Water Security

Principles, Perspectives and Practices

Bruce Lankford, Karen Bakker, Mark Zeitoun, Declan Conway, Bruce Lankford, Karen Bakker, Mark Zeitoun, Declan Conway

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136285851
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences physiques
• Subtopic: Hydrologie

The purpose of this book is to present an overview of the latest research, policy, practitioner, academic and international thinking on water security—an issue that, like water governance a few years ago, has developed much policy awareness and momentum with a wide range of stakeholders. As a concept it is open to multiple interpretations, and the authors here set out the various approaches to the topic from different perspectives.

Key themes addressed include:

• Water security as a foreign policy issue
• The interconnected variables of water, food, and human security
• Dimensions other than military and international relations concerns around water security
• Water security theory and methods, tools and audits.

The book is loosely based on a masters level degree plus a short professional course on water security both given at the University of East Anglia, delivered by international authorities on their subjects. It should serve as an introductory textbook as well as be of value to professionals, NGOs, and policy-makers.

Part I
Frameworks and Approaches to Water Security

1 Introduction

A Battle of Ideas for Water Security

Mark Zeitoun, Bruce Lankford, Karen Bakker, and Declan Conway

Introduction

There may be as many interpretations of ‘water security’ as there are interests in the global water community. The purpose of this book is not to provide yet another interpretation, but to explore the range the interpretations cover, and to move knowledge and thought forward through debate of interpretations that hold the greatest meaning to different actors.

In meeting this goal, the book thus queries the growing discourses on water security, in particular, narrow ‘securitized’ approaches to the concept. In its most alarmist securitized formulation, ‘water security’ suggests safeguarding the resource in volumetric terms from others, and is often associated with the desire to eliminate risk and variability through climate-proofing infrastructure, for instance. While such responses can appeal to political favour and public emotion in uncertain situations, they may also exacerbate existing problems or even trigger unintended consequences by reducing the number of options available in the future.

One of this book's clear messages is that water security passes not through armoury or concrete, but through the messier realm of policy and governance. From this perspective, we argue that water security cannot be achieved at the expense of the water security of others; sustainable outcomes require reconciliation of basic needs and access to water, as well as the most assured physical and social thinking of water science by practitioners, academics, students, and professionals. Within this reduced field of water security study, the ground covered is still quite broad, and the battle of ideas very acute.

Context and Scope

Having grappled with the terms of water security through scholarship, teaching, and training with a diverse constituency, we as editors sensed before we invited contributions to this book that we would not achieve consensus on any meaning of water security. Each author was thus encouraged to approach his or her contribution without a common frame of water security in mind. Now with contributions from 27 authors in 21 chapters, we are even more confident that the term has too many disciplinary, sectoral, ideological, and geographic roots to be conveniently pinned down.

There is a general political ecology disposition amongst the chapters, in the sense that the authors hold knowledge about water to be both be socially produced and generate material consequences that can be somewhat objectively measured. There is also consistency in critical thinking, neither eschewing nor espousing the rush towards ‘water security’ as a meaningful and possibly innovative concept. Otherwise, each chapter presents a personal perspective and interpretation of water security, and the volume might best be seen as a collection of analytical but partisan essays. Law, environmental science, international relations, hydropolitics, geography, political economy, and political ecology are all deployed here, cumulatively building on considerable scholarly work aimed at conveying the myriad dimensions of water. The path followed bypasses both the deterministic alarmist tone (captured by the phrase ‘the world is running out of water’) and ungrounded theorization (of risk, for instance).

As the title of the book would suggest, each chapter offers views on perspectives, principles, and practices of water security. With particular reference to ‘practices’, we caution against any expectation that the book records actual practice of water security—the concept is simply too novel to be (mis)understood in that light. Rather, our contributors in Part 2 have reflected on debates regarding the application of the idea of water security. We also wish to note that the order of the chapters within each section conveys no particular meaning in terms of priority or relationship, and all comprise elements of the ‘battle of ideas’. All previous assertions not withstanding, a selection of these ideas are organised into a conceptual framework through which water security can be understood, and this is presented in the final chapter.

With the authors' partisan interests in mind, readers will notice that some chapters record recent thinking in the water security debate in an apparently neutral fashion, while many others weigh in to push water science to challenge concepts that are gaining undue wide acceptance, or to develop new ones. We hope the collective effort has been sufficiently contentious that water security does build some measure of identity that separates it from other terms that have lost coherent meaning in water research (such as integrated water resources management and water governance).

The Battle of Ideas for Water Security

Within the broad range of topics covered in the volume, we find that ‘water security’ serves both to revitalise old ideas and to promote new ones. This comes as no surprise, at this point in time when water scientists of all types face a degree of uncertainty that has questioned the very way we approach water resource futures. Some equate this with insecurity, and see opportunities in reducing the variability of river flows, meaning dams for agriculture or hydropower (e.g., Briscoe, 2009; Muller, 2012). Alternative views question the paradigms of distribution of the possibly reduced or increased water flows between countries and communities of vastly different capacities. Water security can inform and be informed by water science, in other words, through exploration of how climate change and water communities approach the same challenges (Conway, Chapter 6), how competing perspectives on water security are articulated with distinct governance practices (Cook and Bakker, Chapter 4), and how the engineering biases and fashions have guided infrastructure choices to date (Lankford, Chapter 16). Water security reaches beyond scientists, furthermore, to those concerned about food security (Allan, Chapter 20), national security (Zala, Chapter 17), environmental sustainability of businesses (Hepworth and Orr, Chapter 14), or ‘international development’ (be it human or economic development [Chenoweth et al., Chapter 19; Garrick and Hope, Chapter 13] in non-industrialised or urbanised/industrialised [Boelens, Chapter 15; Earle, Chapter 7] contexts).

The range of principles invoked throughout the book is more tightly delimited. Environmental sustainability and collaboration both figure so explicitly (or implicitly) throughout the chapters that they may be considered two inseparable and fundamental elements of water security. Almost as ubiquitous are references to the interdependencies water creates with everything else in the world, including energy (Froggatt, Chapter 8), the demands of cities (Earle), climate change (Conway), and—most evidently and importantly—food (Allan; Falkenmark, Chapter 5). Equity and justice are also given considerable weight, whether explicitly (Boelens; Leb and Wouters, Chapter 3; Garrick and Hope; Hepworth and Orr, Chapter 14; Zeitoun, Chapter 2) or implicitly by recognising an environmental exigency (Tickner and Acreman, Chapter 9).

The variety of topics and principles that inform this battle of ideas can be classed into the broad groups (and probable research directions) of emerging ideas and debates, interconnectedness, comprehensiveness, and harmonisation.

Emerging Ideas and Debates of Water Security

Fortunately, tensions can fuel progress. Clément enters the debate in her discussion of water productivity versus security, for instance, reminding us that the attention paid to principles and justice in this volume rarely reflects the dynamics of the real-world political economy. Equity typically takes second place to efficiency as the guiding principle in efforts to secure water for large corporations (e.g., WRG, 2010). Similarly, the role of armed forces in water provision in country recovery and stabilisation programmes is raised as a policy goal in foreign affairs and defence circles via concerns about how water security relates to state failure (see, e.g., DNI, 2012; King, 2012; Tanzler and Carius, 2012). On the other hand, Leb and Wouters here assert that ‘military security and water security in this paradigm are incongruent goals’. And Warner (Chapter 18) points out the mechanism by which the two may nonetheless meet: a short (discursive) route from ‘security’ to ‘threat’, to the legitimatized ‘securitization’ and then militarisation of water resources (see also Cook and Bakker; Warner; Zala; Zeitoun).

Fruitful debate also occurs amongst contributors. For example, calls by Mason (Chapter 12) for water security indicators (of water availability, access, risk, ecosystem services, and institutions) sit alongside considered arguments to question our superficial understandings of the same (Falkenmark for scarcity (5), Clément for apolitical views of nature (10), and Mirumachi, (11) for the very political and commercial nature and interests of water institutions). Likewise, Garrick and Hope, propose that issues of water stress, pollution, water variability, and climate variability are best thought of and handled as risks. Yet Lankford, Chapter 16, argues that the apportionment of risk of excessive scarcity above and beyond that caused by natural distributions of rainfall and river flow can be traced to design faults in river basin architectures. And Warner's analysis of lessons of risk management from floods in Holland cautions against the approach, due to its tendency to pass on residual risks to local people.

Hepworth and Orr grapple with the contested topic of corporate engagement in water security, convincingly demonstrating that the influence of large multinationals on local and global food and water production is so great that water security practitioners cannot afford to debate that role from the sidelines. The need to reconcile the traditional interests of corporations—preferential and sustained water access, permissive water quality objectives, and laissez-faire regulation—with the water security goal of improving the wider public good at all scales is also identified. In their comprehensive tour of water law and legal frameworks, Leb and Wouters suggest another part of that way forward: the development of guidelines that can serve both to evaluate competing claims, and, crucially, to desecuritise water conflict issues. The potential for market-based tools to balance equity and efficiency (which can work only in very well-regulated contexts, as Garrick and Hope point out) thus finds its place beside more critical persuasive views that the market should be shunned for cultural-based solutions (Boelens) and warning of the pitfalls of retaining productivity—not security, much less equity— as a guiding principle for water management.

Water Security and Interconnectedness

The interdependence of material and immaterial objects at all levels of water security are also revealed throughout the breadth of the volume. Tickner and Acreman argue, for instance, that human water security can only be achieved via environmental security. Chenoweth et al. stress connections between water functions and benefits for household members, while Earle's examination of cities confronts a concentration of human and economic activity so profound that hydropower development and protection from floods are incorporated over and above domestic water issues. Similarly, commercial efforts at resource securitisation come with the dawning realisation of corporate risk being situated within wider societal insecurities (Hepworth and Orr).

The emerging theme here is of interconnectedness—of seeing one sector or user's resource security via a wider lens of collective security. But collective water security—in the sense of securing sufficient water for all users, all uses, and at all times—is not achievable. Nor is it the entire picture: Interconnectedness implies a sharing of deficits in times of flood or famine. Conway attentively draws out lessons from the climate science community in dealing with entirely uncertain and unknown contexts, for example, while Lankford asserts that water security ‘seeks, and is a consequence of, the sharing of water surpluses and deficits between different users mediated by the architecture of water infrastructure designed to address the spatial, temporal and scalar complexities of demand and supply’.

In a comparable vein, Zeitoun asserts that sustainable water security policy at the national level may be achieved following a thorough understanding and balancing of the interdependencies water has with other resources, and of the equitable sharing of both water benefits and harm. Zala's application of security studies' ‘sustainable security framework’ to water resources proves an effective counter to the more tapered understandings of security in traditional defence circles, precisely because it ‘prioritises the resolution of the interconnected and underlying drivers of insecurity and conflict, with an emphasis on preventive rather than reactive strategies’. Pushing the hydropolitics body of research into new arenas, Mirumachi asserts that any robust understanding of ‘transboundary water security’ must look beyond mere treaties and institutions, towards the capacity of the actors involved—and the interdependent means and justifications employed to assure their share of the resource.

Water Security and Comprehensiveness

A second theme emerging from the book is that of completeness. Water security does more than connect interdependent users and uses; it also seems to reach for an all-encompassing and global approach. The two introductory chapters emphasise the multiple social and biophysical links between water...