Perspectives on Water Governance

Abstract

Although fresh water only comprises 2.5 percent of all water resources worldwide, it is essential for sustaining human life. Yet, approximately 1.1 billion people lack access to any type of safe drinking water. As a direct consequence, about 1.6 million people die every year from waterborne illnesses (e.g., diarrhea and cholera) of whom 90 percent are children under ave, primarily in developing countries.1 In 2000, the United Nations Millennium Summit afarmed the importance of safe drinking water for poverty alleviation as embedded in Goal 7, Target 10 of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which seeks to halve by 2015 the number of people worldwide without adequate access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation. The common feature of the three books under review here is their attention to water. Even then, they cover different types of water resources and uses (surface water versus groundwater; irrigation water versus drinking water) and at different levels of scale (villages, national governments, and international treaties). They also cover different theoretical perspectives, encapsulating a wide-range of disciplines within the social sciences, including development economics, geography, social ecology, political science, public policy, anthropology, and law. What unites these books, then, is their focus on the centrality of water resources for alleviating poverty and improving human life, fostering equity and fairness, adjudicating social struggles over access to and quality of water deliv-