Equity, efficiency and sustainability in water allocation in the Andes : trade-offs in a full world

Achieving a balance between equity, efficiency and sustainability appears unrealistic, suggesting the need to remove efficiency as a principle in water allocation and instead, make it an important but subsidiary tool to equity and sustainability. Allocation mechanisms with varying degrees of governmental intervention exist in Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. Water laws in these three countries indicate that while efficiency has become the bastion of neo-liberalisation, equity and sustainability principles are either neglected or become subsidiary, and the complex definition, measurement and monitoring of what constitutes a sustainable scale of human water use, effectively make it an impractical goal