A Synthesis Chapter

Indebted to the book's authors and inspired by their arguments and ideas, this concluding chapter reflects on the idea of water security. My objective here is to make sense of the chapters in this book and literature elsewhere by proposing that water security and insecurity are not necessarily polar opposites; that water security need not be the opposite or ‘converse’ (Grey and Garrick, 2012) of water insecurity. ¹ Rather, by establishing two gauges of water security (sufficiency of water security and equity of water security), four conditions of water security are proposed, hinted at in the title of this chapter (incodys). First, ‘in’ is shorthand for insecurity; second, ‘co’ is short for collective security, and third, ‘dys’, implying inequitable security, is short for dys-security. The fourth condition is co-insecurity, but this is not repeated in the title. The use of these terms also invokes the idea of a-security, implying the lack of an issue of water security, which is briefly discussed in the chapter.