Contentious Perspectives on Water Resources

Abstract

Water as a Human Right for the Middle East and North Africa. Edited by Asit K. Biswas, Eglal Rached, Cecilia Tortajada. London: Routledge, 2008. 191 pp., $140.00 hardcover (ISBN-10: 0-415-44584-1). Global Corruption Report 2008: Corruption in the Water Sector. By Transparency International. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Water Integrity Network, 2008. 367 pp., $39.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-521-72795-2). Embracing Watershed Politics. By Edella Schlager, William Blomquist. CO: University of Colorado Press, 2008. 220 pp., $55.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0-87081-909-4). By the end of the 21st century water may replace oil as the most contentious of global natural resource problems. Water is becoming increasingly scarce, and today water can not be found in the quantity, quality and price to meet the ever growing demand for it around the world. Even in places where water would seem to be sufficient to meet needs it is often misallocated, wasted, and degraded by pollution. Climate change is promising to make already difficult water problems yet worse. There are a very large number of river basins that cross the boundaries of nation states, and control over water resources is widely regarded as essential to the security of nation states. There is a long international history of upstream states slighting the claims of their downstream neighbors. Despite the importance of water, it has not been the subject of the kind of scrutiny in the international relations literature as has oil. While some fine books about water have been written by international relations scholars such as Ken Conca, and a considerable number of political scientists have turned their theoretically oriented attention to water such as Elinor Ostrom, David Feldman, Steve Mumme and Helen Ingram, among many others, most international treatments of water are authored by writers who are closely associated with the expert water resources community of specialists. While none of the three books under review break any new theoretical ground, they do examine water from unconventional perspectives and strongly challenge the hegemony of the dominant water expert community over prevailing conventional wisdom. …