Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Trevor Birkenholtz, Pennsylvania State University

; ,

Description:

Water is at the core of complex sustainability challenges, involving multiple scales, sectors, institutions and agents. Collectively, these challenges—climate change induced variability in freshwater availability, deteriorating water quality, unequal access and the rapidly rising competing demands across economic sectors, political boundaries and sections of society—have likely graduated to the enormity of a crisis. Understood as both, natural and social in nature, the crisis of water scarcity and access to sanitation has been characterised as a crisis of governance (OECD, 2011), and has significant bearing on adoption of sanitation in water insecure regions.

The term, ‘water governance’, according to Zwarteveen et al (2017, 8) concerns “deeply political choices about where water should flow; about the norms, rules and laws on which such choices should be based; about who is best able or qualified to decide about this; and about the kind of societal future such choices support.” The response to such concerns critically determines who gets water, of what quality, how they are able to access it, how much they can effectively use, and at what social and economic costs. Given the centrality of water for life, these choices intimately impact people’s everyday lives, including the sanitation facilities they have access to.

Dominant approaches to critical water and sanitation infrastructures in the policy arena have been positivist, overly techno-managerial, depoliticized, and environmentally deterministic (Loftus, 2015; McFarlane and Rutherford 2007). They rely on notions of modernity, and security and control of water at the level of nation-states and their constituent states, erasing other forms of knowing water and society relations, and obfuscating socially differentiated experiences of waterscapes that are mediated by a multiplicity of socio-political relations.

Acknowledging the macro-level political economy and ecology that shape water and the practices of its governance, some political ecologists have attended to the unequal social, economic and political power relations experienced along intersecting lines of social differences (race/gender/class/caste/religion), that produce nuanced dimensions of water inequity and insecurity, and toilet insecurity (Loftus, 2006; Truelove, 2011; O’Reilly, 2015; Millington, 2018; Anand, 2017; Bjorkman, 2015; Sultana, 2020).

Works cited:

Anand, N., 2011. Pressure: The politechnics of water supply in Mumbai. Cultural Anthropology, 26(4), pp.542-564.

Loftus, A., 2006. Reification and the dictatorship of the water meter. Antipode, 38(5), pp.1023-1045.

Loftus, A., 2015. Water (in) security: securing the right to water. The Geographical Journal, 181(4), pp.350-356.

McFarlane, C. and Rutherford, J., 2008. Political infrastructures: Governing and experiencing the fabric of the city. International journal of urban and regional research, 32(2), pp.363-374.

Millington, N., 2018. Producing water scarcity in São Paulo, Brazil: The 2014-2015 water crisis and the binding politics of infrastructure. Political Geography, 65, pp.26-34.

Molle, F., Mollinga, P.P. and Wester, P., 2009. Hydraulic bureaucracies and the hydraulic mission: Flows of water, flows of power. Water alternatives, 2(3), pp.328-349.

OECD. Water governance in OECD countries: A multi-level approach. OECD, 2011.

O'Reilly, K., 2016. From toilet insecurity to toilet security: creating safe sanitation for women and girls. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water, 3(1), pp.19-24.

Sultana, Farhana. 2020. "Embodied intersectionalities of urban citizenship: Water, infrastructure, and gender in the global South." Annals of the American Association of Geographers 110 (5): 1407-1424.

Truelove, Y., 2011. (Re-) Conceptualizing water inequality in Delhi, India through a feminist political ecology framework. Geoforum, 42(2), pp.143-152.

Zwarteveen, M., Kemerink‐Seyoum, J.S., Kooy, M., Evers, J., Guerrero, T.A., Batubara, B., Biza, A., Boakye‐Ansah, A., Faber, S., Cabrera Flamini, A. and Cuadrado‐Quesada, G., 2017. Engaging with the politics of water governance. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water, 4(6), p.e1245.

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda