Category: Program on Water Governance

Climatic variation and intersectoral water competition increasingly challenge the effective provision of irrigation services. This article explores their combined effects on irrigation allocation from the Angat Reservoir (Philippines), where domestic water use in Metro Manila has overtaken regional irrigation as the dominant right-holder. Rules protecting Metro Manila’s large right to water ‘interact’ with dry spells to affect irrigation security in wet and dry seasons. Historically, irrigators were uncompensated because re-allocation’s cause was contested as (1) an unforeseeable climatic event (releasing domestic utilities of liability), or (2) produced by urban demand (requiring compensation). Trade-off rules must be prepared to navigate combinatory effects.

Shah, S. H., & Zerriffi, H. (2017). Urban water demand, climatic variation, and irrigation-water insecurity: Interactive stressors and lessons for water governance from the angat river basin (philippines). Water International, 42(5), 543. doi:10.1080/02508060.2017.1342073

Click here for full article.

 

A new book titled ‘Global Water Ethics: Towards a Global Ethics Charter’ (Routledge, 2017) has just been published, edited by Rafael Ziegler and David Groenfeldt.

This edited collection assembles a range of perspectives on the theory and practice of water ethics. Contributions consider the difficult ethical and epistemological questions of water ethics in a global context, as well as offering local, empirical perspectives. Case study chapters focus on a range of countries including Canada, China, Germany, India, South Africa and the USA. The respective insights are brought together in the final section concerning the practical project of a universal water ethics charter, alongside theoretical questions about the legitimacy of a global water ethics.

The book includes a chapter from PoWG’s Lucy Rodina, titled ‘Reflections on water ethics and the human right to water in Khayelitsha, South Africa.’ In this chapter Lucy draws on her Masters and PhD research to provide situated reflections on the ethical implications of the widely-touted ‘human right to water’ for water distribution and access.

Further information and a discount offer is contained in the attached flyer.

New 7- Year SSHRC Partnership Grant Announced on Water Governance and Indigenous Law.

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The Sustainable Water Governance and Indigenous Law project is currently welcoming applications from Masters, PhD students and Post-Doctoral fellows interested in any of the following: sustainable water governance, Indigenous law, settler colonialism and resource industries, critical political economy, political ecology and community-based research.

Collaboration with Indigenous communities is a central mandate of the project.

If interested, please send an expression of interest, including a CV and cover letter (including research areas and potential universities of interest) to water.partners@ubc.ca by October 30, 2016.

Please see the poster below for more details.

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PoWG co-director Leila Harris has contributed a chapter to a new book on the ‘politics of fresh water’, exploring the intersection of gender, ethnic difference, and equality in water access and politics. The edited collection forms part of EarthScan’s Studies in Water Resources Management book series. It will be released in December 2016, and is currently available for pre-order.

Harris, L. (in press) Theorizing Gender, Ethnic Difference and Inequality in Relation to Water Access and Politics in Southeastern Turkey. In: C. Ashcraft and T. Mayer (Eds) The Politics of Freshwater: Access, Conflict and Identity, Routledge, Earthscan.

Dr Harris’ chapter makes two assertions. First, one cannot assess, and fully understand the politics of fresh water without attention to inequality, notably with respect to gender and other axes of difference. Second, water access and politics often play a central role in constituting key categories of difference and inequality. As such, these categories are not static, but shift and change in relation to the changing waterscape and associated environmental dynamics. This chapter elaborates these assertions with examples based on earlier work examining complex waterscape changes underway in the upper Tigris-Euphrates basin, also highlighting key concepts from several decades of work in feminist political ecology.

A pre-publication version of Dr Harris’ chapter is also available here.

Members of the Program on Water Governance recently released a policy brief on microbial water quality risk assessment practices in Canada, based on research conducted in 2014. The purpose of this research was to help understand how new technologies associated with metagenomics could improve microbial water quality testing, and how such technologies might fit within existing water quality governance frameworks. The policy brief summarizes the main findings from this research, and identifies key insights for policy makers, practitioners, and the public.

Full details on the study can be found in:

Dunn, G., Harris, L. Cook, C. and Prystajecky, N. (2014).  A comparative analysis of current microbial water quality risk assessment and management practices in British Columbia and Ontario, Canada. Science of the Total Environment 468-469: 544-552.

Members of the Program on Water Governance have just released a new policy brief, which summarizes their analysis of the BC Water Act Modernization consultation process, and identifies key implications for policy-makers and participants. Their findings are described in greater detail in a journal article that is currently under review, and will be made available on the website once published.

Jollymore, A. McFarlane, K. and Harris, L.M. 2016. Whose input counts? Public consultation and the BC Water Sustainability Act. Policy Brief. Vancouver: Program on Water Governance.

The policy brief summarizes the results of an analysis of the large-scale consultation process undertaken for British Columbia’s Water Act Modernization between 2008-2013. Submissions were analysed from the three stages of consultation that informed the development of the Water Sustainability Act (2014), to explore variability in the policy preferences of submitter groups, and compare those preferences with policy outcomes in the Act. The results of this analysis indicate uneven alignment between policy outcomes and the policy preferences of different groups. Submitter perspectives on the consultation process were also analysed, highlighting key ways in which the consultative process could be improved.

On May 16th, 2016 a workshop on Community-Based Research (CBR) and Water was held at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. This workshop was organised as part of a joint project on CBR by the Institute of Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES–UBC), the Program on Water Governance (UBC) and the UNESCO Chair on Community Based Research and Social Responsibility in Higher Education (UVic). More information on the CBR partnership project can be found here.

The workshop consisted of two sessions combining theory and practice of CBR. A workshop report has since been compiled, summarising the key discussions and conclusions from each session, and is available here.

Thank you to all who made this workshop possible!