The Social Water Table of Andalusia is constituted in 2018 following a collaboration experience and intersectoral coordination in policy issues of the agua, starring a set of representative organizations of different sectors at the Andalusian scale.
Although it lacks its own legal personality, It relies on the structure of the organizations that form it to make a collective monitoring of the main events of the policy of the agua in the field of Andalusia, with the aim of making valuations, position take -up and joint proposals. This has given rise to the elaboration of a core of shared ideas that have been consolidated as a collective ideology throughout the process.
During this process, the table has gone approving and disseminating documents in which analyzes are presented, Diagnostics, alternatives and proposals to each of the issues that have been raised.
This elaboration has materialized in collective comments or allegations in different planning processes (hydrological plans, drought plans, agreements of the Unacalse commission) and in Documents aimed at public opinion through media and social networks in relation to policy proposals for agua (Regulation of the Integral Cycle, Andalusian Pact of the Agua, Drought decrees) or events related to the agua especially significant.
Water: controversial theme in Andalusia
The social table of Agua of Andalusia (MSA) has been critical of the participation mechanisms in the field of agua and environment in the Andalusian Council of the Agua held today in Seville. In the main body of consultation and advice of the Andalusian government in the matter of agua, The MSA has declared that, although they perceive slight advances in the latest public consultation processes, persist The inclination of the regional administration to limit the levels of effective social participation to the maximum.
Given this, the MSA insists that public information and active participation must be two of the fundamental principles on which it supports the management and planning of water resources, aquatic and aquifer ecosystems.
However, as MSA already denounced in Brussels in 2023, the functions of the regulated participation bodies, established in recent years by legal imperative, They collide with the reluctance or rejection by political representatives and of the technical teams, which often consider them mere appendages of the political-administrative structure.
The set of organizations that are part of this social table of the Agua of Andalusia defends that most of these organs are generally convened to endorse decisions made in advance by the administration and not for Bring social debate the really hot issues and interest social agents.
Political and economic interests behind the water
So, These organs have been perpetuated as bureaucratic instanceswith a conception of the participation and the merely formal consultation, but very little effective in transferring the issues and improvements that could arise from the collective and plural debate necessary for this type of matters.
The MSA criticizes that, in the meetings of these organs, most members limit themselves to vote or nod, with little knowledge and previous work on projects, plans or reports, subject to mere consultation, without enough time and space to develop debates or enrich them with virtually no contribution. In addition, when these modification proposals are produced, they are frequently laminated by the overwhelming majority of votes that the administrations have in these bodies.
The MSA considers that the Junta de Andalucía has been promoting a seemingly participatory model that works arbitrarily and erratically, which has gathered significantly significantly, and whose results have had Scarce real plasma in water -related planning processes. Although its number has been expanded, constituting new participation bodies, its operation has not been improved.
A clear imbalance persists within these bodies, in which more participation is given to public administrations, but also to representatives of some economic agents, in the face of agents representing broader social and environmental interestswhich, in the opinion of this social table, constitutes one of the main democratic deficits of the current participatory model.
The practical impossibility of participating initium in the design of administration proposals accentuates even more the withdrawal of its members when providing an active and useful collaboration. The MSA considers that this participatory model opposes the principles established by the AARHUS agreement and by Law 27/2006, of July 18, which regulates the rights of information, public participation and access to justice in the field of the environment, which transposes said agreement to the national regulations.
Sirva As an example, the second meeting of the Andalusian Water Council, held on March 12 (After its formal constitution on February 22, 2022), an organ whose meetings must be at least annual (art. 12 of Decree 477/2015, of November 17), but whose first and only call until now took place on February 1, 2023.
Hydrological and irrigation management plans
In this session, the Administration comes to inform the beginning of a new review of the hydrological plans of the intra -community demarcations on which it holds powers. Once again, the Administration informs about LThe review projects of hydrological plans and risk management plans projects of flooding of the Andalusian internal basins once the public information period has been completed and after the analysis of the allegations presented.
They do not submit for consideration of the council members Because they had already previously voted in the Water Councils of each hydrographic demarcation. Nor are the subjects that have raised more interest and controversy, and of course there is no debate.
One more sample, In the opinion of the MSA, of the type of operation, bureaucratized, hierarchical and controlled to some extent by some sector interests that do not represent the diversity of interests of the community Andalusian in this matter, granting a space very limited to the expression of social values and general interest.
On the other hand, the MSA warns that once again the opportunity has been missing in this same Andalusian Council of the Agua to consider the importance of review of the hydrological plan of the demarcation of the Guadalquivir and The management of water resources marked by the current plan (State competence in this case), even when this river is the main part of the consummy uses (particularly irrigation) of Andalusia.
The agenda of the Council also includes the presentation of a report on the review processes of the flood risk planning instruments in intra -community hydrographic demarcations of Andalusia; The update of the danger maps of the Guadalhorce and the review of the preliminary flood risk evaluation.
In the opinion of the table, the flood risk management plans (PGRI) contain some advances such as: recognizing the needs of greater coordination and planning of the civil protection authorities and of Emergency municipal plans in the risk of flooding.
Slow advance in early alert systems
The improvement of early alert systems to the population, the recognition of nature -based solutions as measures of special interest, the recognition of the need for Social Communication Strategies and Education around risk perception of administrations, social and citizen agents, and the recognition of the importance of the evaluation and diagnosis of the lessons learned with flood events.
However, these advances are excessively shy and are at a pace too slow, which does not allow an effective response or accompanied by the increase in flood damage due both to the acceleration of the consequences of climate change and the rest of the factors that concur: occupation of flood areas, agricultural practices not adapted to the conditions of the land, increasing soil waterproofing, new transport infrastructure that disorganize natural drainage, institutional alert and intervention systems limited or poor operation.
Finally, The MSA denounces that in the call of the Council they are out of the age of daywithout information or social debate, fundamental elements of the policy of the agua that interest the whole society, and that they develop with opacity and without participation of the set of social agents. Among these important issues we can cite the following:
- The implementation process of the Andalusian strategy of aguas regenerated, which has been presented in recent years as one of the emblematic flags of the policy of aguas Autonomic. A project presented by Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla at the United Nations Conference on Climate Change.
- The erratic evolution of decisions on the autonomous feature of supply and sanitation.
- The situation of the new regulation of the integral cycle of agua Urban, which was announced in the phase of previous information and of which you have no news.
- The important repercussions in the public domain of mining policy.
- The absence of an evaluation of the effects of drought on family, social and professional agriculture, which constitutes one of the backral columns of the territory, and that suffers, with the opposition of this table, linear reductions of endowments and marketing mechanisms of the marketing of the agua that benefit large -company models increasingly alien to the territories.
After More than three decades of operation of collegiate bodies of participation in the environmental field (Patronatos, Rective Boards, Councils, Monitoring Commissions, …), The MSA wants to insist that it is necessary to address an in -depth change in the composition, competences, objectives and operating standards, in such a way that a true participation of civil society is guaranteed.
This has been transferred at the Andalusian Council meeting of the Agua of March 12, 2025, with the hope and effort of not losing a new opportunity to improve this Participation of society in the next review of the demarcation hydrological plans that has just begun.