Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
The choice of scale is a similarly critical issue for water governance. In the Euro-
pean Union, for example, the allocation of water management responsibility is
decided on the basis of 'subsidiarity' (Bermann and Pistor, 2004). This concept
means, simply put, that decisions should be taken and policies implemented by the
smallest (or lowest) competent authority. Subsidiarity is balanced, in the European
approach to federalism, with 'harmonisation', in which legislation and policies are
selectively standardised. In some cases, this means that member states make the
decisions; in others, it is more appropriate and effective to make decisions at the
European level. In general, the balance has tilted towards harmonisation; most
national water policy in member states is now determined in Brussels and water
legislation is one of the most harmonised components of European environmental
legislation (Kaika and Page, 2002). The EU's Water Framework Directive and asso-
ciated approach to water governance are now widely recognised as being amongst
the most advanced in the world, at least potentially capable of redressing or attenu-
ating many of the persistent problems that plague water governance globally.
The work of environmental geographers has illustrated that scale, in short, is
both a social construct and a powerful lens through which to study and manage
water. The need to choose one or more scales of analysis is inevitable, as are the
constraints which a specifi c scale places upon research and management. However,
through research which articulates scales and clarifi es the bases upon which scales
are constructed and chosen, environmental geography allows us to refi ne both our
analyses and our stewardship of water resources.
Conclusions
Whereas engineering and hydrogeology (the other modern disciplines which can lay
a claim to a sustained focus on water issues) have largely focused on questions of
assessment and technique (associated with water supply and hydraulic technologies,
and hydrogeological processes in the latter), geographers' studies of water have been
concerned with interactions between humans and the environment in a much
broader sense (although focusing, understandably but perhaps rather myopically,
on the surface water cycle to the relative neglect of groundwater processes).
Through this research, geographers have made important contributions to broader
debates in geography on 'socio-nature': a concept that refutes conventional nature/
society binaries and asserts the mutual constitution of human and non-human
worlds. This work has important implications for applied water management
because it documents the effects of human actions on landscapes, allows us to assess
and predict water-related hazards, and analyses the relative risks and vulnerability
to those hazards across human societies. Moreover, work by geographers also docu-
ments how the hydrosocial cycle infl uences and impacts human societies, through,
for example, the mutual constitution of waterscapes and cultural norms, the politics
of water governance, and urban form. As a result, this work speaks to very general
concerns in 21st-century academia: accurately describing the relationship between
humans and environment, and shedding deterministic and anthropocentric assump-
tions about causality within that relationship.
This approach is in line with broader trends within academic and policy circles.
Water managers, for example, are increasingly cognisant of the fact that water
management must move beyond hydrology, biogeochemistry and engineering to
include the dynamics of what Shiela Jasanoff terms the 'co-production' of socio-
