Introduction: Global Governance of Water

Abstract

Water is a key element of the earth system with all its geophysical, biological, and human-social interactions. Freshwater is a prerequisite of human well-being in terms of drinking water and sanitation, food security and health, industrial processes and energy supply, transportation and recreation, and further goods and services delivered by ecosystem integrity and freshwater biodiversity. The sustainable management of water resources in times of global change poses one of the most pressing challenges for public policy in the twenty-first century. Global demand for freshwater has skyrocketed with population expansion, income growth, and technological development. The resulting strains on supply create not only environmental pressures but social tensions as well, given that freshwater resources are unequally distributed among world regions, countries, and social groups. Water scarcity and conflicts over the allocation of water resources are already widespread around the world. One-third of humanity already lives under water stress today, and one-fifth of the world's people do not have access to safe drinking water. Freshwater ecosystems are the most degraded and endangered of the planet's habitats. Under contemporary global change, the inequality of water distribution is increasing, and threats from water extremes like droughts and floods are growing. The importance of securing world water resources is increasingly recognized not only by researchers across the academic disciplines, but also by policymakers and the general public. Yet although a global discourse about water issues has evolved over the last five decades, a clear global governance framework has still not emerged. This omission is the more remarkable when one considers that, unlike governance of many other environmental and resource issues, water management has a very long history. It can be traced back 5,000 years to the ancient civilizations of the Nile, the Indus, the Euphrates, and the Tigris. Nevertheless, global regimes for water have been much slower to emerge than global governance of, for example, climate change and ozone depletion. As ecological, social, and economic interdependence on a planetary scale grows, the need to govern water in global terms becomes all the more urgent. Yet how can global public policy on this issue be promoted when local and national arrangements have become entrenched over a very long period of time? How can new global elements of water management be intertwined with local, national, and regional aspects to create multilevel arrangements that provide effective and legitimate governance of this vital resource? In spite of the clearly evident scientific and political challenges, global water governance has not yet received the research attention it needs. To improve this situation, the Global Water System Project (GWSP) was created in 2005 to, among other things, build capacity and networks among global water governance scholars. The GWSP organized a workshop in June 2006 to bring together researchers from multiple disciplines working on global aspects of water policy. This special issue of Global Governance includes a collection of major articles presented at that workshop. The five articles published here highlight the need for adopting a global perspective on water governance. With regard to theory, the articles consider how to conceive of global water governance. In terms of empirical analysis, the articles provide in-depth analysis of specific global water issues, with particular emphasis on delineating the links between the river basin level and the global level. The case studies span different continents and cover a variety of institutional, cultural, economic, and environmental conditions. Taking the five articles in order, the opening piece by Claudia Pahl-Wostl, Joyeeta Gupta, and Daniel Petry analyzes global governance of water with emphasis on the role of network governance and on the use of governance typologies--in particular, the mobius-web concept developed by James Rosenau. …