Sociospatial understanding of water politics (original) (raw)
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Sociospatial Understanding of Water Politics: Tracing the Multidimensionality of Water Reuse
Much social science literature on water reuse focuses on problems of acceptance and economic problems, while the spatial and political dimensions remain under-researched. This paper addresses this deficit by reformulating the issue in terms of sociospatial politics of water reuse. It does this by drawing on the work of Mollinga (2008) and the Territory Place Scale Network (TPSN) framework (Jessop et al., 2008) to develop an analytical approach to the sociospatial politics of water in general, and water reuse in particular. The paper argues that Mollinga's understanding of water politics as contested technical/physical, organisational/managerial and regulatory/socioeconomic planes of human interventions can be deepened through further reflection on their implications for the four sociospatial dimensions of the TPSN framework. Such a comprehensive, multidimensional approach re-imagines the politics of water reuse, providing researchers with a heuristic device to trace the interventions through which water reuse plans disrupt existing arrangements, and avoid a concern for individual preferences and simplified notions of barriers and enablers. The potential of the analytical framework is explored using an empirical illustration of water reuse politics in the Berlin-Brandenburg region in Germany.
Cities and Their “Water Socio-Footprint”: A Dynamic Socio-Technical Network
Proceedings of the Water Environment Federation, 2010
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Water policy – Water politics: Social engineering and strategic action in water sector reform
2008
The contribution maps the ‘politics of water’ as a field of research. Water control is understood as politically contested resource use. Contestation is mapped along two axes: (1) different levels or domains of water politics; (2) issue-networks encompassing processes of contestation within or across levels and domains. The four domains are: the everyday politics of water control, the politics of national water policy, inter-state hydropolitics, and the global politics of water. These have different space and time scales, are populated by different configurations of main actors, have different types of issues as their subject matter, involve different modes of contestation and take place within different sets of institutional arrangements. Some of the most important questions in water policy and water politics involve the interlinkages across domains, around certain issues. Among the plethora of issuenetworks of concrete water politics policy, the chapter focuses on two main ‘sticki...
Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, 2005
Reading the recent memoirs of the former US Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, I found one of the most striking moments in the book is his realisation that providing clean drinking water in developing countries is a much more complex task than he anticipates. Applying his usual Occam's razor approach, he cannot conceive why simple solutions cannot be delivered through the USA's geopolitical might, but instead stumble against a seemingly trivial array of problems, hurdles, and barriers. Indeed, the domestic economic strength of the USA is part of the problem, with US consulting companies, nongovernmental organisations, and utilities firms all standing in the way of his simple solution. And if the world's most powerful minister of finance cannot solve the problems of access to water for the 1.2 billion who today lack access to that most vital of resources, potable water, then what hope is there for solving the problem without which other issues of development and social justice cannot adequately be addressed? It is the seeming complexity of the provision of water with which Erik Swyngedouw wrestles in his new monograph, Social Power and the Urbanisation of Water: Flows of Power. Although he uses water as a means of providing a more general exploration into power struggles and the changing social relations of production, the book does indeed provide a detailed analysis of how capital development can produce and deny access to drinking water. The book is focused around a case study of a single town in Ecuador, Guayaquil, and provides a detailed historical materialist analysis of the changing economic fortunes of the town and its capacity to provide access to drinking water. The book is situated within a conceptual framework of political ecology; the essence of that framework is as a critique of neo-Marxian analyses which assume and obscure the conversion of nature into commodity. Political ecological approaches begin by exploring the interdependence of economic activity on the capacity of societies to convert and commodify nature. In his own words, he is interested in bringing together:`T he tensions, conflicts and forces that flow with water through the body, the city, the region and the globe show the cracks in the lines, the meshes in the net, the spaces and plateaus of resistance and power'' (page 26). Just as studying the urban form provides insights into the power relations and struggles which dominate urban life, so studying how societies mobilise to`metabolise nature' (in the political-economic terminology) excavates the power relations and struggles more generally in society. And in that regard, the book performs impeccably, the detailed case study of water provision providing detailed insights into broader subjects such as the spatiopolitical organisation of Ecuadorian society as well as the relationship between the city, its residents, and the international product markets on which its commodities are sold. This is a long and arduous intellectual journey to make and the book is broadly sympathetic of its readers requirements in this regard. There is a strong and clear set of messages, and the structure of the book allows the readers gently to assimilate Swyngedouw's arguments over the course of its 180-odd pages. There is a general introduction which sets out a rationale for political ecology approaches, followed by a conceptual section in which he presents his dialectic method, which he terms``the production of socio-nature'' (page 22). There is then an introductory section to the city of Guayaquil, and a presentation of some of the issues concerning water shortage in that case study. The bulk of the analysis is provided in the five following chapters, five interrelated and overlapping stories about how economic development, political struggles, technical change, and urbanisation have all contributed to making the very complex and socially unjust picture which is visible today.
Water, politics and development: Framing a political sociology of water resources management
Water Alternatives, 2008
Volume 1 | Issue 1 Mollinga, P. P. 2008. Water, politics and development: Framing a political sociology of water resources management. Water Alternatives 1(1): 7-23 where most of the papers in this collection were presented and discussed. Through this publication, the Water, Politics and Development initiative links up with other initiatives simultaneously ongoing, for instance the 'Water governance -challenging the consensus' project of the Bradford Centre for International Development at Bradford University, UK. At this point in time, the initiative has formulated its thrust as 'framing a political sociology of water resources management'. This, no doubt, is an ambitious project, methodologically, theoretically as well as practically. Through the compilation of this collection we have started to explore whether and how such an endeavour might make sense. The participants in the initiative think it does, are quite excited about it, and are committed to pursue it further. To succeed the project has to be a collective project, of a much larger community than the present contributors. All readers are invited to comment on sense, purpose and content of this endeavour to profile and strengthen critical and public sociologies of water resources management. 1 The papers in this issue focus on freshwater management, and do not address issues related to the management of the oceans for instance. 'Management' in this formulation is used in the broadest sense possible -as a generic term including water use, allocation, distribution, governance, regulation, policy, etc. However, at other points it is also used in a narrower sense, distinguishing it from governance for instance. This double use is unfortunate but difficult to avoid. For use as a generic term to encompass all activities and arrangements directly and indirectly related to the human use of water, 'management' remains the best candidate, because it is the most widely and diversely used category.
Re-Theorizing Politics in Water Governance
Water, 2019
This Special Issue on water governance features a series of articles that highlight recent and emerging concepts, approaches, and case studies to re-center and re-theorize “the political” in relation to decision-making, use, and management—collectively, the governance of water. Key themes that emerged from the contributions include the politics of water infrastructure and insecurity; participatory politics and multi-scalar governance dynamics; politics related to emergent technologies of water (bottled or packaged water, and water desalination); and Indigenous water governance. Further reflected is a focus on diverse ontologies, epistemologies, meanings and values of water, related contestations concerning its use, and water’s importance for livelihoods, identity, and place-making. Taken together, the articles in this Special Issue challenge the ways that water governance remains too often depoliticized and evacuated of political content or meaning. By re-centering the political, an...
The Spatial Dimension of Water Management
Water management is essential to human development. Throughout history, reciprocal relationships between water management, human settlement, food production, climatic conditions, and social organization—on both local and regional levels—have produced a range of physical landscapes with a myriad of social-ecological and spatial dynamics (Figure 1). More recently, technological advancements coupled with accelerated processes of urbanization and agricultural production have created new demands for water, as well as new approaches to wastewater management and flood control. As such, today, we are confronted with multiple dimensions of water management—operating across various spatial and temporal scales. The article begins by exploring three historical examples of water management, including: (1) the chinampas in Mexico City (a type of Mesoamerican agriculture which uses small, rectangular plots to grow crops); (2) Major John Wesley Powell’s drainage districts (a proposal for an alternative hydro-political organization and water democracy for the American West); (3) the Dutch polder model (a mixed model of top-down and bottom up approaches to develop and maintain flood control infrastructure). Each example illustrates an approach to water management that fundamentally responds to local conditions, while embracing dynamic relationships between human agency and natural processes. Finally, the article discusses how these site-specific and culturally informed approaches are influencing contemporary water management projects.
Water International
interrelatedness of material, political, social and discursive aspects of rural-urban water (dis)connections. As we outline below, hydraulic infrastructure projects, policies, laws and water-related imaginaries and discourses all connect rural and urban spacesand thus attendant hydrosocial designs and configurations. This also includes attention to intersecting flows of water, knowledge, money, ideas and people, as processes that all require analytics that link rural and urban hydrogeographies (or, engaging other terminology, waterscapes [Swyngedouw, 1997], hydrosocial cycles [Linton & Budds, 2014], or hydrosocial territories [Boelens, Hoogesteger, Swyngedouw, Vos, & Wester, 2016]). While some of the earlier concepts and approaches invite attention to rural-urban connections and linkages through quantitative analysis of resource requirements (as with the footprints approach), this special issue combines a range of analyses that further political ecology and hydrosocial approaches to illustrate and consider such connections. As such, our contributions help clarify that urban-rural changes in the water realm relate not only to important biophysical, climatological and material dynamics and linkages (as with the ecological footprint concept) but also rely on ideological, economic and political connections and linkages. We discuss how urban and rural livelihoods and lifeways are constructed relationally. Given our reliance on political ecology and associated socio-natural, techno-political and cultural-discursive frameworks, our contribution similarly advances approaches related to disputes over socio-ecological interventions, distribution and governance, as well as equity and justice considerations important for urban-rural water transformations. We also relate these concepts to issues of (disputed) water culture(s) and identities, examining the ways in which cultural politics often importantly shape urbanrural relations and mutual (mis)recognition. This combination of themes has only begun to be explored to date (it is most prevalent in earlier work on 'extraction' or 'sacrifice' zones, as noted above). Water provides a particularly useful and interesting lens through which to understand and think through urban/rural and urban/extra-urban dynamics and pathways. As a flow resource, water moves from rural spaces, through cities, and out again. On the way, water literally takes on characteristics and 'imprints' from the diverse locales it passes through. It also links people and places in ways that make the connections between sites clearoften in ways that are hidden in analyses that take the urban-rural boundary to be fixed or distinct. Thus, upstream pollution (e.g., from a mining site) affects the suitability of the water source for use in an urban area, or can affect the specific treatment processes that are required (or urban and peri-urban pollution can pose particular risks for agricultural water uses; see Wessels, Veldwisch, Kujawa, & Delcarme, 2019, this issue). Similarly, urban residents benefit from forested and protected catchments upstream, and there has been increasing recognition of these connections with programmes such as payment for ecosystem services (PES) to protect water sources that serve urban populationsi.e., payments to upstream farmers to avoid practices that pollute shared waters or to reward them for pursuing practices that conserve and protect water sources. In a similar way, after water leaves urban areas, there is a clear and indelible imprint of the features of cities, from industrial pollution to storm runoff that might be associated with urban soil sealing. In all of these ways, water links and connects urban, rural and peri-urban areas, transcends such divides and also defies the characterization of these very categories. In this volume, we explore such dynamics to explicitly consider the interfaces and complex movements, flows and dynamics that connect and disrupt locales and the boundaries between them. We are also interested
Integrated water resource management (IWRM) is widely accepted and has been implemented though international, national and regional water management guidelines. Nonetheless , concrete implementation of IWRM gives rise to new questions for policy analysis. Scholars interested in water regulation, the design of effective and efficient policy instruments , and structures of participative and multi-level policy processes face challenges regarding research design, concepts and empirical approaches. This special issue integrates research about regional, national and transboundary policy perspectives on water management in seven countries, four continents and two transnational water bodies. From the six articles presented in this special issue, we learn more about how to define integration, to think about borders and scales and to theoretically and empirically study collaborative management in water policy analysis.