ABSTRACT
The present book confidently states that it is about ‘the politics of water’. So why worry if water is political? The political nature of water appears to be blindingly obvious. The most classic representation of this position (Mollinga 2001, 733) claims: ‘At a general level, the statement that “water is politics” hardly needs any defense’. In a later paper, Mollinga (2008a, 3) qualifies this all-encompassing statement in a narrower version that refers only to water management: ‘water resources management is an inherently political process’. The essentialism of these statements raised our curiosity, as it appears to be fairly easy to think of instances of water management that are not intuitively political. This chapter will look at the meaning(s) of the political. We recognize that water is very often contested or contestable, but that water is not necessarily politically contested. The recognition of the political in water issues is a relatively new development.
To mention just one example, the 2004 World Water Council seminar on Water and Politics in Marseille was a first for the organization. In the past few decades internationally networked water scholars with backgrounds outside political science have discovered water as a political issue. Explaining water as a political issue often had more explanatory power than presenting a merely technical analysis of water. The political take on water explicitly sought to expose patterns of depoliticization. Scholars as diverse as Tony Allan, a geographer by training, and Wageningen University’s Irrigation and Water Engineering group, on which Mollinga’s work has had a strong imprint, have worked hard to convince their colleagues in the water sector of the momentous and damaging implications of ignoring water politics. Saying ‘water is politics’ is a strategic speech act (Austin 1962), to politicize
water issues for a social (emancipatory) goal, to break an undesirable status quo.1
The essentialism in the claim that water is necessarily political can be strategically appealing in ‘political advocacy and struggles to provide satisfactory analytical concepts’ (Mollinga 2008b, 11). This does not exclude the possibility that claiming that ‘water is not politics’, or that ‘politics is the problem’, as multilaterals like the World Bank have done (Flinders and Buller 2006), could serve the same, or other, strategic goals. Whether water is political or not depends on how you define politics. This
is the business of political science, and it should be cause for alarm to
political scientists that prominent authors on water politics like Mollinga rarely engage with the political science literature proper when writing about water politics. Nor does his framing of a ‘political sociology of water’ draw on existing political sociology, yet so far this has failed to elicit a response from the political science (and political sociology) communities. To a degree, the political science community may have itself to blame, as political science can be an inward-looking discipline (Buzan and Little 2001), and there are conspicuously few political scientists who write about water. ‘[T]he few studies conducted on international water relations tend to be written by geographers, civil engineers and experts of law, paying cursory attention at best to established IR [International Relations] theory or political science frameworks’ (Warner and Zeitoun 2008, 802). As a consequence, it is perhaps unsurprising that water politics is not very
well defined in the water literature. The absence of leading (competing) definitions can be a problem, as definitions matter, and they reveal a lot about the Weltanschauung of their users. Let us contrast the definition by Peter Mollinga, an expert on water engineering studying water politics, with that of Tony Turton, a political scientist writing about water management. Turton (2002) offers a definition of hydropolitics (unlike Mollinga, Turton treats hydropolitics as synonymous with water politics) that is squarely rooted in David Easton’s pioneering work in political science (1965, 21), adapted to fit water. Turton (2002, 16) defines hydropolitics as ‘the authoritative allocation of values with respect to water in society’. Mollinga (2001, 735) on the other hand, inspired by a dictionary definition,2 refers to water politics as ‘the contestation of water resource planning and use’. With some simplification, we can say that while Mollinga focuses on process, Turton focuses on the outcome-the social order. Obviously, both are very important to understanding water politics, but we observe that Easton, by way of Turton, still equates politics with value conflicts, not resource conflicts. The choice of the broader, process definition allows Mollinga (2001, 2008)
to distinguish between three different levels or domains of water politics (hydropolitics, everyday politics and politics of policy3) while observing that ‘a fourth level is emerging’: the global politics of water (2001, footnote 1). He explains hydropolitics as ‘the level of inter-state politics regarding the allocation, distribution, control and quality of water resources. … It can also refer, in a federal structure, to inter-state water resources issues within a nation state’ (2001: 735). This is a helpful start, but it does not explain or problematize the con-
testation. While Mollinga (2001, 750) identifies the perceptions of different interest groups as inevitable (‘socio-political polarization’), at the same time mentioning ‘scarcity’, Tony Turton implies that he sees scarcity as the main reason for water becoming a political issue: ‘because water is scarce and because it is essential for life, health and welfare, it has become a contested terrain and therefore a political issue’ (Turton 2002, 13). The implication would be that where there is no scarcity, there is no water politics.
