Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
unit volume. In demonstrating the links between the water supply system, urbanisa-
tion, economic interests (such as the international trade in bananas) and political
power, Swyngedouw's study was a considerable conceptual breakthrough. More-
over, it had signifi cant policy infl uence - inspiring, for example, the theme and
approach of the UNDP's 2006 Human Development Report on water, which sought
to demonstrate (in contrast to much of the water-related research in the development
literature) the links between power, inequitable political economies and households'
access to water (UNDP 2006). Indeed, the UNDP's argument - that water scarcity
is largely a social and economic construct that is the result of human actions rather
than natural events - is directly opposed to arguments in favour of privatisation
and commercialisation predicated upon an assumption of water scarcity, paralleling
the divide between mainstream economists and critical geographers who have
studied water privatisation in the global South (e.g. Bakker, 2003; Bond, 2004;
McDonald and Ruiters, 2005).
Another example of this 'unsettling' of conventional concepts can be found in
recent debates over the 'watershed' as a socially constructed scale. The desirability
of organising environmental management at the watershed scale is rarely disputed
within both academic and policy literatures. Similarly, the ecological relevance of
the watershed scale is usually taken to be self-evident within the water management
literature. Environmental geographers have critically examined these arguments,
inspired by Neil Smith's (1984) arguments about the social construction of scales -
whether evidently social (such as a parish, or a region) or putatively 'natural'.
Geographers have argued, for example, that watersheds appear as meaningful scales
to some environmental scientists, but are largely ignored by land users and managers
(such as farmers and agricultural ministries) which operate within cadastral or local
political boundaries such as the county, parish or nation-state (Fischhendler and
Feitelsen, 2005; Ivey et al., 2006). Hydrologists and groundwater hydrogeologists
have also argued that the watershed is an arbitrary scale upon which to base water
management, insofar as groundwater (aquifer) boundaries and surface watershed
boundaries almost never coincide, and insofar as topographical, meteorological and
soil conditions can heavily infl uence the degree to which runoff is interconnected at
a watershed scale (De Vito et al., 2005). And environmental scientists - particularly
ecologists - argue that a watershed can be a relatively meaningless scale in ecological
terms, and argue that spatial scales such as range or biome are far more relevant
to integrated environmental assessment and management.
Water and Scale
The research discussed above opens up the question of the scales at which water is
best managed. Water is a local resource par excellence: cheap to store but expensive
to transport, with variations in water quality posing diffi culties (both in ecological
and public health terms) for long-distance transport. For these reasons, it would
seem that water should best be governed at a local level. But the biophysically
hierarchical nature of surface runoff organisation, the existence of transboundary
waters, the multiple competing uses to which water is subject (exacerbated by inevi-
table confl icts between upstream and downstream users), frequent scalar mismatches
between supply and demand, and the implications of poor water management for
public and environmental health all imply the need for a higher order of governance
- usually regional or national. On the one hand, distribution of governance to local
levels of government makes sense, particularly where different regions have dramati-
