Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
1
Introduction
“There is more than enough water in the world
for domestic purposes, for agriculture and for industry. (…)
In short, scarcity is manufactured through political processes and institutions (…).”
(United Nations Human Development Report 2006: 3 )
Water scarcity, water crisis, water wars since the beginning of the 1990s these terms have
appeared again and again in scientific debates, political strategies, and media reports. Water is
perceived as a scarce resource that needs efficient management in order to satisfy all needs and
to prevent violent conflicts over its distribution. Considerable research has been devoted to
this topic. In this research, water is commonly referred to as a common pool resource: a non
excludable public good with rivalry in terms of consumption. Hence, research has long focused
on collective action problems in managing this common pool resource (e.g. Ostrom 1990,
1992).
In recent years, anthropological and sociological scholars in particular have criticized that
in these studies the complexity of water, its embeddedness in a wider cultural and social con
text, and the role of power have been neglected. Water is different from other natural re
sources in some important aspects: its mobility, its variability, and its multiplicity (Mehta 2006:
2f; Linton 2006: [10]). Mobility makes ownership claims difficult: Water moves, transcending
state borders, not fixed like other resources. Variability refers to the fact that its availability
varies temporarily, depending on weather conditions. Multiplicity evolves as water is used for
numerous economic, technical, cultural, and social purposes simultaneously and thus has ma
terial as well as symbolic dimensions. It is obvious, albeit long neglected, that water manage
ment is not merely a technical issue that can be decided by technocrats and engineers, but
involves decisions that affect the sometimes conflicting interests of various actors and
spheres of society. Therefore, the final policy output is the result of strategies, debates, con
flicts, and coalitions between individual and organizational actors with differing interests con
cerning the distribution and use of water resources.
Since the turn of the millennium, this aspect has received enhanced consideration and re
sulted in what Tony Allan called the “political institutional water paradigm” (Allan 2003). In
ternational organizations stress the importance of “good water governance” for reaching sus
tainable, equitable, efficient, and democratic usage of water resources. In this view, scarcity is
not necessarily a product of physical shortage but rather of societal and political processes and
decisions. In 2006, the United Nations Human Development Report cited above confirmed
this conceptual shift when it highlighted the role of power and inequality in the global water
crisis and rejected the idea of physical scarcity as its primary cause. Lack of water is considered
the result of public policies and of institutional regulations favoring rich and powerful people
and excluding other notably poor people from equal access to water: “The scarcity at the
heart of the global water crisis is rooted in power, poverty and inequality, not in physical avail
ability” (UNDP 2006: 2).
This new discourse is centered on the term water governance . On the one hand, it refers to
the complex setting of water management in wider governance structures that have to be ac
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