Sustainable urban groundwater governance in Faisalabad, Pakistan: challenges and possibilities.

Groundwater use is high in developing countries, especially in places where municipal water authorities struggle to meet the water demand of their residents. To analyze the interactions between groundwater and piped water in the Global South context, Faisalabad, Pakistan was taken as the case study area. Using the Institutional Analysis and Development framework and Elinor Ostrom’s design principles as analysis tools, formal and informal institutions governing the piped water and groundwater, including their congruence with the social and ecological factors, were explored. The results showed that scarcity of piped water pushed people towards groundwater and the absence of informal and the weakness of formal governance rules allowed people to access groundwater without restrictions. As a result, urban groundwater in several parts of the city has depleted, while in others, it is close to depletion. According to Elinor Ostrom to manage the resources held in common; resource users can come together and devise institutions to govern the resource themselves. A one-shot common pool resource experiment was conducted with the household heads to determine if people want to want to come together and govern groundwater. The results of the game showed that participants are willing to moderately cooperate with each other on matters pertaining to groundwater withdrawal. As far as piped water is concerned, the residents’ choices for the piped water governance mode were also explored, using the discrete choice experiment and the conditional logit model. The results showed that people prefer to have a state-owned piped water system. In terms of governance, they prefer an impartial system and, to a lesser extent, prefer to co-produce piped water