The Effects of Drought and Reallocation on Water Resources Planning for the Chattahoochee River Basin

Proceedings of the 1993 Georgia Water Resources Conference, April 20-21, 1993, Athens, Georgia.This paper will consider the problems of inter-jurisdictional water resource management by relating Alabama's recent experiences with drought planning and its involvement in the Comprehensive Study of the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Hint (ACF) River Basin. In both cases, state-level participation in water management activities has been constrained by the existing institutions that address water management issues and the decision-making processes these institutions apply to specific problems. By considering the conflicting scales of participation in both planning examples, we may be better able to reconcile three components of decision making towards improved water management practice: water use, water management practice by alternative users at differing geographical scales, and jurisdictionally-based water policy. The problems associated with poor policy coordination in water resource management also raise concern about how optimal management is depicted for planners. Although planning theory can be unrepresentative of how management occurs across the array of water resource decision-makers, theory can be a strong influence in the development of policies and in funding for specific projects. A premise necessary for this discussion is that water management is practiced within formal, procedural, institutionally organized settings (ie. water permitting) and informally by water managers who may not be documented by these formal planning and resource management processes.Sponsored and Organized by: U.S. Geological Survey, Georgia Department of Natural Resources, The University of Georgia, Georgia State University, Georgia Institute of TechnologyThis book was published by the Institute of Natural Resources, The University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia 30602 with partial funding provided by the U.S. Department of Interior, Geological Survey, through the Georgia Water Research Institute as authorized by the Water Resources Research Act of 1984 (P.L. 98-242). The views and statements advanced in this publication are solely those of the authors and do not represent official views or policies of the University of Georgia or the U.S. Geological Survey or the conference sponsors