Water governance for justice, peace and sustainability

The term water governance has rapidly gained popularity in the last three decades. This can be traced to two related meanings and uses of the term. First of all, in water policy circles - which used to be dominated by natural scientists and engineers - it indicates a broad acknowledgment that water is not just natural, but also importantly social. The term governance thus marks a change in policy emphasis from infrastructure (engineering) to the organisational, financial and institutional arrangements needed to regulate and order flows of water.

The second source of the term lies with economists and political scientists, who started using the word governance to capture the diminishing direct role of the state in arranging the distribution of welfare. Hence, from being mostly a public responsibility, water has increasingly become a shared concern of public, civil society and private sector actors. These actors come together to manage water in river basins and watersheds; organise service provision for drinking water, sanitation and irrigation; engage in the prevention or management of floods; or negotiate sharing water agreements at different levels. 

With the proliferation of actors, it has become increasingly difficult to trace flows of water, and thus to know whom to hold accountable for water-related decisions and outcomes. Yet, doing this has only become more important. Declining quantities and qualities of, and increased competition over, water prompts re-allocations that inevitably favour some uses and users over others. Likewise, the increased incidence of floods - often caused by the intersection of climate change with urbanisation - affects different groups of people differently. Those less protected or with poor access may resort to protests to demand for water security or justice. When those with different needs - farmers and herders, for instance, or the industrial sector and the agricultural sector - depend on the same diminishing source of water, it may lead to (sometimes violent) conflicts. Depletion and pollution, moreover, may provoke loss of biodiversity and ecosystem decline. 

IHE Delft water governance work takes inspiration from philosophical, critical, feminist and legal scholarship on water and the environment more broadly. It mobilises this scholarship to engage in empirical investigations of how injustices, conflicts and environmental degradation become manifest in and around water; for exploring options to anchor water justice, peace and environmental care in laws and regulations; and for critical attempts to redefine and retheorize water in ways that make it easier to recognize and address these concerns. 

In our research and education, we look at how intersecting relations of class, gender or ethnicity (etc.) mediate how water is shared, and scrutinise the organisation of water decision making in terms of how representation and authority are defined and organised.

In the context of river basins and agriculture, water governance work revolves around an understanding of and engagement with institutional and infrastructural mechanisms to access, own and distribute water or irrigated land. One important question here is how ongoing processes of liberalisation, aimed at opening up land and water rights for markets, risk concentrating water rights in the hands of a few commercial investors or business actors.

In urban contexts, we are mainly concerned with how access to water services is arranged across city spaces and people, and with how floods, droughts or water-related diseases are spatially distributed - with some places and people being more vulnerable than others. Understanding the processes of uneven development that produce such differences requires engagement with theories of urbanisation or agrarian transformation.

At the transboundary level, we support water diplomacy processes to facilitate fair cooperation between states on shared water resources, develop effective joint institutions, and help the prevention and resolution of water related conflicts among them. This requires a thorough understanding of the practices of water diplomacy, the interlinkages of water with the broader political context and the interdependence of different scales of water governance.