Abstract
As populations grow and climate patterns change, difficult trade-offs in water security must be made. Re-allocation of water resources and re-distribution of water security outcomes will inevitably raise questions of equity. Equity is a central component of water security but often underemphasised, hence we still lack nuanced insights to how equity is understood and operationalised by water managers and users. The concept of risk is increasingly used in water security policy and practise but has been weakly integrated with equity considerations. We offer a contextual study that explicitly unpacks risk and inequity in water security across multiple scales; we have analysed lived water experiences and their hydrosocial drivers in a major river basin in Ethiopia. This is based on 61 interviews from seven rural kebeles, government organisations at woreda, zonal, regional and federal level and local and international NGOs as well as 17 industrial water user surveys. With our findings, and drawing on existing studies, we offer a theoretical framework for embedding water risk in equitable water security considerations. We find that when water risk is (re-)oriented from a biophysical framing, towards one centred on water-related values, it can be suitably embedded within hydrosocial framings of water security. This approach offers unique insights into how inequities are understood, within uneven power and political dynamics, which is critical for interventions that seek to deliver more equitable water security and meet social development targets.
Highlights
There are inequities in water security—the unfair distribution of water security risks and benefits—that exist on a spectrum and can be delineated across contexts
Drawing on existing scholarly work, and with a case study of the Awash River basin in Ethiopia, this paper reveals how equity and risk in water security are inherently interlinked through values and we highlight the inequitable lived experiences, perspectives and values of water security and the socio-natural processes that influence them
Using qualitative research methods allowed research participants to identify their own values and with an analysis starting from a place of values, our case study research revealed that embedding values within ideas of water access, risk and equity enabled a diverse interpretation of water security, a grounding of its subjectivity and fosters an academic move towards local conceptual understandings
Summary
There are inequities in water security—the unfair distribution of water security risks and benefits—that exist on a spectrum and can be delineated across contexts. Even just considering water access, inequities exist across social divides in wealth and ethnicity (JMP, 2019). Inequities in water security are shaped by a combination of social and natural drivers, requiring an interdisciplinary approach to understand them. In arenas of water scarcity, water resources are often prioritised for economic activities to the detriment of social development through market mechanisms (Swyngedouw, 2009) and governance norms (Woodhouse and Muller, 2017). Inequity is acutely observed in developing countries where institutional arrangements to govern water security are weak (Hepworth et al, 2013), while Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 calls for safe and affordable water for all, placing the poorest and most marginalised in the spotlight (UN, 2019a)
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