ABSTRACT
The litany of alarming observations about water use and misuse is now familiar—over a billion people without access to safe drinking water; almost every major river dammed and diverted; increasing conflicts over the delivery of water in urban areas; continuing threats to water quality from agricultural inputs and industrial wastes; and the increasing variability of climate, including threats of severe droughts and flooding across locales and regions. These issues present tremendous challenges for water governance.
This book focuses on three major concepts and approaches that have gained currency in policy and governance circles, both globally and regionally—scarcity and crisis, marketization and privatization, and participation. It provides a historical and contextual overview of each of these ideas as they have emerged in global and regional policy and governance circles and pairs these with in-depth case studies that examine manifestations and contestations of water governance internationally.
The book interrogates ideas of water crisis and scarcity in the context of bio-physical, political, social and environmental landscapes to better understand how ideas and practices linked to scarcity and crisis take hold, and become entrenched in policy and practice. The book also investigates ideas of marketization and privatization, increasingly prominent features of water governance throughout the global South, with particular attention to the varied implementation and effects of these governance practices. The final section of the volume analyzes participatory water governance, querying the disconnects between global discourses and local realities, particularly as they intersect with the other themes of interest to the volume.
Promoting a view of changing water governance that links across these themes and in relation to contemporary realities, the book is invaluable for students, researchers, advocates, and policy makers interested in water governance challenges facing the developing world.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|22 pages
Integrating hegemony
part II|75 pages
Crisis and scarcity
chapter 4|10 pages
Producing crisis
chapter 6|18 pages
Abundance and scarcity amidst the crisis of ‘modern water'
chapter 7|16 pages
Water scarcity and the colonial state
part III|68 pages
Marketization and privatization
chapter 12|16 pages
(Dis)connecting the flow, steering the waters
chapter 13|18 pages
Privatization of the urban water supply in Kenya
chapter 14|6 pages
Privatization, marketization, commoditization as dominant themes in water governance
chapter 15|4 pages
Hegemony does not imply homogeneity
part IV|71 pages
Participation
chapter 19|16 pages
Participation's limits
part V|10 pages
Conclusion