we review the reasons why collec- tive action among farmers may be important for
the purpose of wetland restoration Section 2. We discuss how the findings in the social science
literature can be related to collective action in this context Section 3. We then ask whether there are
suitable water management institutions in the UK that could facilitate this process, drawing on the
findings of a survey of Internal Drainage Board representatives Sections 4 and 5. We conclude
with some potential directions for institutional reform and policy development more generally.
While the emphasis here is on the experience in England and Wales, water management in other
countries involves similar institutional issues. In particular, the study by White and Runge 1995
on watershed management in Haiti has some rele- vant findings in this regard Section 3. Institu-
tions for the collective management of irrigation are more often discussed in the literature e.g.
Loehman and Dinar, 1994; Ostrom, 1990. How- ever, the principles discussed here will apply in a
similar way to diverse locations and water man- agement issues.
2. The rationale for collective action
The term ‘restoration’ can accommodate vari- ous degrees of reinstatement and may encompass
a broad spectrum of activities from minor repara- tion of damage through contrived reassembly of
species to de novo regeneration Wheeler, 1995. There is a growing literature on how to determine
what to restore as well as the best techniques to use Treweek et al., 1993; Parker, 1995. Depend-
ing on the objectives of restoration and the loca- tion,
the technical
complexity of
restoring wetlands can vary markedly. In some areas, at-
taining suitable conditions may just mean reduc- ing the extent to which water is removed from an
area, with little control over water levels. In con- trast, it is possible, especially in areas with high
levels of infrastructure and flat land, to generate specific water regimes for particular ecological
requirements. The former approach is more likely to be associated with gravity drained areas and
less productive land while the latter may be more often associated with pump drained areas of
higher agricultural productivity.
Treweek et al. 1991 argue that in a similar way to ensuring the maintenance of the agricul-
tural productivity of farmland, wildlife productiv- ity
also requires
careful and
continuous hydrological control. One of the aims of their
research has been to establish conditions required to achieve specific restoration objectives. Two of
the conditions that may give rise to a need for collective actions are as follows: the costs of water
management; the relationship between scale of restoration and environmental benefits.
2
.
1
. The costs of water management Whatever the extent of control over conditions,
it will often be difficult, if not impossible, for individual land holders to control the wetness of
their fields without affecting their neighbours’ fields. Furthermore, restoration may require some
alteration of regional wetness. Thus in the Somer- set Levels and Moors ESA, Baldock et al. 1990
comment that ‘it is impossible for a farmer indi- vidually to control water levels of holdings with-
out introducing a very complex and costly system of sluices within the Internal Drainage Board
water courses…’.
There is some anecdotal evidence of economies of size involved in restoring a larger area if ma-
nipulation of the arterial drainage infrastructure is required. Raising the water level of a block of
land above an adjacent area leads to some natural drawdown. To protect adjacent landowners, water
that seeps out in this way may have to be pumped back in. The extent to which this happens is
positively related to the perimeter-area ratio. Since larger areas have a smaller perimeter in
relation to area, there is some marginal cost sav- ing in restoring larger areas Adrian Armstrong,
Agricultural Development and Advisory Service Land Research Centre, Gleadthorpe, personal
communication, 1997. In some locations, these costs can become substantial through time as land
levels fall with the oxidation of peat on the sur- rounding intensively farmed land in relation to
the level maintained on a nature reserve by envi- ronmental conservation.
In such cases, whether or not wetland restora- tion is achieved depends not only on how one
individual farmer reacts to the monetary incen- tives offered through government conservation
schemes, but also whether agreement can be reached with neighbouring land holders to take
advantage of the opportunity to provide wetland habitats. From some investigation of what hap-
pens in ESAs, it would seem that farmer coali- tions of perhaps 7 – 12 land holders in the case of
the Somerset Levels and Moors, and 15 – 20 land holders in the Upper Thames tributaries might be
required before raising water tables or a major alteration in the hydrological regime becomes a
practical option.
2
.
2
. En6ironmental benefits and scale of restoration
Even in cases where hydrological and topo- graphical conditions permit individual land hold-
ers to control field wetness effectively, there are other reasons why collective action may lead to a
disproportionate increase in environmental and economic benefit.
The environmental benefit of a wetland restora- tion scheme will often depend on what is happen-
ing in the surrounding area. Wheeler 1995 makes the point that wetlands are far more influ-
enced by their surroundings than are drylands because the character of wetlands is often criti-
cally dependent on the nature of their water sup- ply. Thus fens may have various water sources
and a wide catchment, and changes in these may materially influence the quantity and quality of
their water inputs. In the context of restoration of lowland wet grassland, Treweek et al. 1991 com-
ment that the weakness of current efforts to pro- tect wetlands lies in the separation of the
management of protected areas and adjacent land. They discuss the problems of ‘edge effects’ — any
wetland that is recreated from agricultural land will be surrounded by land still under agricultural
management. Impacts might take the form of disturbance from livestock or people, run-off of
the agro-chemicals which affects water quality, sedimentation, the encroachment of non-wetland
plant species, and, most seriously, the effect of continued drainage.
The theory of island biogeography lends some support to the idea that scale is important in
wetland restoration. The number of species that an area, can maintain is directly related to the size
of the area, but not on an arithmetic basis MacArthur and Wilson, 1967. An arithmetic
decline in the area of a wetland preserve can result in a geometric decline in the number of species
able to use the area. Thus, larger areas will be more effective as habitats for wildlife than smaller
ones. O’Brien and Buckingham 1989 comment in the context of the broads ESA that to ensure
success in restoring bird populations, such as red- shank, lapwing and oystercatcher, it is important
to have whole river catchments entering tier two of the ESA scheme which involves raising water
levels.
1
One more specific example is that a mini- mum of 20 ha of wet reedbed is necessary for the
successful breeding of bitterns Royal Society for the Protection of Birds research, Jeff Kew, per-
sonal communication, 1997. It is very likely that the appropriate area for restoration would not fall
exclusively within the land owned by one farmer.
3. Relevant findings from social science literature
