Institutional capacity
From Water Wiki
Many formal institutions--government agencies, non-profit and for-profit corporations--have pieces of the water regulatory puzzle. This page outlines some of those institutions to give links to further discussion of their roles and their capacity for freshwater governance.
- Water supplier
In North Carolina, water suppliers are regulated by federal, state and local governments, and to those water suppliers it often feels like regulation dominates all their decisionmaking. Yet water suppliers have more autonomy than in many other states in the United States. Such important matters as rate setting, assurance of future supplies, extent of service areas and decisions whether to interconnect with other systems are largely left to the systems themselves, at least the public sector systems.
- Local and regional planners
In North Carolina, various local and regional planning agencies, such as the Councils of Government, have played major roles from time to time in helping with water plans. But there is little or no regional planning on an ongoing basis. Some potential planning structures began to emerge in the 1990s and 2000s around river basins, as the state's wastewater permitting and planning was moved firmly and formally to river basin scales. The state water resource agency has also changed its original state water supply planning scale to a river basin scale, starting in the 2000s.
-The Catawba-Wateree Project, Duke Energy's system for power generation in the Catawba River basin, provides an interesting study in regional planning, under the direction and authority of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. It has created a Drought Management Advisory Group to create and modify its Low Inflow Protocol and a Water Management Group that is a potential model for regional water supply planning elsewhere in the state and region.
- Associations
ACEC/PENC and various other professional associations are important networks that build social capital and expertise around water.
- State agencies
- Interstate and federal agencies
