Welcome to Water Justice

Our purpose here is to do some thinking about the essential commodity of human life, indeed the essential substance of all living things.  Some now blithely say that competition for water will be the basis for future war between nations.  Some say, with climate change, we'll have too much water, or we'll get it at the wrong time in the wrong amounts, or delivered by powerful, ocean-generated weather.  Closer to home, in the United States at least, legal paradigms with which to determine how water is apportioned strain when supply gets short.  Drought is a growing concern.  Hopefully the writing posted here will encourage you to dig deeper in your own thoughts about the justice of water use and management.

Like the air we breathe, water is an essential component of this globe's life-engendering habitat.  We can't live without it.  In the history of western civilization, water has been believed to be a "common" asset, available to all.  And yet, access to it has proved confrontational in private-property oriented societies, as well as between governments and nations.  Justice is, of course, about balancing the respective merits of competing claims in unique, and sometimes confrontational, contexts.  And justice is not just about the rules, for those may well have been set in place to create and protect wealth, power and station.  Justice has a greater reference, a greater home, than law itself.  Because need for water is global and time immemorial, water justice inquiry invokes broad societal and temporal reference, research and contemplation.

Hopefully you will discover, as you review the materials provided here, that these thoughts are not "all wet," and that the humor, if and where it exists, is not exceedingly "dry."

James Davenport

Water Justice--The Book

In naming this blogsite, I encountered a new book (2018) with the title Water Justice, Cambridge University Press.  So as not to offend the sensibilities of its authors, Rutgers Boelens, Jeroen Vos and Tom Perreault, I wrote to Professors Boelens and Pearreault only to find two like minds.  Their work falls, they say, within the field of "political ecology."  I would have said "water politics" or "water law."  Their "questions address fundamental issues regarding how water scarcity is being constructed by dominant agents, and how power relations influence water knowledge and development to produce particular claims to truth."  These questions "intrinsically engage research and transdisciplinary social action, focusing for instance on how knowledge production can contribute to strategies that contest water dispossession and accumulation; and how the knowledge systems of scholars, activists and water users can be mutually enriching and complementary."
From the position of academe, the three professors continue in their introductory chapter:
“[W]e base our understandings of “water justice” on a notion that sees environmental governance not as the “governance of nature” but “as ‘governance through nature’ – that is, as the reflection and projection of economic and political power via decisions about the design, manipulation and control of socio- natural processes” (Bridge and Perreault, 2009 : 492). More specifically, we situate “water justice” conceptually and politically in the field of the “political ecology of water,” which may be defined as: “the politics and power relationships that shape human knowledge of and intervention in the water world, leading to forms of governing nature and people, at once and at different scales, to produce particular hydro- social order” (Boelens 2015a : 9). This political ecology of water thus focuses on unequal distribution of benefits and burdens, access to and control over water, winners and losers, and disputed water rights, knowledge, and culture. It is also about practical and theoretical efforts to build alternative water realities.”
“The combination of intensified resource extraction, land and water degradation, increasing competition over water access and control, and growing reliance on market forces and forms of water expertocracy, have profound implications for debates over water rights and justice. On the one hand, it is increasingly clear that water scarcity and insecurity are not so much related to the absolute availability of fresh and clean water, but rather are expressions of how water, and water services, are unequally distributed among societal groups. Unequal water distribution and exposure to contaminated water, flooding and failed water projects often reveal elite capture of the state and related biased policies and corrupt practices. In other words, the so-called “water crisis” is less a consequence of generalized scarcity than a manifestation of uneven power geometries (UNDP, 2006 ). On the other hand, the mainstream water policy community tends to avoid scrutinizing the root causes of water problems. Instead, in accordance with its own positivist, universalist epistemologies and its belief in expert knowledge systems, formal legal structures and market forces, it blames the victims: local water  user groups, communities and their “chaotic, inefficient plural rights systems” (Boelens and Zwarteveen, 2005 ).”
“[U]nderstanding and challenging water injustices requires conceptual tools to recognize the power and politics of water use, management and governance. Beyond their expression in laws, explicit rules and formal hierarchies, . . . power and politics also significantly work through more invisible norms and rules that present themselves as naturally or technically ordered. These rules are part of established water development intervention procedures and practices, and are embedded in water expert communities’ cultural codes of behavior (Zwarteveen and Boelens, 2014 ).”
Heady thoughts.  Thank you, gentlemen.
J. Davenport