Water governance in the twentieth-first century

Abstract

It is widely ackowledged that the world water crisis is mainly a crisis of governance. However, there is no shared understanding of what "governance" means, how it works, who are its actors. The prevailing conceptions of governance in mainstream water policy documents tend to be instrumental and idealistic. Perhaps the most important consequence of instrumental and idealistic understandings of governance is the rhetorical depoliticization of what is, paradoxically, a political process. The main mechanism of this "depoliticization" of governance" is the exclusion of the ends and values informing water policy from the debate. Instrumental and idealistic understandings of governance constitute a major obstacle for the scientific understanding of the process and for achieving success in policy interventions directed at tackling the water crisis. The paper argues for the development of a balance between the techno-scientific, socio-economic, political, and cultural aspects of water management activities, which may help in superseding the artificial separation of water research and practice in disciplinary and corporatist feuds.

Boundaries between inequality and difference in water governance

“…According to Castro (2007), social conflicts and confrontations between political projects are at the core of what is internationally called water governance in the 21 st century. The boundaries of these conflicts are defined by a complex arrangement of variables, which range from water availability and projections of commitment of the resource to political confrontations about the forms of use and access to socioterritorial resources.…”

The Value Base of Water Governance: A Multi-Disciplinary Perspective

“…Hermans et al (2006) for a study which explains conflicts in terms of economic values of water or Groenfeldt and Schmidt (2013) for a perspective from ethics), others have a very broad and inclusive understanding that would benefit from some systematisation. Presenting the general public's thinking on water values and attitudes around water, Hatfield-Dodds et al (2006/2007 for example suggest that: " [t]here is a strong element of public good thinking, acknowledgement of environmental rights, and support for the efficient use of water for Australia's overall wellbeing" thus including very different value concepts such as efficiency or environmental values of water.…”

“…This paper therefore proceeds by discussing various meanings of water governance, before introducing multiple perspectives on values, a term that is of central importance to economists, philosophers, psychologists and other social scientists. Water governance may refer to a theoretic ideal which prescribes that government organisations should jointly tackle water management issues with stakeholders and civil society, rather than act by themselves in a top-down manner (Castro 2007;UNDP 2004). In the literature, this perspective is known under the headline of "the shift from government to governance" (Walker 2014).…”

Multi-Level Policy Coalitions an Interpretative Model of Water Conflicts in the Americas

“…It is not merely a question of insertion in some alterglobalist networks, but also the accumulation, at the international level, of political resources that can be reused within national spaces of power (ministries, regulatory bodies, etc.). Thus, while conventional governance approaches (Young, 1994;Castro, 2004Castro, , 2007 make internationalization the simple outcome of creating horizontal networks outside the sphere of the State, national spaces of power constitute an essential dimension of these processes (Dezalay, 2007). How does analysis not consider the national technical groups (civil engineers in particular), and their social and political power?…”