ABSTRACT
From 2016–2018, the United Nations High-Level Panel on Water pursued a “valuing water” initiative that sought to align the human right to water and sanitation with the Sustainable Development Goals. In this chapter, I situate the “valuing water” initiative with respect to an approach to human rights grounded in Henry Shue’s notion of basic rights. I examine how the UN High-Level Panel on Water appealed to the notion of resilience to broker the union of human rights and sustainable development in a context where humans are altering how the Earth system functions through inequitable social structures. To do so, I distinguish sufficiency approaches to human rights, often portrayed in terms of “human needs,” from approaches grounded in equality. The appeal to resilience as a way to link values and water to human rights, I argue, valorizes norms of sufficiency over those of political equality in ways inconsistent with the impetus of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I conclude by referencing Hannah Arendt’s provocative idea of a “right to have rights” to draw attention to why equality is superior to sufficiency as a normative basis for valuing water with respect to the human right to water and sanitation.
