Dr. Karen Bakker has just released a new co-edited book on Water Security: Principles, Perspectives and Practices. For more information, click here.

Contemporary Water Governance in the Global South

Scarcity, Marketization and Participation

Edited by Leila M. Harris, Jacqueline A. Goldin, Christopher Sneddon

Published May 15th 2013 by Routledge – 264 pages

The litany of alarming observations about water use and misuse is now familiar—over a billion people without access to safe drinking water; almost every major river dammed and diverted; increasing conflicts over the delivery of water in urban areas; continuing threats to water quality from agricultural inputs and industrial wastes; and the increasing variability of climate, including threats of severe droughts and flooding across locales and regions. These issues present tremendous challenges for water governance.

This book focuses on three major concepts and approaches that have gained currency in policy and governance circles, both globally and regionally—scarcity and crisis, marketization and privatization, and participation. It provides a historical and contextual overview of each of these ideas as they have emerged in global and regional policy and governance circles and pairs these with in-depth case studies that examine manifestations and contestations of water governance internationally.

The book interrogates ideas of water crisis and scarcity in the context of bio-physical, political, social and environmental landscapes to better understand how ideas and practices linked to scarcity and crisis take hold, and become entrenched in policy and practice. The book also investigates ideas of marketization and privatization, increasingly prominent features of water governance throughout the global South, with particular attention to the varied implementation and effects of these governance practices. The final section of the volume analyzes participatory water governance, querying the disconnects between global discourses and local realities, particularly as they intersect with the other themes of interest to the volume.

Promoting a view of changing water governance that links across these themes and in relation to contemporary realities, the book is invaluable for students, researchers, advocates, and policy makers interested in water governance challenges facing the developing world.

The city of Accra faces challenges in providing its citizens with potable water due to rapid population growth, poverty and governance challenges. This policy brief highlights the positive uses of local water boards (LWBs) and “water dialogues” to spark discussion and change in the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area.

The international community has outlined the need for participatory environmental governance for decades and drawing upon this discourse, the authors, Leila M. Harris and Cynthia Morinville, discuss whether this governance is feasible in Accra. They note that dialogue must be sensitive to local concerns and designed to ensure that citizens’ voices are heard. The authors recommend that LWBs are instituted in additional communities in Accra, that effort is put into improving the function of the boards, that participatory mechanisms are strengthened to ensure citizen representation, and that best practices are shared with other urban areas with similar challenges.

On Wednesday, June 5, 2013, 5:00 pm Professor Karen Bakker gave a Book Prize Lecture at the University of Victoria. Karen is the winner of the 2012 Rik Davidson/Studies in Political Economy Book Prize for her book Privatizing Water: Governance Failure and the World’s Urban Water Crisis (CornellUniversity Press 2010)