The Water Dissensus – A Water Alternatives Forum
"How could anything non-controversial be of intellectual interest to grown-ups?" (Edward Abbey)
This Forum is intended to provide space for critical debates and discussions about water issues. Existing dissensus, or antagonistic values and points of view, can be turned into a learning opportunity for the benefit of all and give way to reasoned debates that have the potential both to further understanding of complex water issues and to generate new ideas.
by Barbara Schreiner and Barbara van Koppen Inequality has been rising across the world for several decades. While there has been a reduction in the number of people living in extreme poverty in some countries, the 1% have continued to amass vast amounts of wealth. What do internationally used concepts of "equitable access to water" really mean in ...
Can the world succeed in becoming more efficient with water and food resources, while preserving sufficient nature by 2050? No, according to a recent study* (Seijger et al., 2024) that assessed the period after the Green Revolution, from 2000 to 2020, and concluded considerably more agricultural land was required than initially anticipated. This wi...
Bruce Lankford, Dorice Agol, Colin Steley, Philippe Floch, Tafadzwanashe Mabhaudhi and Annelieke Duker About 20-25 years ago, an influential literature – critically reviewed elsewhere (Lankford and Agol, 2024) – considered the virtues of adding blue water to green water through irrigation (Barron et al., 1999; Rockström, 2003; Rockström et al., 200...
It's better to be approximately right than precisely wrong! Evan Vlachos, late water sociologist in Colorado A recurrent problem with environmental economists is their tendency to idealize solutions that seem obvious, while forgetting their administrative and transaction costs. This is frequently the case with water tariffs: metering is often advoc...
In a 1991 article, Charles Wilkinson pronounced the Old Prior water rights doctrine dead after a run of 151 years. To paraphrase what Mark Twain once said about a premature eulogy, the report of Prior's death "was an exaggeration." The doctrine, born in the gold mining camps of California in the late 1840s, remains the foundation of Western USA wat...
by Jonatan Godinez Madrigal, Rozemarijn ter Horst, Bich Tran, Rossella Alba We are a group of young scholars working together in the Constructive Advanced Thinking Programme framework. We asked and received funding to unpack and discuss 'Controversial tools: researching modelling practices in water governance'. {tweetme theme=cl_blue | mode=link | ...
By Kris Hartley Smart cities are not water-smart. To unpack this proposition, we must first consider how they are conceptualized. In a 2018 article, Vu Ming Khuong and I define smart cities as "the institutionalized and integrated application of smart technologies with a digital age mindset to the tasks and challenges of urban management" (p. 849)....
By Hosna J. Shewly, Md. Nadiruzzaman and Jeroen Warner Floods, droughts, cyclones - these days, every time we experience a disaster, it is framed as a climate event, and climate labelling dominates coverage in all knowledge communication portals. Large swathes of state water managers and popular media have developed a dominant discourse of blaming ...
Reflections by young water researchers from the Global South Neha Khandekar, Indika Arulingam, Deepa Joshi, Upandha Udalagama, Shreya Chakraborty, Kausik Ghosh, Paula Pacheco There is now, perhaps as never before, a growing consensus on the need for transformative change in water and climate science. As early career water researchers engaged in rec...
Last month's contribution to this forum from two of the 6,500 participants in the recent UN water summit (Alan Nicol and Lyla Mehta) nicely summarised the changes that have, and more importantly, have not happened since the Mar del Plata meeting almost half a century ago. Here I look more closely at the "practical" recommendations that emerged. The...
by Lyla Mehta and Alan Nicol The UN 2023 Water Conference took place in New York on 22-24 March, 46 years after the last UN water conference in Mar del Plata, Argentina. The 1977 conference led directly to the UN water decade of the 1980s with an avowed aim of achieving 'water for all'. Perhaps overly ambitious, given the ensuing global crises, dec...
Climate change is reducing water availability and threatening food security, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. In response, multilateral donors are increasingly funding farmer-led irrigation (FLID). Donors and governments see FLID as a strategy to expand irrigation coverage to improve household food insecurity and alleviate rural poverty. FLID is a...
California has one of the highest water stress levels in the world (FAO and UN Water, 2021). Particularly, the California Central Valley Aquifer System is one of the three groundwater resource systems with the highest depletion rates (Richey et al., 2015). In other words, water stress and use are high and regularly challenged by multi-year droughts...
A recent review of irrigation projects in sub-Saharan Africa found some surprising reasons for the poor performance of many schemes that complement the usual suspects (McCarthy and Winters, 2022). Not only is irrigation infrastructure itself often poorly constructed (not "fit"), but the operations, maintenance and repair of irrigation infrastructur...
The post-apartheid South African state placed local government at the centre of basic service provision for all, which it understood as a transformative function. However, more than two decades later, local government has become a site of dysfunction. The financial and infrastructural state of municipalities is deeply troubling. According to South ...
In the Kebili Region, southern Tunisia, the use of solar panels has recently soared, with a total of 2358 solar panels identified. Increased adoption of solar-based groundwater pumping is chiefly found among farmers who are off-grid, in private agricultural extensions that now represent a much larger area than traditional oases. Research conducted ...
What role should large hydropower dams play in future electricity systems? At the UNFCCC COP 26 in November 2021, the International Hydropower Association (IHA) sought to further the industry's role – and access to climate financing – by advocating 'sustainable hydropower' as vital to achieving net zero emissions targets (IHA, 2021). Civil society ...
I argue for some paradigmatic departures in defining and conceptualizing peri-urban water security. I argue for abandoning the notion of the peri-urban as an area contiguous to the city; reorienting our thinking from emphasizingstate intervention to improve water security to a more broad-based notion of "network governance" (Mathur 2008); and final...
Water as a resource for humans is fundamentally inequitable: naturally distributed water supplies do not occur where people want them, nor at the times and in quantities and/or qualities that people prefer. Water politics has largely been motivated by goals of securing plentiful, clean, and cheap water supplies and pushing off risks to others. That...
We argue that promoting Solar Power as a Remunerative Crop (SPaRC) can help fix the perverse incentives that have frustrated groundwater demand management efforts in India. India relies heavily on groundwater, primarily for irrigation, but also increasingly for meeting domestic and industrial water demand. The atomistic and anarchic development of ...
<<< This discussion is now closed >>> The World Health Organization holds that han...
<<< This discussion is now closed >>> Growing water crises have drawn attention to...
<<< This discussion is now closed >>>That water is a political resource, we all know. We ...
<<< This discussion is now closed >>> We argue that groundwater regulatory po...
<< This discussion is now closed >> South Africa's water laws and reform policie...
<< This discussion is now closed >> In response to excessive water development lea...
< This discussion is now closed > The financial impact of Covid-19 has been devastating for p...
< This discussion is now closed > The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Agenda is considered by ma...
< This discussion is now closed >For centuries we have been adapting our waterways to use the...
< This discussion is now closed > During much of the 20th century, governments w...
< This discussion is now closed > "Payments for ecosystem services" (PES) ...
Can Nexus avoid the fate of IWRM? [This discussion is now closed] Is the nexus approach the...
Ecological flows are exclusionary, technocratic and top-down practices ... (but could be empowering)
Posted by Jeroen Vos and Rutgerd Boelens << This discussion is now closed >> Following a century in which dominating...
Controversy allows the design and testing of projects and solutions that integrate a plurality of points of view, demands, and expectations. This ''taking into account,'' which takes place through negotiations and successive compromises, unleashes a process of learning (Callon et al. 2001). The production of knowledge in the water sector has tended...