Water Justice Research Articles

“Water and all My Relations”: Reimagining Indigenous Water Justice for Seven Generations

The Ojibwe Gichigami (Lake Superior) bioregion is the ancestral and contemporary homeland of the Anishinaabe Ojibwa. Harvesting and consuming fish has sustained people for millennia, but today, toxic risks due to fish contamination contribute to many burdens for both human and more-than-human worlds. For the Ojibwa, nibi gaye nii’kinaaganaa (“water and all my relations”) are the lived experiences of fish-reliant communities and emphasize sustaining good relations with water and relatives. Toxicity disrupts traditional harvest lifeways, violates treaty rights, and problematizes Ojibwa water relations. In this article, I describe diverging values attributed to water and conflicting norms of water quality relations between Ojibwa people and scientific practices of toxicology. Drawn from a study of institutional water decision making, I examine practices associated with water, fish, and risk and how these practices clarify ethics in water policy. The study of toxic substances, albeit invisible in water policy and fish advisories, raises broader issues of Indigenous water justice, particularly for sensitive populations (e.g., developing children, women of childbearing age, and fish-reliant communities). In proposing a broader justice framework for reimagining water lives and livelihoods, I argue for foregrounding Indigenous water justice ethics based on long-term wellbeing, a time period inclusive of seven generations.

Responding to the global challenges of ‘Too Much, Too Little and Too Dirty’ Water: Towards a Safer and More Just Water Future

The world water crisis is manifest through ‘Too Much, Too Little and Too Dirty’ water at multiple scales from the local to the global. Understanding the key drivers and consequences of this water crisis, and who bears the biggest costs, is necessary to develop appropriate responses, at scale and over time. Using four framings: one, water stocks and limits; two, water rights and responsibilities; three, water values and prices; and four, green and grey water infrastructure, we review the challenges and possible responses. Using a water justice lens, we highlight the transitional and transformational pathways towards a safer and more just water future.

A tale of two rivers – Baaka and Martuwarra, Australia: Shared voices and art towards water justice

Two of Australia’s iconic river systems, Baaka in New South Wales (NSW) and Martuwarra in Western Australia (WA), are described in a narrative that connects Indigenous custodianship, bio-physical features and art, and contrasts settler law with First Law to provide multiple ways of seeing the two river systems. Our narrative is a shared response to: (1) upstream water extractions that have imposed large costs on Baaka and its peoples; and (2) threats of water extractions and developments to Martuwarra. By scribing the voices of the two river systems, we have created a space to reimagine an emerging future that connects the past and present through the concept of ‘EveryWhen’, where First Law has primacy, and where art connects Indigenous knowledges to non-Indigenous understanding. Through a dialogue process with Indigenous knowledge holders, artists and water researchers, five action processes, or journeys, are identified to guide water decision making towards water justice.

A transdisciplinary and collaborative urban water security framework: Developed through an interdisciplinary study in Kolkata, India

AbstractUrban water security (UWS) is and will remain a crucial issue over the next decades, especially as it is exacerbated by climate change effects and related hazards. Despite the growing number of studies focusing on more diverse dimensions, including social dimensions, of water security and urban dynamics, there is still an absence of comprehensive, interdisciplinary UWS measurement index that takes into account the complexity and multidimensional aspects of water security. This article discusses a new, transdisciplinary community‐focused approach to analyzing and responding to water insecurity. It draws on findings from a large study carried out over 4 years with a focus on creating a new and comprehensive way of measuring water security, incorporating biophysical and social factors. The project collected data in Kolkata, India. Kolkata is an important megacity in a developing country, facing rising pressures on water‐environmental provision due to rapid population growth and urbanization combined with governance and infrastructural issues. The project team worked collaboratively with affected communities to create a comprehensive framework for measuring and evaluating water security for cities. A water justice approach to water security we argue is particularly important in emerging countries, and one that can be effectively applied to environments where urban growth and resultant shrinking resources have created complicated and fragile systems. This approach adds to existing knowledge and research that focuses on collaborative interdisciplinary methods that aim to create solutions that can help create a sustainable water secure future “leaving no one behind.”

Assessing water scarcity narratives in Brazil – Challenges for urban governance

Analyzing water scarcity narratives is important for formulating policies. However, narratives and discourse are not neutral but are deeply embedded in societal contexts. They have the power to influence decision-making processes by legitimizing some solutions and disregarding others, as well as by including or excluding the needs of specific social groups. In this study, we examine water scarcity narratives in Brazil, identify those that perpetuate and support strategic viewpoints and determine which types of narratives possess the most persuasive and coordinative power. Furthermore, we aimed to understand how framing the issue impacts local-level solutions, policies, governance, and water management, specifically emphasizing the state of Sao Paulo. We analyzed a large textual dataset from Brazilian newspaper articles from 2010 to 2021, utilizing machine-learning text classification tools, an essential method in Natural Language Processing. Our findings indicate that the water scarcity narrative in Brazil is multifaceted and encompass various narrative typologies that offer insights into different aspects of the issue. These typologies include narratives on institutional, management/mismanagement, escalating deforestation, and causal factors such as reduced rainfall. These narratives tend to downplay the responsibility of local governments for effective water management and align with climate-centric perspectives. Furthermore, various groups have politically appropriated some narratives, including those promoting denial narratives, which undermine the severity of the water scarcity problem and emphasize the abundance of this resource. On the other hand, water justice narratives bring attention to the challenges of limited access to water and inadequate infrastructure. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought these issues to the forefront revealing the urgent need for equitable water distribution and improved infrastructure.

River Commoning and the State: A Cross‐Country Analysis of River Defense Collectives

Grassroots initiatives that aim to defend, protect, or restore rivers and riverine environments have proliferated around the world in the last three decades. Some of the most emblematic initiatives are anti-dam and anti-mining movements that have been framed, by and large, as civil society versus the state movements. In this article, we aim to bring nuance to such framings by analyzing broader and diverse river-commoning initiatives and the state–citizens relations that underlie them. To study these relations we build on notions of communality, grassroots scalar politics, rooted water collectives, and water justice movements, which we use to analyze several collective practices, initiatives, and movements that aim to protect rivers in Thailand, Spain, Ecuador, and Mozambique. The analysis of these cases shows the myriad ways in which river collectives engage with different manifestations of the state at multiple scales. As we show, while some collectives strategically remain unnoticed, others actively seek and create diverse spaces of engagement with like-minded citizen initiatives, supportive non-governmental organizations, and state actors. Through these relations, alliances are made and political space is sought to advance river commoning initiatives. This leads to a variety of context-specific multi-scalar state–citizens relations and river commoning processes in water governance arenas.

The illusion of water justice at the expense of tourism

ABSTRACT Water justice, defined as water distribution based on political agendas that prioritize certain regions in the reorganization of water resources, has become a critical issue in many regions around the world. Iran's hydraulic mission exemplifies how dam construction and inter-basin water transfer primarily benefit high-water-demand sectors. Against this backdrop and drawing on available data and a review of literature, this research demonstrates that despite tourism accounting for a small portion of Iran's overall water usage, the Iranian perception of water justice undermines tourism by harming its physical components including waterscapes, historical relics, traditional crafts, and urban ecology. This research concludes that the decline of tourism exacerbates social inequality and unsustainability, necessitating a reconsideration of Iran's approach to water allocation in favour of a more sustainable and inclusive tourism sector.

Heterogeneity of Water Justice and the Question of Nile Solidarity

This article analyses the recent contestation over the Nile River due to the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) and its implications for the agrarian question and water justice. The article focuses on the commodification of the Nile by national governments, whereby technology, rationality, and regulations have become the driving force of the river’s development. The engagement of civil society actors in the GERD dispute reveals several perceptions of “riverhood” of the Nile. As a result, water justice is heterogeneous and challenges building a wide-basin movement.

The need to acknowledge, study and engage with new water justice movements

The need to acknowledge, study and engage with new water justice movements

Rewards, risks and responsible deployment of artificial intelligence in water systems

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly proposed to address deficiencies across water systems, which currently leave about 25% of the global population without clean water, about 50% without sanitation services and about 30% without hygiene facilities. AI is poised to enhance supply insights, catchment management and emergency response, improve treatment plant and distribution network design, operation and maintenance, and advance service availability, demand management and water justice. However, proliferation of this nascent technology could trigger serious and unexpected problems, including system-wide compromise owing to design errors, malfunction and cyberattacks as well as exposures to cascading socio-ecological, water–energy–food nexus and coupled critical infrastructure failures. In response, we make three recommendations for safe and responsible deployment of AI across potable water supply and sewage disposal systems: address gaps in foundational infrastructure and digital literacy; establish institutional, software and hardware mechanisms for trustworthy AI; and prioritize applications based on our proposed systematic benefit and risk assessment framework. In this Perspective, the authors survey potential water-system-wide benefits of AI applications from catchments to end-users and then highlight potential systemic barriers, direct risks and exposures to cascading failures, which may prove catastrophic for communities. In response, they make three recommendations for safe and responsible deployment of AI across potable water supply and sewage disposal systems.

Balancing water rights in metropolitan water conservation areas: the case of Chengdu, China

ABSTRACT Water justice can be a delicate balancing act. Conservation regulations ensure urban areas’ water demands are met, but these may conflict with the water rights of local people living in catchment areas. No metropolis wants to face water shortages, yet prioritising municipalities’ rights over those of local people can result in water injustice. This paper explores water rights and water justice, defining both to show how the latter is achieved by balancing the former. It examines Chengdu’s water catchment area using field observation, interviews, and document analysis and investigates the causes of water conflict through the lens of local culture. The study then outlines a water justice framework involving domestic habits and lifestyle, production of water, and management principles with the aim of providing parity of rights that highlight local cultural factors. The justice criteria outlined here could also be used in other places where power structures disregard local people’s water rights.

Engaging with Water and Rivers from a Multispecies Justice Perspective

Rivers are ecosystems indispensable for the survival of both humans and non-human species. Yet humans often disregard their importance and modify the existing socio-natural equilibrium of rivers in the pursuit of economic and political agendas. With a focus on new water justice movements, this article advocates a perspective that recognizes rivers as hydrosocial territories, actively and continuously co-created, co-inhabited, and transformed by a multiplicity of human and other-thanhuman beings. Such a perspective opens a path to a multispecies justice framework that involves rethinking the relations between human and non-human beings in the worlds we share as a medium for creating more socio-ecologically just and biodiverse water worlds.

Plantation pasts, plantation futures: resisting zombie water infrastructures in Maui, Hawai’i

ABSTRACT Sugar plantations have fundamentally shaped water use in Maui, Hawai’i for over 100 years, with tremendous resulting impacts on ecosystems and Native Hawaiian communities. In this paper, we build on literature on the plantationocene and the political lives of infrastructure to examine plantation irrigation infrastructure. We center Maui’s vast water conveyance ditch system as a means of understanding how infrastructure continues plantation logics into the present, considering both the physical ditches themselves as well as the laws and politics which support continued water extraction. We also consider infrastructural futures, highlighting ongoing efforts of communities seeking water justice via infrastructural control.

Advancing water justice through a tribally-driven partnership: Designing sustainable rainwater harvesting systems in the Yukon–Kuskokwim delta of Alaska

Community driven co-design models can help collaborators to respectfully engage in projects that provide much-needed resources and services to underserved communities. For example, partnerships between tribal, academic, and non-profit collaborators have the potential to generate positive outcomes for communities when individual efforts by those same groups may be less successful. However, cultural and spiritual differences between collaborators (particularly tribal and non-tribal) can lead to misunderstandings and negative project outcomes, despite good intentions and an honest effort by collaborators to achieve a common goal. Here, we provide a case study of a community-driven co-design project involving tribal, academic, and private collaborators to design and build a rainwater harvesting system with the Akiak Native Community (ANC), and their tribal council in Alaska, USA. A novel collaborative co-design process honoring the tribal sovereignty of the ANC is emphasized in this case study; a design model that is poorly represented in the literature with real-world examples. Logistics associated with designing and constructing the community-use rainwater harvesting system on Alaskan tribal lands is reviewed but the focus of this work is on the collaborative design process more so than the construction of the water harvesting system end product. More explicitly, the use of multiple approaches to promote collaborator involvement along with an emphasis on developing community driven project goals are highlighted as essential steps in our co-design process.

Making scarcity “enough”: The hidden household costs of adapting to water scarcity in Mexico City

In the face of water scarcity due to climate change and population growth, cities around the world, especially in the Global South, increasingly provide intermittent, rather than continuous, water supply. Because an intermittent water supply has negative effects on infrastructure and water quality, literature often recommends transition to continuous supply, but that transition may be unfeasible or cost-prohibitive for many cities. There are few policy recommendations for ensuring safe and equitable urban water accesswithinwater-scarce systems. By understanding how households bear the monetary and non-monetary costs of intermittency, we can make urban water safer, more sustainable, and more equitable. This study combines results from open-ended household interviews and ethnographic observations about water management (n = 59 households) with a large-N survey (n = 2,595 individuals) to understand how households experienced water scarcity in Mexico City. We found most residents reported satisfaction with the quantity of intermittent water supply but incurred monetary and non-monetary costs to achieve that satisfaction. We document the ways householdsadapted to scarcity, transforming the intermittent supply they received from the grid by storing, reusing, and conserving water. These adaptations “made scarcity enough,” allowing families to store and preserve sufficient water to meet their needs for waterquantity. However, these same adaptations simultaneously burdened households with financial costs, such as expenditures for storage, pumps, and alternative water sources, and non-monetary costs, such as time-intensive labor spent managing water and noticeable deterioration in drinking waterquality. Because the scarce public water supply is distributed unequally throughout the city, the financial, labor, and water quality impacts of adapting to scarcity were borne privately, primarily by marginalized households. Our findings about intermittency have implications for water justice and equity. We conclude with policy solutions that address the deterioration of water quality during household storage and the inequalities of intermittency.

Workshopping Water Justice: linking struggles from the Cape Flats to the rest of the Continent

ABSTRACT Drawing insight and inspiration from our comrade Aziz Choudry, in this paper, we explore the role of political education and knowledge making in social movement struggles to contest the state and capital around access to water and other public services. Drawing on a decade of organising work in the city of Cape Town and at wider scales, we highlight the importance of learning and knowledge generation in social movements and the everyday strategies of organising movements use to overcome divisions based on ‘race’, gender, class and nationality, and to confront those obstacles presented or exacerbated by exclusionary governance arrangements, commodified service delivery and the coercive apparatus of the state. Rejecting elite led organising in favour of working-class self-organisation, these strategies seek to build individual and organisational solidarity across the diverse and fragmented experiences of those living on the margins of capitalist society.

The politics of adaptive governance: water reform, climate change, and First Nations’ justice in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin

Adaptive water governance scholarship aspires to flexible and responsive governance that is inclusive and supports learning and collaboration among a wide range of stakeholders. Much of this scholarship assumes that polycentric arrangements will facilitate these characteristics as different nodes of decision making adapt and respond to challenges within their arena of authority. However, in the case of both adaptive water governance and polycentricity, there are growing questions as to whether the reality matches the theoretical ideal. Drawing on a case study of Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin, we introduce the concept of a polycentric spectrum to distinguish between systems that resist change from those that enable more adaptive transformative change. In our case study, an overarching national agenda of water reform has generated a perpetual cycle of reviews and inquiries into water governance. We examined 34 reviews conducted since 2004, asking whether, how, and to what extent these recommendations are enabling governance adaptation and transformation versus maintaining conventional paradigms. Our analysis revealed problem-solving logics that have dominated water governance for decades to stymie efforts to move toward the more adaptive and transformative forms of governance required to address two key areas of reform: climate change and First Nations’ water justice. Despite an acknowledged need for substantive reforms, inquiry recommendations perpetuate technocratic (for climate change) or administrative rationalist (for First Nations) approaches. We argue that the reform agenda needs to be directed away from governments as the sole agents of change through deliberate and strategic efforts to engage local level and non-state actors who are central to adaptive water governance. This would require debate about reforms to move beyond how water is allocated and optimized to address how power is redistributed in the system. Our analysis questions whether polycentricity alone is sufficient to enable normatively desirable adaptive water governance, suggesting the need for future work to consider whether other organizing concepts, such as water justice might be required.

Disrupting Utility Law for Water Justice

Disrupting Utility Law for Water Justice

Moral economies for water: A framework for analyzing norms of justice, economic behavior, and social enforcement in the contexts of water inequality

AbstractOver the past two decades, scholars have invoked E. P. Thompson's and James Scott's concept of a “moral economy” to explain how people mobilize notions of justice to make claims to water. We draw together 20 years of literature to assess the state‐of‐the‐art present in research on moral economies for water. We trace the historical foundations of the moral economies concept and its relevance to water; define the three basic components of a moral economy for water—(1) shared understandings of justice, (2) normative economic practices, (3) social pressure mechanisms—and provide examples of how they manifest globally. We then discuss how moral economies for water can cycle through four basic states—balanced struggle, intensified reaction, mass revolt, and collapse and dissolution—at different scales. We also explore the implications of the moral economies framework for key areas of current research on water: water sharing, water commons, water markets, and biocultural outcomes, and discuss the ways in which the moral economies framework dovetails with recent advances in water research, especially the economics of water and development. We argue that the moral economies framework is a powerful explanatory tool for understanding the relationships between ideas of water justice, economic behaviors, and mechanisms of social enforcement that complements other methodological approaches and theoretical perspectives. We envision moral economies for water as a field that can facilitate a range of norm‐based analyses of economic behavior and water justice, including across scales—from local to global—and in broad, integrative, multiscalar, and cross‐disciplinary ways.This article is categorized under: Human Water > Water Governance Human Water > Value of Water Human Water > Rights to Water

Critically assembling water quality ethics beyond thresholds, hierarchies and best practices

The emerging field of water ethics analyses and explores the moral implications of particular human–water relations and practices. This article focuses on ethical aspects of planning, management and governance of water quality, in what I refer to as water quality ethics. In particular, I draw attention to the potential for incorporating the ethical perspectives of philosophers Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari into water quality planning, management and governance, opening for exchange between these normative fields of policy and practice with speculative philosophy. Deleuze and Guattari’s ethics emphasises the rejection of externally imposed binaries and categories onto a deeply heterogenous and dynamic world. Therefore, I identify three potentially problematic moments in how water quality is defined and responded to according to these criteria. I provide examples of how abstract and universalising principles can obscure the complexity of individual situations and thus hinder the visibility of alternative solutions. In so doing, I note the possibility for the empirically oriented arena of water justice scholarship to be complemented by a philosophical approach that emphasises the situated, fluid and lively materiality of water and water quality.