Contemporary Water Governance in the Global South

Scarcity, Marketization and Participation

Leila M. Harris, Jacqueline A. Goldin, Christopher Sneddon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781135125042
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

The litany of alarming observations about water use and misuse is now familiar—over a billion people without access to safe drinking water; almost every major river dammed and diverted; increasing conflicts over the delivery of water in urban areas; continuing threats to water quality from agricultural inputs and industrial wastes; and the increasing variability of climate, including threats of severe droughts and flooding across locales and regions. These issues present tremendous challenges for water governance.

This book focuses on three major concepts and approaches that have gained currency in policy and governance circles, both globally and regionally—scarcity and crisis, marketization and privatization, and participation. It provides a historical and contextual overview of each of these ideas as they have emerged in global and regional policy and governance circles and pairs these with in-depth case studies that examine manifestations and contestations of water governance internationally.

The book interrogates ideas of water crisis and scarcity in the context of bio-physical, political, social and environmental landscapes to better understand how ideas and practices linked to scarcity and crisis take hold, and become entrenched in policy and practice. The book also investigates ideas of marketization and privatization, increasingly prominent features of water governance throughout the global South, with particular attention to the varied implementation and effects of these governance practices. The final section of the volume analyzes participatory water governance, querying the disconnects between global discourses and local realities, particularly as they intersect with the other themes of interest to the volume.

Promoting a view of changing water governance that links across these themes and in relation to contemporary realities, the book is invaluable for students, researchers, advocates, and policy makers interested in water governance challenges facing the developing world.

Part I Integrating hegemony

2 Water, governance and hegemony

Christopher Sneddon

DOI: 10.4324/9780203076361-2

Hegemony is like a pillow: it absorbs blows and sooner or later the would-be assailant will find it comfortable to rest upon.

(Cox, 1983: 173)

Water governance is of central concern to a range of actors within governments, corporations and civil society organizations. It also encompasses an exceedingly complex set of discourses and actions that include water policy, water management and water politics. This chapter examines the rise in recent years of a variety of concepts that have assumed hegemonic status within discourses and practices associated with water governance. The notion of hegemony, while associated most closely with the writings of the Italian political philosopher and activist Antonio Gramsci, has come to refer to a wide variety of practices and ideologies associated with the power to influence decisions and patterns of thought. More specifically, hegemony is identified with the capabilities of some dominant collective within a given society to exercise influence in such as way to have its interests appear to be the interests of society as a whole. In effect, hegemony is about the wilful creation of power relations – the ‘pillow’ as noted above in Robert Cox’s (1983) epigram – that serve the goals and desires of a specific set of actors, although a much wider set of actors create and maintain those goals and desires. In the sphere of water governance, management and development, these actors and institutions often seem to establish and disseminate hegemonic concepts at a global level, and, indeed, one of the important critiques of water governance is that a global ‘water mafia’ exercises undue influence over how societies interact with and govern water (Petrella, 2001; IRN, 2003). However, one of the key themes of the present volume is that hegemony manifests and is reshaped at multiple scales and levels, from global to national as well as in local settings.

My aim here is two-fold: to establish a common frame of reference for how the subsequent chapters engage the notion of hegemony; and to briefly highlight the rise of the three hegemonic concepts specific to water governance – scarcity, marketization and participation. These concepts provide the core themes investigated in our book. While the tone of this chapter is theoretical, its aims are eminently practical. The basic water needs of millions of people around the world – whether oriented towards survival and household uses, sanitation, agriculture or other dimensions – are not being effectively addressed (UNDP, 2011). Moreover, historical efforts to meet the human needs for water have too often come at the expense of aquatic ecosystems (e.g. rivers, lakes, wetlands) that have been left in a degraded state. We argue that ‘the main causes for this unacceptable state of affairs are neither technical nor “natural” but rather are, broadly speaking, of a social and political nature’ (Castro, 2007: 98). It is precisely through the exercise of hegemonic concepts that many of the causes (and solutions) to lack of access to water come to be identified as sitting exclusively within technical, institutional or natural domains.

I proceed to a discussion of the concept of water governance and a framework that highlights the theoretical underpinnings of hegemony and hegemonic concepts. I then examine the three dimensions of water governance – scarcity and crisis; markets and privatization; and participatory water governance – that have emerged in recent years as hegemonic, providing the foci taken up in the present volume. This sets the stage for later ‘framing’ chapters by Mahayni, Harris and Goldin that examine each of these dimensions in greater detail. Short examples demonstrate the complicated ways in which hegemonic concepts guide and influence policy decisions and political dynamics in water management and development. I conclude by highlighting the advantages of thinking about water governance in a way that foregrounds hegemony and hegemonic concepts.

Water governance and hegemony

In recent years, scholars and practitioners have increasingly directed attention towards a wide range of issues in an effort to understand the complex ways that human societies modify, exploit, adapt and consume water resources. These processes come together under the rubric of water governance. Geographer Karen Bakker defines resource or environmental governance more generally as the process by which organizations (‘collective social entities that govern resource use’) execute and enact management institutions (‘the laws, policies, rules, norms, and customs by which resources are governed’); more simply, governance is ‘the process by which … we construct and administer the exploitation of resources’ (2007: 434). Governance, however, has also come to encompass additional meanings. For example, one of the key architects of global approaches to water governance, the Global Water Partnership (GWP), offers the following description:

Governance looks at the balance of power and the balance of actions at different levels of authority. It translates into political systems, laws, regulations, institutions, financial mechanisms and civil society development and consumer rights – essentially the rules of the game.

(emphasis in original; GWP, 2003: 2)¹

This definition is interesting for several reasons, but perhaps none so more than its attention to power and authority, both key concerns of an understanding of hegemony. Moreover, the notion of governance transcends a narrow focus on how states exercise power to include a host of potential agents across private and public spheres. In this same sense, concerns over greater levels of participation within water–society relations have led to the idea of distributed governance. This ‘describes a system where many different parties have roles and responsibilities – government, civil society, private sector, individuals – with the State no longer acting alone to solve societal problems’ (GWP, 2003: 6). In another vein, governance can encompass both instrumental (how water is shared and exploited via administrative and technical tools) and process-oriented conceptions (the setting of water use goals and priorities prior to implementation). These distinctive modes of water governance can lead to vast differences in how agents understand and experience governance as a set of processes. For example, mainstream and more casual uses of water governance – in policy reports, websites and global forums – often mask deep divisions among irreconcilable intellectual and political frameworks and the policy decisions that flow from these frameworks (Castro, 2007).

These evolving understandings of water governance raise a number of critical questions: how precisely do non-state actors (e.g. multinational corporations, water-related NGOs) engage in water governance, and has their increasing presence resulted in more effective social or ecological outcomes? How are such outcomes of water governance defined as ‘effective’ or otherwise assessed? Responses to these questions are highly contingent on who ‘sets the terms’ for water governance in the first instance, and what passes for expertise, knowledge and ‘best practices’ in the world of water policy and management. Such concerns are both political and pragmatic – the technical and management decisions made by water planners in the context of urban supply systems or construction of water infrastructure, for example, are directly shaped by the broader understandings of water’s ‘appropriate’ use within society (see Baker, Chapter 3). The arenas for defining such uses are of course characterized by power relations among different agents; while the invocation of ‘stakeholders’ is nearly ubiquitous in the policy documents associated with water governance, those actors with a larger stake, often financially or politically, are frequently in a position to alter the governance process to meet their own objectives. For these and other reasons, the concept of hegemony can facilitate a more incisive understanding of how these power relations in the water realm are shaped and contested.

In recent years, the phrase hegemony has been used to describe a wide range of discourses and practices within the sphere of water–society relations. At the level of world politics, hegemony connotes a condition in international relations whereby one state is able to enrol ‘others in the exercise of [its] power by convincing, cajoling and coercing them that they should want what you want’ (Agnew, 2005: 1–2). Under this rubric, hydro-hegemony occurs when one state within, for example, a shared river basin is able to assert its power over upstream flows or persuade other riparian states its uses of the basin’s water resources (via abstraction, dam development and so on) will be of benefit to all (Zeitoun and Warner, 2006). At other levels, hegemony indicates a particularly potent idea or policy that readily lends itself to widespread adoption across diverse societal contexts. Michael Goldman (2007), for example, traces how the bundle of policies and management interventions carried out under the World Bank’s ‘Water for All’ initiative in the 1990s and 2000s – emphasizing among other things the need to see water as a economic good and the mobilization of the private sector to enhance drinking water services for the poor – circulated through transnational policy networks to become a globally dominant approach to water governance. However, the concept of hegemony as deployed originally by Gramsci (1971: 12–14) and more recently by contemporary work in the social sciences (see Birkenholz, 2009; Loftus, 2009; Mann, 2009; Perkins, 2011) also directs attention to the everyday processes whereby individuals and groups internalize certain concepts and act in a way that may be inimical to their broader interests within society. In a compelling account of the state’s efforts to manage competing claims over drinking water access and infrastructure in Bangalore (India), Ranganathan (2010) uses a Gramscian framework to highlight the multiple relations of power that mobilize different social groups and help define their stance towards the water projects in question.

Cox’s (1983) work on the Gramscian understanding of hegemony as applied to geopolitics offers a useful way to link the notion of hegemonic concepts across spatial scales. One of Cox’s key insights, drawn from Gramsci, is that hegemonic power that operates at a global scale in the sphere of international affairs is constituted by and reflective of hegemonies of social classes within particular nation-states. Hegemony in world politics is ‘in its beginnings an outward expansion of the internal (national) hegemony established by a dominant social class’, and (eventually) the ‘economic and social institutions, the culture, the technology associated with this national hegemony become patterns for emulation abroad’ (Cox, 1983: 171). Setting aside the numerous critiques and extensions of Cox’s interpretations (see e.g. Cox, 1999), this line of reasoning implies that hegemonic concepts such as those examined within the contours of water governance – whether linked to markets and privatization, scarcity and crisis, or participation at national or local levels – are tangibly connected to mechanisms of world hegemony such as international organizations, which (among other functions) legitimize certain norms that serve specific interests and co-opt the elites of dependent countries. From our perspective, it is more fruitful to think of multiple hegemonies, or hegemonic projects, that privilege certain ideas about water governance and disseminate those ideas in specific ways. This reflects a more nuanced view of how hegemony actually operates in a given society, as ‘consent’ to be governed (or govern oneself) in a fashion that sustains the hegemonic position of others is ‘constantly being rearticulated’ in unexpected ways (Birkenholz, 2009: 211). We are also mindful that debates over the hegemonic properties of the neoliberal project (see below) are highly contested and remain far from settled in theoretical terms (see Barnett, 2005; Perkins, 2011).

As we employ the term, a hegemonic concept refers to certain ideas that become dominant within a society and hence mold and structure how individuals and groups perceive and interpret certain phenomena (Trottier, 2003: 1). Such ideas limit the terms of debate, create little space for conflicting ideas and, when applied to societal ills, tend to become the dominant frame of reference for crafting solutions. Applied to water governance, hegemonic concepts are presented by their proponents so frequently and authoritatively that they exude an aura of unassailable objectivity in the quest for more effective water policies and management practices. In Gramsci’s terms, they exude ‘common sense’, which forms the ‘ideology or conception by which people validate their day-today, functional position in any given political, economic, and cultural system’ (Perkins, 2011: 559). We would extend the ideological sphere of hegemonic concepts in water governance to include not only individuals, but also the state agencies, international development programs and community organizations that guide and implement water interventions. Historically, state agents and their allies in the business and developmental spheres have adopted a ‘hydraulic mission’ to appropriate freshwater resources for human use (Molle et al., 2009), underscoring the centrality of the state in creating and sustaining hegemonic ideas.

We certainly start from the assumption that ideas and approaches to human interventions within ecological systems – whether under the umbrellas of ‘development’, ‘resource management’ or ‘water governance’ – further the interests of political and economic elites within a given society, often at the expense of disenfranchised and marginalized social actors. These ideas circulate throughout society abetted by a variety of media – international conferences, special reports, educational forums, th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface and acknowledgements
• PART I Integrating hegemony: social and biophysical perspectives
• PART II Crisis and scarcity
• PART III Marketization and privatization
• PART IV Participation
• PART V Conclusion
• Index