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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
As the world faces another water crisis, it is easy to understand why this precious and highly-disputed resource could determine the fate of entire nations. In reality, however, water conflicts rarely result in violence and more often lead to collaborative governance, however precarious. In this comprehensive and accessible text, David Feldman introduces readers to the key issues, debates, and challenges in water politics today. Its ten chapters explore the processes that determine how this unique resource captures our attention, the sources of power that determine how we allocate, use, and protect it, and the purposes that direct decisions over its cost, availability, and access. Drawing on contemporary water controversies from every continent from Flint, Michigan to Mumbai, Sao Paulo, and Beijing the book argues that cooperation and more equitable water management are imperative if the global community is to adequately address water challenges and their associated risks, particularly in the developing world. While alternatives for enhancing water supply, including waste-water re-use, desalination, and conservation abound, without inclusive means of addressing citizens' concerns, their adoption faces severe hurdles that can impede cooperation and generate additional conflicts.
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Seitenzahl: 486
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Chapter 1: Why Water Politics Matters
A tale of two cities
A framework for water politics
Process
Power
Purpose
Gender and water as ethical and cultural conundrum
Understanding contemporary water politics – the importance of multiple perspectives
“Back to the future” – understanding the present through learning from the past
SUMMARY
RECOMMENDED READING
WEBSITES
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
Chapter 2: Contested Waters: The Politics of Supply
Overview
Cities and water supply
Agriculture, politics, and water supply
Public vs. private ownership – process, power, and purpose
Marketing – water as tradeable commodity
Conclusion – water supply equity
SUMMARY
RECOMMENDED READING
WEBSITES
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
Chapter 3: Clean, Green, and Costly: Water Quality
Introduction – pollution politics
An overview of water quality politics – past as prologue
Pollution politics – national variants of process, power, and purpose
Comparing water pollution politics
Comparative lessons: power, inequality, and pollution
The politics of innovation – “thinking outside the pipe”
Pollutant trading: a tale of two watersheds
The politics of unconventional pollutants
Conclusion: a “green” solution to pollution?
SUMMARY
RECOMMENDED READING
WEBSITES
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
Chapter 4: The Water–Energy–Food Nexus
Complicated links between food, energy, and water
Nexus I: The Politics of water and energy – power, process, purpose
“Fracking” as microcosm of energy–water nexus politics
Nexus II: water–energy–food
Conclusion – the future nexus and its political challenges
SUMMARY
RECOMMENDED READING
WEBSITES
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
Chapter 5: Drought, Flood, and Everything In-Between
Water as extreme hazard
Flooding and drought – political process
Varying power, evolving process, divergent purpose – flood
Information, trust, power, and purpose – drought
Climate change and water politics
Reforming the politics of climate and water: knowledge networks
Conclusion – spanning expert and lay audiences
SUMMARY
RECOMMENDED READING
WEBSITES
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
Chapter 6: Water Rights and Water Wrongs
Why Law Matters
Law as purpose
American water law – power and competing purpose
Debates over power and purpose – the West
Purpose as vision – ancient traditions and water laws
Law as process – compacts and basin commissions
Conclusion – What gives water law its power?
SUMMARY
RECOMMENDED READING
WEBSITES
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
Chapter 7: International Cooperation
Global and trans-boundary issues
Overcoming barriers – the art of confidence building in formal regimes
Non-governmental networks – “soft” power and cooperation
Conclusions – new challenges in trans-boundary accord
SUMMARY
RECOMMENDED READING
WEBSITES
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
Chapter 8: Water Conflicts
What causes water disputes?
Diverting water – power, process, purpose
Depletion – what happens when water is used up?
Degradation – dysfunctional waters in dispute
Conclusion – can divergent interests be reconciled?
SUMMARY
RECOMMENDED READING
WEBSITES
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
Chapter 9: Tapping into Toilets: New Sources of Water
Introduction – the politics of water alternatives
Is there a political process for adopting alternatives?
Desalination – purpose, process, and power
Supply approaches and fairness
Demand-side measures – do they really work?
Purpose – are demand-side measures fair?
Conclusions – when is an alternative a positive innovation?
SUMMARY
RECOMMENDED READING
WEBSITES
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
Chapter 10: Toward a Water-Sensitive Future
Introduction – paradigms and politics
Achieving the new paradigm – resistance
Finding viable governance – the limits of markets
Process and power – gender, culture, community
Purpose – improving governance through appropriate scale
Conclusions – new approaches, old problems
SUMMARY
RECOMMENDED READING
WEBSITES
Glossary
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Figures
Figure 1.1 A conceptual framework for water politics
Figure 3.1 Jacksons Creek catchment
Figure 4.1 Water withdrawal by sector by region
Figure 8.1 China’s South-to-North Water Transfer Project
Figure 8.2 Kishanganga–Neelum river basin
Tables
Table 3.1 Examples of best management practices for water pollution abatement
Table 4.1 (a) Population, energy consumption and water consumption for energy, 2005–2050; (b) as (a) but with improved energy efficiency
Table 5.1 Examples of boundary organizations for climate information support in water politics
Box
Box 1.1 To bottle or not to bottle water – Northern California
Box 1.2 Lead, water, expert power, and a city’s degraded politics – The saga of Flint
Box 1.3 Islamic State, power, and water
Box 1.4 Can water policy reform be animated by noble purpose?
Box 2.1 How megacities manage water supply – Mexico City as exemplar
Box 2.2 I love Paris . . . when its water is publicly owned
Box 2.3 Bolivia and privatization – an enduring conflict
Box 2.4 Water marketing in Australia
Box 3.1 How can a river catch fire? In Cleveland – it happened more than once
Box 3.2 Cities, water, and public health – New York City
Box 3.3 What are “micro-beads” and why should we worry about them?
Box 4.1 Fracking as local dispute – energy and water in Poland
Box 4.2 Groundwater governance and the water–energy–food nexus in India
Box 5.1 The Sacramento Solution – many measures, gradual risk reduction
Box 5.2 Climate change, water politics, and the ancient Near East
Box 5.3 Climate change as political narrative: Australia
Box 6.1 When water laws and their purposes conflict – the case of rural Chile
Box 6.2 Are rain barrels an illegal diversion of water? The case of Colorado
Box 6.3 Water law reform and groundwater – the case of Arizona
Box 6.4 Compacts and the emergence of a “Law of the river” – the case of Arizona vs. California
Box 7.1 “Living in the Nile” – accord without agreement
Box 7.2 Iraq and Syria – water as a weapon
Box 7.3 The US, Canada, and Trans-boundary Water Management – “friendly” rivals?
Box 8.1 An old diversion whose legacy remains – Los Angeles and the Owens Valley
Box 8.2 The benefits of dams come with many costs – Brazil’s Itaipu Dam
Box 9.1 Desalination in Southern California – a lengthy build
Box 9.2 Innovations in mega-cities: Tokyo
Box 9.3 “Newer” approaches – the politics of pushing the envelope
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Water Politics
Governing our most precious resource
DAVID L. FELDMAN
polity
Copyright © David Feldman 2017
The right of David Feldman to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2017 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0465-7
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Feldman, David Lewis, 1951- author.Title: Water politics : governing our most precious resource / David L. Feldman.Description: Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2016028561 (print) | LCCN 2016043496 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509504619 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509504626 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781509504640 (mobi) | ISBN 9781509504657 (Epub)Subjects: LCSH: Water-supply--Political aspects. | Water-supply--Co-management. | Water security. | Water resources development.Classification: LCC HD1691 .F454 2017 (print) | LCC HD1691 (ebook) | DDC 333.91--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016028561
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Preface
A familiar adage of our time is that water is to the twenty-first century what oil was to the twentieth – a contested resource for which the fate of entire nations hangs in the balance. Strategic and other comparisons between oil and water are somewhat problematic, however. While disputes over water are growing due to climate change, demands for food and energy that are increasing, and with the advent of mega-cities, nations rarely resort to violence to resolve water conflicts. Moreover, unlike petroleum, which can be exhausted, there is no upper bound to available fresh water if we manage it well.
In many regions of the world such as the Indus, Mekong, or Colorado basins, the need to share over-stressed supplies and to cooperatively manage water infrastructure often leads to collaboration, however precariously. In fact, there are long-standing approaches to conjoint management of water arising out of needs for food, hydropower, and domestic supply (Harrington 2014).
This book analyzes the processes that determine how water issues get the attention of decision-makers, and how disputes over water arise within and between countries. We also examine how varied sources of power: economic, legal, and expert, determine its governance – how we allocate, use, and protect it. Finally, we consider the purposes that direct decisions over cost, availability, and access to water. In this wide-ranging analysis, we also provide timely examples from every continent.
Most of all, we consider appropriate arrangements to equitably address water problems. By “governance arrangements,” we mean combinations of public agencies and civil society entities that cooperate to manage water problems. Among these problems are the challenge of water pollution, one of the world’s gravest health and environmental threats, and that is aggravated by poverty, rapid industrialization, efforts to produce more food, and by newer “contaminants of concern” that are often beyond the reach of law and regulation.
Special agreements to govern water, such as river basin compacts and confidence building efforts to resolve trans-boundary disputes, are also assessed. And, attention is paid to controversies surrounding desalination, wastewater reuse, rainwater harvesting and other nonconventional supply alternatives. Finally, we examine growing threats to established governance arrangements posed by drought and flood.
Chapter 1 introduces a framework for understanding water politics: anchored by process (the interaction of agencies and groups), power (the ability to influence decisions), and purpose (the goals of participants). These are the major factors that determine how water politics is conducted, by whom, and toward what ends.
Chapter 2 discusses the political challenges of water supply. We begin with this issue because it is arguably the basis for all other aspects of water politics. Finding, acquiring, and delivering water is of paramount urgency, especially in the world’s burgeoning mega-cities where a plurality of the planet’s population now resides. These cities are grappling with the means to provide ample, safe drinking water supplies through leveraging resources to improve infrastructure on one hand, while facing the resistance of city residents who are asked to pay for these improvements on the other. It is also an urgent priority for feeding growing populations, especially in developing nations. To comprehend these issues, in urban and rural areas alike, requires that we first understand debates over control, ownership, and marketing of water for all needs.
As important as water supply is, degradation of that supply can undermine efforts to make it readily available. Thus, chapter 3 examines why, despite some 40 years of progress, water quality remains one of the world’s most serious environmental challenges. Following a discussion of quantity with one on quality also makes logical sense, we feel, especially since pollution is a ubiquitous global issue. Cases from the US, France, Russia, and China, as well as recent efforts to remove “microbeads” from the water environment, utilize natural means of pollution attenuation, and trade pollution rights, are also discussed. In the past half-century, nations have extended water quality protection beyond human health to encompass the environment itself.
Chapter 4 discusses the so-called water, food, and energy nexus. Some of the most important debates over water politics revolve around making energy and food more plentiful and affordable, and balancing these goals against the desire to protect water quality; achieve integrated management of these resources; and use hydraulic techniques for energy extraction or “fracking.” This nexus amplifies many of the political controversies first discussed under water supply and quality.
Climate change and variability is taken up in chapter 5. We discuss flood abatement, drought alleviation, and recent efforts to manage climate extremes. A growing political challenge is the effort to span local and expert knowledge in managing water and climate. Illustrations from Latin America, the US, and Australia illuminate the effectiveness of this effort. As we will see, it has been complicated by ideologically motivated debate over climate change that impedes long-term collaboration.
Chapter 6 focuses on water law as an evolving set of practices and institutions. Fresh water has long been managed through codified or common law – it is the oldest form of water governance. Law may also take the form of river basin compacts that divide water between provinces or states. Moreover, these arrangements are generally quite durable, even if parties periodically engage in contentious negotiations over how to re-allocate drought-stricken flows.
Chapter 7 examines international collaboration to manage shared waters. Because water is irreplaceable by any other substance, countries must share it. Attempts to monopolize it would generate wars fought to suicidal desperation. This is why chronic water shortages among states sharing watersheds, especially in arid regions, lead to some form of cooperation. By establishing rules over permissible withdrawals and diversions, as in the Tigris-Euphrates basin, or over water infrastructure as between Israel and Palestine, violence can be averted.
Whereas chapter 7 focuses on avenues for transnational collaboration, chapter 8 examines intractable sources of disputes – within and between countries. Debates over hydropower generation; protests over permitting of beverage plants that draw down local ground-water; relocation of populations to make room for large dams or diversion projects; and continued degradation of water bodies – such as the Aral Sea in central Asia, Ojos Negros Valley in Mexico, or Han River in China – are among the most serious of such conflicts. And, these disputes engage many levels of governance.
In Chapter 9, we examine the impacts and implications of alternative sources of water supply, as well as innovative ways to temper or reduce demands. These are topics infrequently discussed in water politics texts, despite the fact that these unconventional methods to augment supply – including wastewater reuse, rainwater harvesting, desalination, and demand management – are growing in significance across the globe. While there has been much discussion about their technical feasibility for quenching the world’s growing thirst, far too little attention has been paid to their public acceptability, perceived risk, and professed fairness (i.e., who pays for, and benefits from, them?). These political factors affect long-term prospects for their implementation.
Finally, chapter 10 considers the future of water governance and prospects for better democratizing water politics in order to amicably resolve disputes. We also weigh the likelihood of sharing power among diverse groups, and of broadening purpose to better encompass issues of inclusiveness and public engagement – especially at the local community level.
This text also explores other issues not commonly addressed elsewhere. One example is debate over water as a commodity. In addition to the advantages and disadvantages of privatization, there is growing interest in the impacts of so-called “virtual” water trades – the buying and selling of products whose manufacture depends on water. These trades raise nagging questions regarding the capacity of developing countries to engage in import substitution and industrialization. They also prompt us to inquire whether the dependence of water-short countries on others for water-intensive products retards their development, denies them equal access to resources, encourages the building of large water projects, and is unfair (Hoekstra & Chapagain 2007).
Water wars – as implied earlier – are rare. Nevertheless, an issue of growing concern in global water politics is the fact that, should war erupt for other reasons, water infrastructure may become a prime military objective. Germany’s Ruhr dams were effectively targeted during World War II, for example, while attacks on water supply and treatment facilities have occurred in parts of the Middle East since 1948 (Oren 2003; Holland 2012). More recently, Islamic State has “weapon-ized” water as a means of securing control over contested territory, and internecine wars in Iraq and Syria have led protagonists to do the same.
The arenas where water politics play out encompass formal governance arrangements at various jurisdictional levels, overseen by agencies charged with managing water and other resources. The tools these agencies employ include laws and regulations governing water supply and its quality; treaties negotiated among countries for sharing or conjointly managing river and groundwater basins; and partnerships between public (i.e., governmental) and non-governmental entities to advise and set standards for managing pollution.
Water politics is further composed of a vast array of interests; informal and formal organizations; and diverse venues where debate, dialogue, discussion, and decision-making occur. Corporate boardrooms, science and engineering labs, and religious gatherings serve as political venues for water when they prescribe objectives water policies should achieve – such as recommending standards for clean water, determining what new or innovative methods for providing additional supply are fair or equitable (e.g., desalination, wastewater re-use), and suggesting what roles public participation should play in setting water rates paid by users. Although their procedures and methods of decision-making differ from those found in, say, legislative chambers, law courts, or regulatory agencies, these diverse venues exercise power over policy outcomes. They also clearly engage in purposeful action. We touch upon these venues.
In recent years, water politics has become somewhat synonymous with environmental politics: an arena where questions regarding how to protect nature while satisfying society’s need for natural resources intersect in complex ways. This has been true in a variety of cases: from cleaning up polluted rivers in Cologne or Cleveland; supplying water for growing food or producing hydropower in China or India; providing clean water to residents of Mexico City or Dublin, Ireland; mitigating the impacts of climate change, drought, and flood in Australia or Brazil; or building desalination plants in California or Israel.
Actions we take to enhance society’s access to water can sometimes degrade the natural environment. By the same token, choices we may make to protect nature from engineered intrusions designed to enhance publically useable water supplies may limit our ability to meet societal demands (e.g., choosing not to dam a river). We often accept such trade-offs because powerful interests demand that we preserve pristine streams for the enjoyment of future generations. These groups also try to demonstrate the benefits in doing so: not only for ourselves but also for our progeny.
Across the planet, there are growing demands to treat fresh water as an amenity as opposed to a purely economic commodity. There also are growing demands to rethink how we value, allocate, and prioritize its use, particularly in light of major drought and serious apprehensions about the long-term impacts of climate change.
Both sets of demands have become linked in larger calls to manage fresh water more equitably – a word that has multiple, and even conflicting meanings: fairness toward people and their welfare, or toward nature and its sustainability. In cases where certain groups seek to develop large dams or diversion projects, for instance, there may be fervent pressure to ensure that under-represented groups living adjacent to these proposed projects share in their benefits. To others, however, equity with respect to building dams may mean protecting fauna and flora that might be driven to extinction if such projects are built without regard to their ecological impact.
With regard to the last of these issues, we pay special attention to global competition over water and its impacts on available supply and quality – in places as diverse as the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and South and Southeast Asia. Disputes over water are not limited to developing nations. They are found in many parts of the developed world, especially Europe and the US. In the latter, water has long been a focal point of dispute, and is becoming more critical as a result of extreme weather – frequent, long-term droughts punctuated by sudden and destructive flooding.
While sole authored, the issues this book covers are the product of an inherently collaborative effort. I have drawn upon a career-long association with many distinguished colleagues, here in California and elsewhere, whose conversation and inspiration are – I hope – reflected here. My colleagues at the University of California, Irvine and in other parts of the US, as well as Australia, Russia, and Europe, have immensely enhanced my understanding of the politics of water through our work together on many of the questions and problems taken up in this volume. Most importantly, their ideas and support continue to reinforce a message that I hope resonates throughout this book: that every academic discipline, field of study, and intellectual domain is important for understanding the politics of water.
I especially thank several colleagues, students, and former students for their inspiration and ideas. At the University of California these include: Amir AghaKouchak, Victoria Basolo, Peter Bowler, Tim Bradley, Wing Cheung, Jean Fried, Silvia Gonzalez, Stan Grant, Travis Huxman, Helen Ingram, Sunny Jiang, Richard Matthew, Valerie Olson, Meg Rippy, Brett Sanders, Soroosh Sorooshian, Lindsey Stuvick, and Jinsuhk Suh.
I have also immensely benefitted from the insights of other US and Australian colleagues including Ashmita Sengupta and Eric Stein with the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project, and Vin Pettigrove and Meenakshi Arora from the University of Melbourne. I also thank Louise Knight, my editor at Polity, for her encouragement and patience throughout the process of writing this book. While I owe a great debt to all these colleagues for furthering my knowledge of these problems, all errors of fact, interpretation, or judgment are solely my own.
Finally, to my family who have patiently put up with me throughout this project – and whose support makes it all worthwhile – this book is dedicated to Justin, and most of all, to Jill.
CHAPTER 1Why Water Politics Matters
A tale of two cities
Despite receiving an average of 63 inches of rain annually, 25 inches more than Seattle, Washington, Sao Paulo is in the throes of a severe drought that has led city leaders to adopt water rationing and undertake other emergency measures in this metropolis of 21 million – Brazil’s largest, and the most populous city in the Southern hemisphere. Systematic removal of forest cover and subsequent sedimentation has severely reduced the capacity of the city’s reservoirs, including the Guarapiranga, Rio Grande, and Billings. In some cases, reservoirs are also severely polluted.
Compounding this crisis, much of the city’s largest source of freshwater, the Cantareira system, first came on-line in 1976 when the city had a little over half the population it has today. Infrastructure improvements have not kept up with growth. Moreover, when it does rain, the fast-growing city has been paved over with so much asphalt that, as Pedro Jacobi, an environmental scientist at the University of Sao Paulo notes, a storm dropping two inches of rain can result in massive flooding. Without adequate means to abate floods or harvest them for later use, floodwaters simply flow to the sea.
Not surprisingly, alternation between too little and too much water has contributed to a policy landscape that belies the severity of the current drought, and a skewed public perception that complicates voluntary conservation efforts. On top of this skewed outlook is a general sense of public distrust exacerbated by lackadaisical government responses to the crisis over the past three years. Residents first began complaining of dropping water pressure in their homes as early as May 2014, but officials did not commit to rationing or other actions until March 2015: stubbornly clinging to the hope that rain would refill the reservoirs, alleviating the need for more drastic measures and allowing officials to spend public funds on solving other problems.
The local water utility, Companhia de Saneamento Basico do estado de Sao Paulo, or “Sabesp,” initially exercised expedient measures, including laying extra pipe to the Cantareira reservoir system. Later, it decided to increase water rates to encourage conservation and help pay for emergency measures. Further negating the credibility of officials was their belated admission of the seriousness of the drought, and the need for more expensive mitigation measures. Late concessions increased distrust of officials’ competence and worsened protests (Borrell 2015; Kozacek 2015). Sabesp, together with the state regulator that is empowered to approve rate hikes, are mindful of the protests that accompanied bus and train ticket increases in Rio and Sao Paulo in 2013. Not surprisingly, they are reluctant to institute possibly unpopular measures that could cause civil unrest.
Experts like Professor Jacobi hope the drought is an opportunity to improve the city’s future water security. “You have to think about the way of dealing with a crisis that has not just come in the short-range, but has come to stay . . . You have to look at it as permanent [and] . . . to learn that you cannot only depend on the government. You have to organize yourselves, developing more social learning to engage people into doing something . . . because it is the way we develop as a city” (Kozacek 2015).
If distrust and cynicism have pervaded Sao Paulo’s responses to its drought, by contrast the recent experiences of Melbourne, Australia, during the so-called Millennium Drought (1996–2010) led to a number of measures that were based on a widely shared perception of crisis, and a set of responses that garnered a comparatively high level of public trust. Home to some four-and-a-half million people, one-fifth the size of Sao Paulo, but comprising one-fifth of Australia’s entire population, Melbourne is almost entirely dependent on locally-sourced surface supplies that dwindled to less than 24 percent of total capacity during the heart of the drought. Faced with few options, the city turned to a number of unconventional approaches to ensure long-term resilience.
Melbourne Water – the city’s utility – and the state of Victoria pursued a wide range of approaches, including construction of a controversial desalination plant which, while built, has yet to be used, several household conservation measures, as well as small-scale projects to harvest rainwater. Most crucial to Melbourne’s dramatic reductions in water use during the drought, however – household water consumption fell by some 50 percent on average – is the fact that adoption of these measures was facilitated by governmental arrangements that: mandated cross-jurisdictional and coordinated policy response; permitted regional oversight of local utility operations (thus assuring such coordination took place); and delegated authority to localities to impose water use restrictions, implement conservation measures, fund rainwater harvesting projects, and employ direct public outreach via mass-media messaging.
Various layers of government were given authority to institute changes, and exercise of this authority was legitimized to a great extent by local citizen confidence in the capacity of these governments to act responsibly. In part, this confidence was brought about by Victoria’s efforts to engage citizens in an extensive dialogue about water demand, possible supply options, and long-term changes in urban design.
In 2002, the Victorian Government announced a recycled water target of 20 percent of sewage inflows by 2010, an additional 6,200 ML by 2015, and an additional 10 GL by 2030. To meet Victoria’s reuse targets and the exigencies imposed by the Millennium Drought, a rapid increase in the use of recycled water occurred between 2005 and 2009. In 2005, the government launched two major recycled water schemes that remain the anchors for water supply for the region. These so-called “Class A” (suitable for home and agriculture irrigation use) recycled water schemes include the Werribee Irrigation District and the Eastern Irrigation Scheme – and cover much of the Melbourne region.
Moreover, the drought severely reduced flows and increased the salinity of local river water, resulting in low river water allocations. In response, farmers in the Werribee District turned to groundwater until that source was banned by the Victorian government over concerns that rapid drawdown of groundwater could lead to seawater intrusion. This made the use of recycled wastewater especially attractive and practical, leading to its expansion beyond use as a stopgap measure.
Starting in 2005, three more urban recycled water schemes were added to ensure that precious drinking water would not have to be used for landscaping, parks, or golf courses, and in 2006 the first residential recycled water dual pipe system became operational in Melbourne.
Melbourne’s experience suggests that major droughts can create windows of opportunity for decision-makers to engage the public constructively – somewhat at variance to the experience of Sao Paulo. While these cases share in common an attempt to respond to crisis – in this case drought – both also reveal much about the politics of water management in the early twenty-first century. In essence, decision-makers – and not just in cities – must be willing to pursue multiple remedies – and to engage various publics in adopting these possible remedies – in order to build confidence in their competence to deal with drought crisis (Grant et al. 2013; Low et al. 2015).
Moreover, both crises remind us that, while challenges posed by water availability will always arise, and can be exacerbated by human activity, especially in the case of drought, the capacity of societies to effectively respond to these crises depends on three things. First, do these societies’ decision-making processes afford inclusive participation to those affected by decisions, and is this process transparent? If not, can they reform these processes to make inclusion and transparency possible? Second, are officials charged with managing and providing water willing to share power and authority for decisions with affected groups? And, how is this power exercised in deciding how to respond to a crisis – is it concentrated in the hands of a few, or widely shared among many? And third, can participants agree – whether they are the decision-makers or the people affected by decisions – on consensus-based principles for managing water problems based on common or shared purpose? Are these principles narrowly confined to a few objectives – say, economic prosperity – or do they also embrace social equity and environmental justice?
A framework for water politics
The theme of this book is that the provision and management of water are not merely technical problems whose resolution hinges on hydrological principle, economic cost, or engineering feasibility. They are and have always been products of decisions made by institutions that exercise control over access to water, that determine who gets it as well as prescribing the condition people receive it, and that define the goals for its use.
The allocation, protection, and use of water are influenced by a complex array of statutes, rules, and norms of exchange. This is not only true for megacities like Sao Paulo, or metropolises such as Melbourne, but it is true for entire countries such as modern day Kuwait, for instance, where bureaucrats appointed by the royal family determine how desalinated freshwater is distributed to citizens. Moreover, the centrality of politics to water management was no less true in the distant past when Egyptian pharaohs allotted Nile floods to farmers, and later, when Roman emperors built aqueducts to deliver water to burgeoning cities in Italy, Spain, and Gaul (today’s France).
Likewise, water provision is partly determined by deeply held values that shape approaches viewed as legitimate for governing its quality and availability (Swyngedouw 2007; Linton 2010; Phillips et al. 2011). These values may be rooted in tradition and influenced by religious practice, as was true in nineteenth-century New Mexico, for example, where farmers paying homage to the patron saint of water, San Isidro, shared community supplies by cooperatively managing acequias – elaborate irrigation ditches maintained by the villages where they resided. Conversely, the values animating water management may be shaped by scientific observation and assessment – as many recent reports on the condition of the world’s water contend. The rules, norms, and values of water politics, as well as the institutions that engage in decision-making, are rarely wedded to only one approach. They usually blend many values and types of knowledge.
Water politics matters because it determines the outcomes of issues vital to our well-being and survival. These include: our ability to balance the needs of nature and society without severely compromising one or the other; how to manage threats to water supply and quality in the face of a world that is increasingly urbanized and challenged by climate change; and what constitutes a fair price to pay for clean water – and who should be able to decide on this price? In seeking solutions to these and other problems, this book draws on a unique analytical framework.
Moreover, water politics comprises more than the actions of government. It embraces the activities of private businesses that treat, distribute and sell water for a profit; civil society groups that avidly defend the rights of people who demand access to affordable water; and entire nations that covet and compete for shared river- or groundwater basins. We employ a three-fold structure for understanding water politics: the process of decision-making, the exercise of power, and the purposes governance aims to achieve. This framework is depicted in figure 1.1.
Process
A key to understanding water politics is the process by which issues get the attention of officials (i.e., what political scientists call agenda setting), and the means by which policies are formulated and applied through law, rule, treaty, or common everyday practice. Process encompasses negotiation, bargaining, and accommodation among various interests that use, manage, and provide water and includes such entities as corporations; scientific, legal, and other experts; large user groups (e.g., farmers, industrial and commercial sectors, urban utilities); as well as environmental groups and citizen organizations. Individual decision-makers holding formal positions are also involved: from emperors, kings, chieftains, presidents, and prime ministers, to governors, mayors, legislators, bureaucrats, judges, and diplomats.
Figure 1-1A conceptual framework for water politics
Studies of the role of process in water politics have identified two important characteristics of decision-making. First, in every polity, decision-making usually involves a complex interplay of forces and participants that vary according to: the problem context (local, regional, national, or international); and the nature of water as a contested resource. Second, the “playing field” of water politics is dynamic, not static. A participant who loses a policy debate in one venue may try and change the outcome in another. These facts have long been known and studied by students of water politics since at least the 1960s, and their implications have been tied to efforts to better understand policy outcomes (Fox 1966; Ingram et al. 1980; Mann 1985).
In many cases, controversies regarding the provision of, say, public water supplies might engage the efforts of local elected officials, private companies, citizen groups, and even courts who might weigh in on appropriate ways to resolve a dispute over eminent domain, or the rates a water company can legally charge consumers. Questions guiding this process might include: how do private corporations and public distributors provide domestic supplies to municipalities; how much should people have to pay; and, should special measures be taken to treat – and otherwise protect – drinking water in poor communities to ensure it is safe from contaminants, even if it is expensive to do so? Finally, do providers confer with local citizens in making decisions?
Process doesn’t stop there, however. If a private corporation manages local water supplies, for instance, or if a local groundwater basin is being used for the production of bottled water, or for use in production of energy, there may be international actors involved who control production, own or control a water source, or operate under license to a government. Local political authorities may have less influence over the operation of such enterprises than the countries in which these enterprises are based. An example of this is the important debate in Bolivia sparked by privatization many years ago.
In most cases, the better organized a group or interest, the more leverage and influence it has on this process of decision-making. This is one reason why the process of water politics often produces diverse outcomes, even when the process is initiated by one set of interests. For example, while a group or set of agencies may initiate efforts to divert water from a basin, other groups may be able to eventually reverse such actions – and even influence the decision-making process at critical junctures to restore the basin. This happened in the Aral Sea, for instance, and while not entirely successful, it does represent a change in decision-making.
Likewise, these factors also explain the leverage of various groups and interests in water management decisions and how this leverage can vary over time as certain groups slowly acquire access to junctions where critical decisions are being made. As we will see, water supply provision in rural areas tends to benefit well-organized farm groups while urban water supplies are often first provided to the wealthier classes who can afford the infrastructure through which it’s provided. Likewise, while well-endowed energy interests may eventually succeed in harnessing water supplies for energy extraction (as in fracking, for example, a practice for extracting oil and gas using water), those who oppose such practices can find points-of-access to contest them.
Many issues reveal the importance – and the complexity – of process. One current controversy that aptly captures the challenges emanating from the interplay of diverse interests and jurisdictions is bottled water – especially its effects on local communities where the water is sourced. The latter has become a lightning rod for debate over the potential health impacts of its manufacture and bottling. The production, distribution and transportation of bottled water produce an enormous carbon footprint, and some three million tons of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) are annually produced for water bottles – consuming the equivalent of some 50 million barrels of petroleum.
Much of this PET finds its way into landfills, streams, rivers, and lakes – and the ocean – while another contaminant commonly found in plastic bottles, phthalate DEHP, has been linked to male infertility, hormonal imbalance and obesity. The source for much bottled water is pristine springs often located in rural areas – making its manufacture a source of geopolitical friction.
Multinational corporations such as Evian, Perrier-Nestle, Coca Cola, and PepsiCo have, over time, bought up and secured local water rights across the globe. Yet, despite concerted public opposition over actual (or possible) threats to springs, headwater streams, and groundwater, in very few instances has local resistance been successful in stopping these efforts. One reason is that while bottled water enterprises may pose local environmental risks, they also create jobs (see box 1.1).
Box 1.1To bottle or not to bottle water – Northern California
Siskiyou County, in drought-stricken northern California, suffers from too little water and too few jobs. In 2013, Crystal Geyser announced plans to re-open an idled bottling plant near Mt. Shasta to produce bottled water, teas, and flavored soft drinks. A former logging community with high unemployment (in 2010, Coca Cola, which also operated a bottling plant, closed up its operations, worsening local economic conditions), the community has few opportunities.
County officials initially welcomed Crystal Geyser’s plans, but many local residents are not so sure these plans are widely beneficial. The plant has no cap on how much snowmelt generated groundwater it can pump. And, despite nearby residents’ concerns over truck traffic, noise, and the risk of compromising the shallow well supply of homeowners, local officials say they have no legal authority to actually halt or even modify the project. The California Environmental Quality Act requires an environmental impact assessment for large public-permitted projects that may have an effect on groundwater levels or other adverse impacts. However, local officials insist that they have no legal authority to require a report because the plant’s site was zoned for heavy industry when it was a lumber mill, and water bottling is a prior and permitted use.
In effect, the process of decision-making with respect to bottling operations is fragmented and arbitrary – a fact conceded by one policy analyst who insists that reaction to the bottled water industry, in this instance and others, might be disproportionate to the problem at hand. Rather than “arbitrarily deciding that one particular use . . . is not good, it would be better to put in place a groundwater management plan because who’s to say that the combined uses aren’t causing a problem?” In other words, without a broadly inclusive process of decision-making, such arbitrary decisions are likely to be commonly made.
Source: Romney 2015
As contentious as debates over the twin objectives of economic development and environmental protection can be in local settings, when these disputes occur on an international stage, they face even greater process hurdles. There are no authoritative institutions at the international level that make binding decisions when choosing between job creation and protection of the environment. At that level, negotiation and accommodation require a commitment by autonomous nation-states to an independent process for problem solving. Furthermore, these nation-states must voluntarily comply with agreements they choose to ratify, and with the institutions charged with their enforcement (Mitchell 2009; Bakker 2013).
Other international issues regarding water confront us with similar process dilemmas. For instance, polities often permit water withdrawals for irrigation during drought, or continued deforestation threatening water quality – even in light of transnational agreements to restore water bodies. Sometimes such transnational agreements are ratified by international organizations which promise to provide aid to improve water supply systems: as with Haiti and the Dominican Republic, for instance. The more layers of governance involved in such decisions, the more complex the process. Inequalities of power and influence are also important in such cases – as we’ll discuss in the next section.
Finally, process is strongly influenced by the overall scarcity (or relative abundance) of the resource, the quality of existing supplies, and the varying demands – especially for food and energy – we place on them. In parts of China, for example, too much (as opposed to too little) water (i.e., periodic flooding), or the need to harness the amount available for agriculture, is a major concern. For thousands of years, rural labor was employed in water control and irrigation – reinforcing, some argue, autocratic political control (Shaughnessy 2000). Since 2005 – Three Gorges Dam, a potent symbol of national engineering pride, has prevented severe flooding, enhanced navigation on the Yangtze River, and become the world’s single largest generator of hydroelectricity.
The building of Three Gorges occurred in a contested political process. Dissidents and many others opposed its construction due to loss of ancestral homes and communities. Because of limited opportunities for participation in official forums, they fought its construction through demonstration and direct action. Environmental impacts on fisheries, wetlands, and water quality due to flooding of mines, waste sites, and siltation led, in some cases, to massive protests. Allegations of corruption in residential relocation efforts even led to high-level judicial investigations (Economy 2010).
More recently, in Iran, a large saltwater lake has become a focal point for a contested process for managing drought. Lake Urmia, located on a steppe bounded by Turkey and Azerbaijan, was once a thriving tourist haven which, as a result of irrigation practices, the damming of feeder streams by the state, and protracted drought has declined to the point where it now holds only 5 percent of the water it did in the 1990s. Environmentalists charge that the government has failed to protect and restore Urmia. Ethnic Azeris, affected by the lake’s decline, claim that its conditions are a harbinger of long-term drinking water shortages, mandatory water rationing schemes for cities like Tehran, and threats to agricultural stability and food security.
Threats of rationing have led to public protests and clashes with police in Esfahan province due to government plans to divert available water to other, more needy, regions (Mostaghim & Sandels 2014). In this case, the process of water politics is not only fragmented but also reactive. As opposed to taking steps to avert crisis, governance processes have sought to impose the simplest methods available to forestall deeper problems, but not – in the view of critics – to prevent them from worsening.
Worldwide, growing population, rapid urbanization, rising demands for food and energy, and climate change will make freshwater increasingly contested. Nonetheless, there will remain important variations across regions, with parts of Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and the Middle East most likely to experience competition over water supply. The latter is particularly likely to experience a contested process for water politics in the future, as it has in the past. And, there are novel networking opportunities possible for local governments to share innovations across national boundaries.
Power
All water politics involves power. While “power” sometimes connotes manipulation, cajoling, or undue pressure exerted by a few individuals over decisions, these are only the most visible examples of its exercise in water politics. Strategically-positioned groups are able to successfully advocate for water policies because they own or control capital needed for investing in water infrastructure, possess legallyenshrined rights to water, have “spiritually-endowed” authority in its management – or, lastly – are able to physically coerce others.
While power has had an important role in shaping water politics in modern industrialized countries and developing countries alike during our present era, its importance has also been recognized in accounts of water decision-making in the distant past. Many scholars have chronicled connections between power, interest group dynamics, decision-maker access, and coalition building for generations (Pomeroy 1955; Hart 1957; Wittfogel 1957; Freeman 1965; McConnell 1966; Ferejohn 1974; Worster 1979, 1985; Weber 2001; Crow & Sultana 2002).
More recently, important work has been done on the special problems of power in collaborative governance arrangements – the kind commonly found in the trans-boundary management of water (Zeitoun 2007; Purdy 2012; Mumme 2016). This scholarship points to the continuing importance of legally enshrined authority in legitimizing certain kinds of power relationships; the continuing importance of resources as levers of influence, and “discursive legitimacy” – the ability of a group or other formal entity to represent and speak on behalf of some issue. The latter requires that these entities “act on behalf of the values or norms of a society, such as the rule of law, the logic of economic rationality, or principles such as democracy or respect for diverse cultures” (Purdy 2012: 410).
This work also holds special relevance for understanding water conflicts – discussed later in this book – by addressing institutionalized expressions of power such as: national sovereignty; the authority vested in entrenched user groups, regulatory agencies, or public works bureaucracies; and even international treaties and their guarantees of “water security.” The latter phenomenon has been examined in the context of Mexico and the US, and Israel and Palestine, among other places (Zeitoun & Warner 2006; Zeitoun 2007; Mumme 2016). While legal arrangements established by treaties are designed to ensure equality among states, in fact, they often allow more powerful states to impose solutions accruing to their advantage.
All sources of power – authority vested in law or norms, discursive legitimacy, and asymmetrically (i.e., unequally) held resources – are exercised in subtle ways. It is often assumed that many water problems are technical issues that can be resolved by merely understanding the “facts” surrounding their management. Thus, if we had a clear understanding of the limits imposed on water supplies by drought, for instance, decision-makers could better meet the needs of farmers and thirsty cities. Likewise, if we fully understood the threats to water quality posed by contaminants found in, say, prescription drugs, we could convince the public to be more careful in how they use and dispose of them.
In fact, knowledge and expertise (as resources for power) may contribute to certain kinds of political inequalities over water in various contexts. Some people are invested with greater authority for decisions because they possess greater knowledge about technical issues than do others. However, they may not be accountable to those affected by these issues or sensitive to the latter’s concerns. Moreover, while knowledgeable on some facets of problems, they may be ignorant about others. As a result, reliance on technical expertise alone can lead to unanticipated and even negative consequences. A recent illustration of these elements of power – and their consequence – is the water crisis in Flint, Michigan (see box 1.2).
As the Flint example illustrates, the wrongful exercise of expert power may result in abuses. However, demands for reform of both the process of decision-making and the power of influential protagonists may occur if water policies result in palpable harm to groups who are able to organize, and appeal to their own sources of power (such as other sources of expertise, or the legal power inherent in regulation) as a counterbalance. As a footnote, Michigan’s governor has appointed a review panel comprised in part of expert critics of the state’s early response to the crisis. Other examples of this phenomenon can be seen in the growing debate over the privatization of urban water supplies worldwide.
Conflicts among participants may cause shifts in the context (or political framework) in which power is exercised. Thus, power – like process – is subject to the structure of decision-making for water, which often straddles local, regional, national, and even international jurisdictions simultaneously (Swyngedouw 2004; 2005).
While multiple jurisdictions and interests complicate efforts to find amicable solutions, differences in power wielded by groups, as well as structural impediments to engagement by every citizen, can impede participation in decisions of those directly affected by them, but who lack access to pertinent levels of governance. Again, the Flint water crisis illustrates this.
Moreover, shared responsibility for resolving problems may also lead to interminable debates over where “sovereignty” for decisions ultimately lies (Bakker 2009). Many political debates over the management of drought, flooding, and other weather-related water management issues exemplify this problem, as we will see. Disputes over water allocation among states sharing the same river basin also are subject to debates regarding the “locus of control” for decisions.
In these and other water politics disputes, each level of political jurisdiction may add its own concerns to the mix of issues, complicating settlement of conflicts over water allocation or quality – especially in large river basins. For example, trans-boundary streams such as the Rhine, Nile, Murray-Darling, Colorado, Mekong, Amazon, and Indus, whose watersheds are shared by more than one nation, state, and province within a country, are subject to varying demands. They also face competing proposals to protect in-stream flow and water quality; control and monitor off-stream withdrawals; and determine where, or if, to build dams.
Box 1.2Lead, water, expert power, and a city’s degraded politics – The saga of Flint
In April 2014, Flint, Michigan – an industrial city that had been in economic and, subsequently, population decline for decades – cancelled a longstanding agreement with Detroit’s municipal water supply system and decided to join a newly-formed regional authority that planned to build a pipeline to Lake Huron. The decision was undertaken to save some $18 million over eight years, once the pipeline was completed around 2016. To meet its interim water needs, the city’s state-appointed emergency manager, the fourth such official appointed by the governor of Michigan since late 2011 to run the city and restore its fiscal solvency, decided to temporarily switch its supply source to the Flint River.
Almost immediately, local residents complained of “discolored, foul-tasting, awful smelling water.” Not until fall 2015, however, was it discovered that the corrosive quality of the Flint River’s water (19 times more corrosive than that from Lake Huron) leached lead from the more-than-a-century old 500-mile long galvanized iron-pipe distribution system. High levels of lead in the water supply delivered to people’s homes – in some cases over six times the recommended threshold by the EPA – produced elevated lead levels in the bloodstreams of young people whom, it is feared, will suffer permanent brain damage and other health problems.
The state-appointed emergency manager repeatedly failed to respond to citizen complaints about the dangers of Flint’s water; other city and state officials gamely tried to reassure residents that the water supply was safe, despite the fact that many residents immediately noticed the corrosiveness of the water and even filed a class-action lawsuit to demand action; and, worst of all, the state and city could have averted the crisis altogether by using phosphates to combat the corrosion of its pipes and the leaching of lead into water supplies. Flint had no such program, the state mistakenly claimed the city did have such a program, and – at this moment – though the city has switched its supply back to Lake Huron, much damage has already been done. Who – or what factors – are to blame?
While forensic policy analysis will take years to render conclusive answers, some explanations are readily clear: an emergency manager who was not politically accountable to city residents; the consistent failure of “expert” regulators to respond to what were viewed as costly demands to fix the problems raised by local complainants; and the widespread poverty of city residents (some 40% of the city’s 100,000 residents live below the poverty line) all conspired to deny residents the power to affect policy – and to compel officials to use their power on behalf of reform. As one legal scholar has suggested, this idea of a “technical” city, run by administrators with “expertise,” is at least partly to blame for the long-standing neglect of Flint’s problems. Evidence suggests Flint is not alone. Jackson, Mississippi; Greenville, North Carolina; and Columbia, South Carolina have reported similar problems in the last decade.
Sources: Gardner 2016; Hennessy-Fiske 2016; Highsmith 2016; Pearce 2016; Schragger 2016; Smith 2016
For international rivers, especially, unequal power among riparian states is an important determinant of how water is shared – and how its overall quality is protected. While upstream users often have distinct advantages in controlling river flow, legal precedents (e.g., the Nile basin) may favor larger downstream states due to treaties first imposed by former colonial powers that wielded unquestioned sovereignty over a region (Waterbury 1979; 2002; Hamner & Wolf 1998; Salman & Uprety 2003; Lautze & Giordano 2005; Zeitoun & Warner 2006; Crow & Singh 2009).
With respect to perceived fairness, it is often the case that when any group feels excluded from decision-making; believes the outcome of decisions places them at a disadvantage with respect to water use; perceives they have inequitable access to clean water; or believes that water-dependent resources are being jeopardized, they will likely resist authority. They may mobilize various members of the public through exercising alternative
