Efforts to meet human water needs at local scales may cause negative environmental externalities and stress on the water system at regional and global scales. Hence, assessing Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) targets requires a broad and in-depth knowledge of the global to local dynamics of water availability and use. Furthermore, interactions and trade-offs between different SDG targets may lead to sub-optimal or even adverse outcomes if the set of actions are not properly pre-designed to consider such inter-linkages. Thus, scientific research and evidence have an important role to play in facilitating the implementation of SDGs through assessments and policy engagement from global to local scales. This paper addresses some of these challenges related to implementation and monitoring of the targets of the SDGs from a water perspective, based on the key findings of a conference organized in 2015 focused on three essential aspects of SDGs: indicators, inter-linkages, and implementation. The paper argues that indicators should not be too simple and should ultimately deliver sustainability measures. The paper highlights that remote sensing and earth observation technologies can play a key role in supporting the monitoring of water targets. It also recognizes that implementing SDGs is a societal process of development, and there is a need to link how SDGs relate to public benefits and to communicate this to the broader public.

Water research is introduced from the combined perspectives of natural and social science and cases of citizen and stakeholder coproduction of knowledge. Using the overarching notion of transdisciplinarity, we examine how interdisciplinary and participatory water research has taken place and could be developed further. It becomes apparent that water knowledge is produced widely within society, across certified disciplinary experts and noncertified expert stakeholders and citizens. However, understanding and management interventions may remain partial, or even conflicting, as much research across and between traditional disciplines has failed to integrate disciplinary paradigms due to philosophical, methodological, and communication barriers. We argue for more agonistic relationships that challenge both certified and noncertified knowledge productively. These should include examination of how water research itself embeds and is embedded in social context and performs political work. While case studies of the cultural and political economy of water knowledge exist, we need more empirical evidence on how exactly culture, politics, and economics have shaped this knowledge and how and at what junctures this could have turned out differently. We may thus channel the coproductionist critique productively to bring perspectives, alternative knowledges, and implications into water politics where they were not previously considered; in an attempt to counter potential lock‐in to particular water policies and technologies that may be inequitable, unsustainable, or unacceptable. While engaging explicitly with politics, transdisciplinary water research should remain attentive to closing down moments in the research process, such as framings, path‐dependencies, vested interests, researchers’ positionalities, power, and scale. WIREs Water 2016, 3:369–389. doi: 10.1002/wat2.1132For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

In the context of accelerated global socio-environmental change, the Water-Energy-Food Nexus has received increasing attention within science and international politics by promoting integrated resource governance. This study explores the scientific nexus debates from a discourse analytical perspective to reveal knowledge and power relations as well as geographical settings of nexus research. We also investigate approaches to socio-nature relations that influence nexus research and subsequent political implications. Our findings suggest that the leading nexus discourse is dominated by natural scientific perspectives and a neo-Malthusian framing of environmental challenges. Accordingly, the promoted cross-sectoral nexus approach to resource governance emphasizes efficiency, security, future sustainability, and poverty reduction. Water, energy, and food are conceived as global trade goods that require close monitoring, management and control, to be achieved via quantitative assessments and technological interventions. Within the less visible discourse, social scientific perspectives engage with the social, political, and normative elements of the Water-Energy-Food Nexus. These perspectives criticize the dominant nexus representation for its managerial, neoliberal, and utilitarian approach to resource governance. The managerial framing is critiqued for masking power relations and social inequalities, while alternative framings acknowledge the political nature of resource governance and socio-nature relations. The spatial dimensions of the nexus debate are also discussed. Notably, the nexus is largely shaped by western knowledge, yet applied mainly in specific regions of the Global South. In order for the nexus to achieve integrative solutions for sustainability, the debate needs to overcome its current discursive and spatial separations. To this end, we need to engage more closely with alternative nexus discourses, embrace epistemic pluralism and encourage multi-perspective debates about the socio-nature relations we actually intend to promote.

This study analyzed and assessed spatio-temporal dynamics of land-use change (LUC) and urban expansion (UE) within the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area (GAMA) of Ghana. This region serves as a case to illustrate how a major economic hub and political core area is experiencing massive spatial transformations, resulting in uneven geographies of urban land expansion. Quickbird/Worldview-2 images for the years 2008 and 2017 were segmented and classified to produce LUC maps. LUC and UE were analyzed by post-classification change detection and spatial metrics, respectively. The results revealed an intensive decrease in open-space by 83.46 km2, brushland/farmland (194.29 km2) and waterbody/wetland (3.32 km2). Conversely, forestland and urban built-up area increased by 3.45 km2 and 277.62 km2. Urban extent expanded from 411.45 km2 (27%) in 2008 to 689.07 km2 (46%) in 2017 at a rate of 5.9% and an intensity of 2.06% with an expansion coefficient of 1.5%, indicating low-density urban sprawl. The spatial pattern turned out to be an uneven and spatially differentiated outward expansion, which materialized mainly in districts located within the urban peripheries but intensely towards eastern and western directions, being the frontier and the hotspots of urbanization. Overall, the findings bear important implications for regional spatial planning and development.

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Accra, the capital city of Ghana, is characterized by limited networked supply, heterogeneous water providers, and various forms of provision. In this paper, we explore how the people delivering water through water tankers shape the distribution of water across the city. Drawing on empirical descriptions of water sourcing and distribution by truck drivers, we show that who gets what water at what price is shaped by the ability of tanker drivers to act as brokers, piecing together various social and material arrangements and resorting to different rationalities and expertise. We analyze how state actors deal with tanker supply seeking to reconcile their mandates with the realities of water supply. Analyzing urban water supply through the practices of water distribution, we show the messy and open-ended character of water governance processes. A practice-based approach makes the complex interrelations between different water providers across the city visible, and underscores the role of individual and collective identities, emotions, moral norms, and unequal interdependencies between actors in shaping urban water distributions.

Abstract:The paper aims to analyze the extent of Ecosystem Service (ESS) based Adaptation (EbA) to climate change in the policy-making process of Bangladesh. The paper is based on a three stage hybrid policy-making cycle: (i) agenda setting; (ii) policy formulation; and (iii) policy implementation stage, where the contributions of EbA can horizontally (on the ground) or vertically (strategic stage) be mainstreamed and integrated. A total of nine national and sectoral development and climate change policies, and 329 climate change adaptation projects are examined belonging to different policy-making stages. The major findings include that the role of ESS is marginally considered as an adaptation component in most of the reviewed policies, especially at the top strategic level (vertical mainstreaming). However, at the policy formulation and implementation stage (horizontal mainstreaming), they are largely ignored and priority is given to structural adaptation policies and projects, e.g., large scale concrete dams and embankments. For example, ESS's roles to adapt sectors such as urban planning, biodiversity management and disaster risk reduction are left unchecked, and the implementation stage receives overwhelming priorities and investments to undertake hard adaptation measures such that only 38 projects are related to EbA. The paper argues that: (i) dominant structural adaptation ideologies; (ii) the expert and bureaucracy dependent policy making process; and (iii) the lack of adaptive and integration capacities at institutional level are considerably offsetting the EbA mainstreaming process that need to be adequately addressed for climate change adaptation.