Water Justice Research Articles

Issues on Water Privatization Under New Regulation: Evidence in Indonesia

Water plays a vital role in every human life, so the availability and sustainability of water resources need to be carefully regulated. This article attempts to analyse water governance in Indonesia under the new water resources regulation, mainly the issue of water privatization. This article is classified as normative legal research. This article shows that even though the State gives the water privatization licence to the private sector as the last priority, it seems that the Indonesian people will still encounter the same problem in the coming year. This article argues that the issue of distribution of water justice, water access, and violations of the water right related to water utilization on a large scale are challenges for the Indonesian government to resolve.

Community Engagement and Diverse River Values: A Case Study of Dyarubbin

ABSTRACT This paper draws on the example of Dyarubbin (Nepean River), an urban river in Sydney, Australia, to illuminate how community engagement facilitates the expression of diverse river values. Combining Indigenous water justice, critical planning scholarship, and a scalar approach to values, and drawing on qualitative research conducted in 2021, we discuss how diverse community values have been represented in strategies for the river and consider which values are overlooked in these processes. We conclude by arguing that values for Dyarubbin are contested and diverse, however the rigid nature of engagement frameworks and the scalar nature of government responsibilities have reduced engagement’s influence on planning outcomes.

Riverhood: political ecologies of socionature commoning and translocal struggles for water justice

ABSTRACT Mega-damming, pollution and depletion endanger rivers worldwide. Meanwhile, modernist imaginaries of ordering ‘unruly waters and humans’ have become cornerstones of hydraulic-bureaucratic and capitalist development. They separate hydro/social worlds, sideline river-commons cultures, and deepen socio-environmental injustices. But myriad new water justice movements (NWJMs) proliferate: rooted, disruptive, transdisciplinary, multi-scalar coalitions that deploy alternative river–society ontologies, bridge South–North divides, and translate river-enlivening practices from local to global and vice-versa. This paper's framework conceptualizes ‘riverhood’ to engage with NWJMs and river commoning initiatives. We suggest four interrelated ontologies, situating river socionatures as arenas of material, social and symbolic co-production: ‘river-as-ecosociety’, ‘river-as-territory’, ‘river-as-subject’, and ‘river-as-movement’.

Applying Commemorative Museum Pedagogy to Public Music Studies

Applying Commemorative Museum Pedagogy to Public Music Studies

Delivering global water security: Embedding water justice as a response to increased irrigation efficiency

AbstractIncreasingly, irrigation infrastructure upgrades have been regarded in global policy as a solution for both water scarcity and low agricultural productivity. However, these technical “fixes” may ultimately prove to be dangerous shortcuts that do little to address the concerns of irrigators, Indigenous People, environmental groups, and local communities about water scarcity, access, security, and sustainability. In the absence of transparent and rigorous governance safeguards, irrigation efficiency upgrades can result in higher water consumption, demand, and ultimately, increased water scarcity. Upgraded irrigation systems also tend to capture return flows and redistribute them to “high value” consumptive water uses, potentially displacing other users and uses, including Indigenous Peoples. In this article, we critique current approaches to governing irrigation efficiency, using a water justice lens to identify four key insights and their implications for governance. We propose new governance pathways and options that take into consideration hydrological realities and the full range of water demands and needs.This article is categorized under: Human Water > Water Governance Water and Life > Conservation, Management, and Awareness Human Water > Water as Imagined and Represented

Knowledge politics around water, development and ecosystem services in Ecuador: creative encounters and resistances

A vast amount of literature has investigated the conflicts between different ways of conceiving development in Latin America. Particular attention has been paid to power differentials among knowledge systems when it comes to decision-making, values and practices over water resources. The Ecosystem Services framework or Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) are often analysed as examples of technical and scientific tools typically produced by multilateral organizations, cooperation agencies and international experts. They are presented as discourses competing with environmental and water justice claims, or local and traditional knowledge, although they can sometimes support them and/or try to incorporate them. The question that arises is whether such incorporation depoliticises local understandings of sustainability and development. This paper aims to examine both the synergies and tensions among different forms of knowledge around development through one empirical case study in the Ecuadorian highlands. It focuses on the efforts of the Kayambi indigenous communities to create, negotiate and scale-up a water conservation funding scheme based on reciprocity and solidarity values. This contribution highlights the creative engagement of diverse actors in designing, cocreating and diffusing a diversity of perspectives on development. It challenges the frontiers between technoscientific and grassroots knowledge by paying attention to the situated practices of different actors. It argues that the coproduction of water and development knowledge between various actors is the result of negotiating worldviews possibly in tension and moving beyond traditional resistance.

Theorising approaches to social movement spatialities: Local and global contestations of neoliberal water services

AbstractThis paper examines different ways of studying – and thereby understanding – social movement spatialities. For more than a decade, literature on the geographies of social movements has explored the multiple spatialities of mobilisation, using concepts like scale, network, place, and territory. Drawing on existing contributions, the study provides a critical engagement that differentiates between several forms of research agendas involving contrasting epistemologies. This engagement contributes to opening up a conceptualisation of multiple analytical approaches by (1) analysing wider processes and political goals spanning different movements, characterised as ‘cross‐cutting spatialities’; (2) studying the more specific and diverse spatiotemporal realities within particular movement cases, which describe their ‘complex‐situated spatialities’; and (3) considering how inherent tensions arise between the different political practices of specific movements, displaying ‘contradictory spatialities’. The reading of these approaches is framed within a relational perspective that employs them in an empirical study of local and global struggles against neoliberalised urban water services. The paper explores the spatial practices of an urban place‐based movement struggle in Johannesburg and a global labour union federation for public service workers – representing two vantage points in the fight for water justice and the human right to essential services. The study demonstrates how the analytical approaches inform one another through complementary but also contrasting perspectives on movement politics.

Water Grabbing Risk Index: A methodological proposal for water justice

Water Grabbing Risk Index: A methodological proposal for water justice

Beyond scarcity and its management: Sociocultural dimensions of the water crisis in the Atacama Desert

Abstract The depletion of freshwater sources by indiscriminate industrial actions is one of the direct causes of the current water crisis. One of the emblematic cases of this problem is the Atacama Desert, a unique hyper-arid zone in which an extensive copper industry depletes its scarce freshwater reserves. This territory, occupied for millennia by indigenous groups, is experiencing a water crisis that threatens its very subsistence. This paper uses the ethnographic method and the Water Justice framework to approach the everyday and often invisible issues of this crisis within the Mamiña community. This Quechua community holds an ambivalent position in front of the copper mine project because of its control of the water rights, the economic interests of some of their members, and the role of the Aymara minority. We suggest that researchers in this field pay more attention to the communities’ internal diversity and its relations with the copper industry to understand how the water crisis is detached from its biophysical conceptions to be socioculturally constructed.

Water Justice as Socioenvironmental Justice

ABSTRACT Humanity will face water scarcity as this century progresses. Water use grew twice as fast as the global human population last century, and an increasing number of regions around the world are facing, or will face, freshwater scarcity. Four billion people face water scarcity at least one month out of the year. Scarcity makes water valuable for privatizers and commodifiers as an investment vehicle; it emboldens the currency of commodification. I will argue for water justice as socioenvironmental justice. The injustices that can and do attach to water are not reducible to merely distributional wrongs or injustices, they are moral and political harms as markers of a failing democracy; water injustice, then, is a structural harm. I build on the literature of power dynamics from Iris Marion Young and David Schlosberg and argue that water injustice is structural and involves mis- and mal-recognition and participation; moreover, I introduce the argument that water justice is participatory, a method of development that walks in lockstep with reflexive and discursive democracy.

Dimensions of Water Resources Regulation in Philosophy of Justice and Human Rights Perspective

Management of water resources is closely related to the availability of access to clean water for the community and has direct implications for social justice and the fulfillment of basic human rights. However, various arrangements in the management of water resources in Indonesia are considered not in favor of the concept of justice and are more directed towards commercialization and capitalization. This research is intended to examine, analyze, and criticize laws and regulations related to water resources. By consdiering several multidisciplinary aspects in the laws and regulations in the field of water resources, including aspects of justice and human rights, this research also analyzes from the philosophical, legal, and sociological aspects. This research found and emphasize that the concept of Pancasila can be a legal political basis for the state's right to control water resources to be directed so that the management of water resources does not oppress those who are socially and economically weak, or the poor. The availability of water is constant, while the demand for water is increasing in quantity and quality, then what will happen is scarcity. At this stage of water scarcity, the principle of justice becomes very important in water management. Access to water justice is not individual or micro justice, but social or macro justice. Justice to get water as a human right cannot be left to everyone based on a market mechanism, but government intervention to ensure the fulfillment of the right to water, at least is very much needed.

“Making do”: Religious segregation and everyday water struggles

I illustrate through this paper how contemporary water (in)justice results from interactions between historical, socio-political, technical, and economic relations, and how such water (in)justice is emotionally experienced and embodied. Focusing on the case of Faizalpur, a low-income Muslim neighborhood in segregated Ahmedabad, I draw on lived experiences approaches to water justice and on an emotional political ecology framework to offer a multi-scalar analysis set across urban, community, and individual scales. I show how the settlement of low-income Muslim families in Faizalpur is inseparable from both the (il)legal status of this land and the religious segregation that have shaped this city. In turn, everyday experiences of water injustice in Faizalpur are premised in contestations relating to the site's land use zoning history. I illustrate how in this contested site carefully framed requests make municipal water infrastructure possible even though such infrastructure is technically disallowed here. The careful-ness of such requests lies in skirting issues pertaining to (il)legality, instead activating other discursive categories, such as ‘humanitarian’ need: categories that possess the moral power to outweigh legal and technical arguments. I suggest that everyday experiences of water (in)justice cannot be understood without attending to the discursive power of planning terms like ‘illegality’ and ‘land use zoning’. Emotionally experienced everyday water struggles in Faizalpur, in the form of anger, trust, fear, grief, etc., need to be understood then as emotional everyday experiences of religious segregation.

Just water transitions at the end of sugar in Maui, Hawai‘i

In December 2016, Hawai‘i saw its last sugar harvest on a 36,000-acre plantation in Maui. In the preceding decades, Native Hawaiians had struggled to regain their water rights from a failing sugar industry that had dewatered the island's streams for centuries. Now, with the end of sugar, Native Hawaiian and environmental groups are working to restore traditional practices and diversified agriculture—goals which hinge upon changing water management practices and rewatering Maui's streams. In this paper we combine frameworks from the water justice literature with a just transitions framework typically applied to energy landscapes in order to examine ‘just water transitions’ in Maui. By synthesizing these frameworks, we show how water-based economic transitions can address the tradeoffs and reconfigurations of infrastructure and power required for a more just future. We examine three distinct visions of water management promoted by coalitions of actors in support of different types of agricultural production systems for the island. We argue that a just water transition – that is, a move toward a more culturally, politically, and ecologically just management of water – must engage with water-specific, place-specific, and historically grounded factors including the legacies of infrastructure, water laws, and powerful agricultural interests.

Climate Justice Now: Layering Texts About the Urgent Topic of Water Justice

Climate Justice Now: Layering Texts About the Urgent Topic of Water Justice

Insights from the first International Water Policy Lab Champions' Forum: Developing modalities for cocreating knowledge, policy, and practice

AbstractSolving water problems requires new ways of harnessing dialogs, reflections, empathy, research, and visions. Too often, water policies and practices tend to take shortcuts, missing out on the benefits these powerful social learning processes can bring towards water justice and sustainability. The question is: How do we apply and nurture an interactive approach to implement water management decisions that benefit both people and the environment, now and into the future? Tackling this question requires a transdisciplinary, practice‐focused, and policy‐oriented approach to learning and governing, embracing the idea of coproduction of knowledge, practice, and policy. The first International Water Policy Lab (WPL) Champions' Forum was organized by the Institute for Study and Development Worldwide (IFSD), the Australia India Water Centre, and World Water Policy Journal on July 16, 2021, bringing together a range of factors to share experience and lessons on processes and practices of the coproduction of policy, knowledge, and practice in water governance. Out of a group of 10 IFSD water policy and management interns under the guidance of Prof. Jeff Camkin, three participated in the WPL Forum and subsequently shared their learnings with the broader group. This discussion paper presents the ideas of all 10 IFSD interns, who come from nine different countries, about how WPL processes can support their efforts towards improving water policy and management around the world. The first WPL forum emphasized that interactive methods are needed to achieve successful water governance policies. It is due to this fact that policy development and implementation both require involvement, integration, and cooperation among all concerned stakeholders (government, researchers, local communities, businesses, etc.) at each stage. A key message from this forum was that boosting the community's role in water governance and its capability to contribute to water management can enhance the development and implementation of policies and the sustainability of water‐related projects.

Living Waters or Resource? Ontological differences and the governance of waters and rivers

ABSTRACT This paper addresses the ontological differences between modern water, the dominant way of thinking about water in the industrialised West, and Living Waters, a concept used by Aboriginal Australians to talk about water(s) and water bodies. Working collaboratively with Aboriginal experts and state government water planners in the Kimberley region of Western Australia we developed two social-ecological conceptual models to compare propositions about the ontological character of water. One model represents a modern water paradigm, upon which state systems of water management are based, and the other represents a customary system of management: a Living Waters paradigm that depicts the relationships between people, other beings, and the waters of the Martuwarra/Fitzroy River catchment. The models are intended to inform water governance processes and influence negotiations between State and customary institutions. We use the models here to analyse water policy tools and their ability to support the relationships particular groups have with their waters. We identify gaps in existing policy for the sustainability of Living Waters. We discuss the implications of the differences between these two conceptual models for water justice, as well as for sustainability research and socio-ecological modelling as it applies to rivers and their waters in Australia and elsewhere, or to other human-environment relationships.

Between Flood and Drought: Environmental Racism, Settler Waterscapes, and Indigenous Water Justice in South America’s Chaco

This article advances a novel approach to investigating geographies of settler colonialism and environmental justice through a critical physical geography (CPG) of water scarcity in the South American Chaco. Drawing from multimethod research conducted in collaboration with Enxet and Sanapaná communities in Paraguay, I evaluate how waterscape change produces social vulnerability with a focus on Indigenous access to safe drinking water. Stemming from a seemingly simple question—how have annual flood and drought events in the Chaco become malignant for Enxet and Sanapaná peoples—my analysis centers on current struggles for Indigenous rights amidst Paraguay’s booming ranching industry. I use an eclectic data set—from historical missionary accounts, seventy-two household questionnaires, mapping new waterscapes, and a political economy of cattle ranching—to show how settler waterscapes produce environmental racism by limiting Indigenous access to “good” water. I argue that the prevalence of water scarcity in Indigenous communities across the Bajo Chaco is not a natural result of biophysical geography but a socially produced outcome of how settler waterscapes rework hydrosocial relations along racial lines. CPG offers a way to bridge biophysical analysis with critical social theory to expand geographic understandings of settler colonialism and its effects on Indigenous environmental justice.

Water Justice across the Rural-Urban Interface: The Making of Hydrosocial Territories in New Mexico’s Rio Grande Valley

Research on rural-urban water struggles establishes the importance of symbolic spatial categories for facilitating and justifying rural-to-urban water transfers. I build on this scholarship by asking how officials construct the rural-urban interface, or patterns of interaction across spatial boundaries, during water conflicts. This study takes a historical case study approach centered on the San Juan-Chama Project (SJCP) in New Mexico (USA), a transbasin diversion authorized in 1962 to bring water from the rural San Juan River Basin into the Rio Grande Basin for urban use. Analysis of archival material, government documents, and secondary accounts show that, although the SJCP would primarily benefit urban places, proponents relied heavily on the project’s rural benefits for justification. Through this process, official actors constructed and mobilized rural-urban boundaries in ways that supported greater urban control over regional water resources. These findings have important implications for understanding the formation of rural water injustices.

Water Federalism, Tribunalization of Water Justice and Hydro-Politics: India’s Inter-State River Water Disputes Act at 65 Years

India’s water federalism is at a crossroads. It is a unique two-tier system that has the constitutional and enabling provisions for water management and inter-state water dispute resolution as its base. These support the tribunal system that adjudicates inter-state river water disputes and administers water justice. More than six decades have elapsed since its establishment. At the same time, during this period, the per capita water availability has fallen drastically. India is now one of the world’s most water-stressed countries. Water disputes between States are becoming more animated and highly volatile. This article examines water federalism in India in terms of two questions: 1) Should water be transferred from the State List to the Concurrent List? 2) Should India persist with the tribunal system or replace it with the judicial process at the Supreme Court level? The first assumes importance as India persists with the river linking project. The second is relevant because the Inter-State River Water Disputes Act is almost 65 years old. In 2016, India’s Supreme Court re-wrote the law, and, more recently, the Union Government sought to revamp the Inter-State River Water Disputes Act through amendments. All these impel the need to re-look the idea of water federalism as it operates in India in its entirety.

The Drinking Water Tool: A Community-Driven Data Visualization Tool for Policy Implementation.

The Drinking Water Tool (DWT) is a community-driven online tool that provides diverse users with information about drinking water sources and threats to drinking water quality and access due to drought. Development of the DWT was guided by the Community Water Center (CWC) as part of the Water Equity Science Shop (WESS), a research partnership integrating elements of community-based participatory research and the European Science Shop model. The WESS engages in scientific projects that inform policy change, advance water justice, and reduce cumulative exposure and disproportionate health burdens among impacted communities in California. WESS researchers conducted qualitative analysis of 15 stakeholder interviews regarding the DWT, including iterative feedback and the stakeholder consultation process as well as stakeholder perceptions of the tool’s impact on California water policy, organizing, and research. Results indicate that the DWT and the stakeholder engagement process which developed it were effective in influencing policy priorities and in promoting interagency coordination at multiple levels to address water equity challenges and their disproportionate burdens, particularly among rural and low socioeconomic status areas and communities of color.