ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 outlines the contours of global water governance (GWG) and its central components, an Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) approach, Water Security and the role of water in the 2030 Agenda. The chapter offers a biopolitical reading of the governing rationales of GWG. It discusses the role and meaning of scarcity and the three main rationales around the productive uses of water for (1) economic development, (2) basic human needs, and (3) ecosystems in terms of how they relate to different populations and distinctions made between them. The chapter also makes explicit how present sustainable development discourses and GWG are based on a biopolitical distinction between humans and the rest of nature. Another important point is the governmentality understanding of the neoliberal characteristics of GWG, according to which, such governance not only includes market mechanisms as the ideal way of governing society, but is also premised on interventions such as the inclusion of ecosystem services in conventional economic models and the adoption of the (human) right to water.
