The Politics of Fresh Water

Access, conflict and identity

Catherine M. Ashcraft, Tamar Mayer, Catherine M. Ashcraft, Tamar Mayer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317509974
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Water scarcity is not simply the result of what nature has to offer but always involves power relations and political decisions. This volume discusses the politics of the freshwater crisis, specifically how access to water is determined in different regions and historical periods, how conflict is constructed and managed, and how identity and efforts to control water systems, through development, technologies, and institutions, shape one another.

The book analyzes responses to the water crisis as efforts to mitigate water insecurity and as expressions of collective identity that legitimate, resist, or seek to transform existing inequalities. The chapters focus on different processes that contribute to freshwater scarcity, including land use decisions, pollution, privatization, damming, climate change, discrimination, water management institutions and technology. Case studies are included from North and South America, Africa, Asia, Europe and New Zealand.

1 The politics of fresh water

Setting the stage

Tamar Mayer and Catherine M. Ashcraft

Water…
is the cause at times of life or death, or increase or privation,
nourishes at times and at others does the contrary;
at times has a tang, at times is without savor,
sometimes submerging the valleys with great floods.
In time and with water, everything changes.

(Attributed to Leonardo da Vinci)

Leonardo da Vinci describes fresh water as a paradox: a natural resource and sustainer for which we have no substitute, but also a resource that at once unites and divides communities. Water is not always available where and when it is needed; nevertheless, it invariably contributes to social and national identity and defines humans’ interactions with their environment. At times, too much water wreaks havoc on our efforts to control it; at others, water scarcity drives migration, adaptation, and conflict. In fact, fresh water is defined by the discourse of crisis: the crisis of fragmented freshwater systems, the crisis of freshwater supply, and the crisis of pollution (Speth, 2008).

As this book nears publication, the Flint, Michigan, water crisis is still unfolding. Economically disadvantaged and predominantly African American, the city of Flint was denied access to safe water for an 18-month period. In 2014 Flint switched its municipal water supply source from Lake Huron water (treated by the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department) to Flint River water (treated by the Flint Water Treatment Plant). Before switching back to Lake Huron water, Flint’s residents and thousands of children, who are particularly vulnerable to lead poisoning, were exposed to toxic lead levels with permanent consequences for their brain development and other health issues. Flint’s crisis illustrates three interrelated themes that are central to any discussion of the politics of fresh water and to this book: access, conflict, and identity.

According to the recent report by the Flint Water Advisory Task Force, Flint’s crisis demonstrates failures of technology, government decision-making, and conflict management. Flint’s poorly maintained Water Treatment Plant was incapable of producing safe drinking water. Flint Public Works personnel followed neither the corrosion-control requirements intended to limit release of lead from aging pipes, nor did they adhere to lead-monitoring rules. By replacing Flint’s locally elected representatives with an emergency manager who had sole authority over municipal decisions, including the decision to switch water sources, the state of Michigan denied Flint’s citizens access to meaningful participation in water decision-making processes. Other government officials failed to enforce drinking-water regulations, ignored citizen’s concerns about the water’s color, taste, and odor, neglected to question increasing evidence of lead exposure, and delayed taking action. Conflict between Flint officials and the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department over water-supply contract terms also contributed to the crisis. In addition to these and other failures mentioned in the Task Force’s report, Flint’s water crisis teaches an important lesson about community mobilization to challenge environmental injustice (Flint Water Advisory Task Force, 2016). Here, the residents of Flint, with support from others from all over the United States, including President Obama, have successfully challenged the government’s inadequate response to the problem and its indifference to their concerns.

Two important insights cut across the chapters in this volume. First, the social, physical, and ecological components of water systems are interconnected, forming a hydro-social system. For example, the decision not to treat Flint’s water with anticorrosives affected physical systems, including the water treatment and supply infrastructure, as well as ecological systems and human health. The hydro-social concept emerged from the literature on coupled social–ecological systems (e.g., Berkes, Colding, & Folke, 2003), from literature on space, time, place, society/nature, and justice (e.g., Harvey, 1996), from science and technology studies (e.g., Barnes & Alatout, 2012), and from literature on conflict resolution (e.g., Islam & Susskind, 2012). The contributors in this book explicitly critique normative understanding of hydro-social systems and present new insights into the ways access, conflict, and identity are constructed in these systems.

Second, instead of being inevitable, freshwater crisis is a socially constructed experience, a lived phenomenon (De Rycker & Mohd Don, 2013). Speaking about Flint’s water crisis, President Obama said, “This was a manmade disaster. … Sometimes it takes a crisis for everybody to focus their attention. … And when we see it, and we understand it, and we feel it, then maybe we start making a connection with each other” (Obama, 2016). Water scarcity is not simply the result of what nature has to offer but always involves power relations and political decisions. The water crisis is not only about who is granted access to safe, clean water (when, where, and why), but also about the extent to which the shrinking of available fresh water influences people’s everyday lives at the national and subnational scales. The water crisis also reflects the impact of modernization and neoliberal policies on identity and sense of community. After all, water is the source of livelihood and survival for all people, in every location, at every geographical scale, and the meaning of access to water is inextricably connected to cultural, societal, and political identities. This book’s contributors illuminate the dialectic between water and society, reinforcing issues of access, conflict, and identity.

The chapters in this volume provide analyses of the politics of fresh water from multiple perspectives and provide a common stage on which humanists, policy specialists, and social scientists can discuss the complexity of water issues. Together, the contributors offer a deeper and more integrated understanding of the politics of fresh water than would be possible through any single disciplinary approach, scale, time period, or region. They go beyond examining the current state of the freshwater crisis as they analyze the drivers of change in water systems and propose opportunities for the future. Finally, in these chapters the contributors confront problems with the artificial distinction between “nature” and “culture.” They suggest that the separation between humans and their natural environment has eroded the identities of those for whom fresh water is a way of life and, at the same time, damaged both nature and culture. Ultimately, this volume challenges us to connect fresh water’s diverse meanings for nature, culture, place, economy, and identity and to reconceptualize human experiences as nature.

Politics, water, and access

Despite global targets and significant advances in global access to affordable, safe, and clean water, these improvements are textured and uneven (Gerlak & Wilder, 2012). According to 2013 United Nations (UN) figures, more than 750 million people do not have access to clean water, especially those living in rural areas, and almost 2.5 billion do not have access to adequate sanitation (UNESCO, 2013a). Six to eight million people die annually from the consequences of water-related disasters and diseases. Most of these deaths occur in the Global South. Global water use is growing even faster than populations, at the same time as climate change impacts are making freshwater supply even less predictable and reliable (IPCC, 2013). By 2025 two-thirds of the world’s population could be living under water-stressed conditions (UNESCO, 2013b).

There are many causes of the freshwater crisis that could be avoided by better planning, by paying attention to the hydro-social system, and by rethinking the connection between “nature” and “culture.” The reasons for the crisis include lack of infrastructure to separate wastewater and drinking water; inadequate technology for filtration and disinfection of drinking water; degradation of freshwater systems through human activities, such as pollution and withdrawals; climate change; social practices that determine access based on social hierarchies; privatization systems that exclude the poor; and lack of institutions that ensure equitable access (Brookes & Carey, 2015; Circle of Blue, 2010; Cox, 2015). The chapters assembled here analyze two kind of processes related to access: those by which these physical, social, and ecological factors interact to determine access to water resources and benefits from its use, as well as access to participate in water decision-making; and those by which textured and uneven access patterns, in turn, shape the hydro-social system, including pathways for challenging injustice.

The first part of this volume focuses on institutions that determine who has access to the benefits of water use and who can participate in decisions regarding water. Strengthening institutions is generally recognized as important for improving water access (e.g., Ostrom, 1990). On one hand, institutions are relatively stable rules and practices, which are constructed to prescribe behavior and create expectations for behavior (Keohane, Haas, & Levy, 1993). On the other, they respond to a shifting reality of internal dynamics and changes in their social, political, and economic environments (Young, 1983). Together the cases in these chapters show how access rules are socially embedded, how they create conflict by privileging access for some over others, and how communities can mobilize to enact institutional change.

Using cases from the Roman Empire, Bannon (Chapter 2) analyzes rules defining who has access to water. Private property rights limited access to water in order to secure the supply for the owners of the rights, but exercise of these rights was tied to community norms of civility. In Venafrum, Italy, fountains provided public access to water, but individuals could also buy personal water rights. Illegal diversions were deterred through the placement of boundary stones and through rules ensuring water’s arrival in town. In contrast, in the Ebro River irrigation community in what is now Spain, public water was allocated in proportion to land ownership. Irrigators had a right to divert water in proportion to the amount of land they each irrigated and according to a set schedule. In Chapter 11, Mustafa describes a similar rotational schedule for distributing water in karez systems in Balochistan (Pakistan) and Nakhchivan (Azerbaijan). In Nakhchivan, where the karez is being resurrected, water access is proportional either to the amount of land owned or to the owner’s contribution to karez rehabilitation. In another case, from New Zealand, McGinnis discusses kaitiakitanga, the Māori cultural system of values and beliefs, which determines spatial and temporal access to natural resources and stewardship obligations. New Zealand’s decision to reorganize its political boundaries according to basin boundaries incorporated kaitiakitanga’s ecosystem perspective.

The river basin approach, as applied for example in New Zealand, is often exalted as a natural and objective unit for better water management, which brings together interdependent and diverse interests within the basin to pursue shared objectives (Powell, 1890; Teclaff, 1967). However, as several chapters in this book demonstrate, the decision to adopt a basin scale system of governance is a political decision between contending values and objectives with unequal consequences for water access (Cook, Cohen, & Norman, 2015; McGinnis, 1999). Ashcraft (Chapter 5), for example, analyzes efforts to organize cooperation at the scale of the entire water system in the Danube and Nile Rivers, which included sharp disagreements over access. In the Danube, countries disagreed over the geographic scope of navigation rules permitting commercial access to ports and ultimately differentiated access according to geographic area (main river or delta area) and whether or not the ship was from a country with territory in the basin. Vogel (Chapter 4), by focusing on the complex histories of the Tennessee, Columbia, and Connecticut River basins, shows how organizing cooperation at the basin scale can spread access to a narrow set of benefits, especially hydropower, to some users at the expense of those who depend on access to other river resources, such as fish, and whose ability to participate in decision-making is limited. In contrast, Ryan and Napoli (Chapter 3) describe how a judicial decision, which created a new basin-wide agency for Argentina’s Matanza-Riachuelo basin to clean up and control pollution, opened up opportunities for human rights and environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to participate in making decisions and shape institutions that govern water access.

Investment in built infrastructure is another common approach to improving access to water. However, technocratic approaches often focus on physical elements of the system and exclude other elements, with negative consequences for access to water’s diverse social, cultural, and ecological benefits (Gerlak, 2016; McCartney & Dalton, 2015). Magilligan, Sneddon, and Fox (Chapter 6) compare the hydropower and economic benefits from constructing large dams with the large costs for other kinds of system benefits, such as biodiversity. In Graybill’s analysis of resource flows in Sakhalin Island (Chapter 7), the Russian federal government, transnational corporations, and international financial institutions engaged in industrial-scale resource development only minimally consider the socioeconomic impacts on local and indigenous subsistence interests who care about freshwater habitat, salmon health, and drinking water. Similarly, in Sri Lanka and Bali (Chapter 9) and Balochistan (Chapter 11), the technocratic approach to irrigation projects physically reduced access to water use for play, bathing, and washing laundry. McMillin (Chapter 15) describes how flood control infrastructure, diversions, and concrete separate the Los Angeles River and limit access to its water system for recreation and habitat for fish and birds. Groenfeldt (Chapter 9), discussing the case of the Cochita Dam in the U.S. state of New Mexico, contrasts actual, negative ecological impacts against the anticipated income, irrigation, and tourism benefits that never materialized. Even when economic benefits are realized from large infrastructure pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The politics of fresh water: setting the stage
• 2 Ancient Roman water rights and commons theory
• 3 Legal mobilization and the politics of water pollution: the case of the Matanza-Riachuelo basin in Argentina
• 4 Does river basin governance mean wider access to river management? A long-term perspective from the Tennessee, Columbia, and Connecticut Rivers
• 5 Shifting currents in water diplomacy: negotiating conflict in the Danube and Nile River basins
• 5 The era of big dam building: it ain’t over till it’s over
• 7 Oil and water don’t mix: impacts of oil and gas development on Sakhalin’s water resources
• 8 The plight of New Zealand’s watersheds
• 9 Cultural water wars: power and hegemony in the semiotics of water
• 10 Theorizing gender, ethnic difference, and inequality in relation to water access and politics in southeastern Turkey
• 11 Water, life, and community in the arid realm: the curious case of karez and acequia
• 12 The politics of muddled waters in Gujarat: a religious nationalist development model’s treatment of water
• 13 In hidden view: how water became a catalyst for indigenous farmworker resistance in Baja California, Mexico
• 14 From management to governance: rethinking water policy and privatization on Easter Island
• 15 Strange waters: from confluence to vortex in the Los Angeles basin
• Index