Street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) interact directly with users and play a key role in providing services. In the Global South, and specifically in India, the work practices of frontline public workers—technical staff, field engineers, desk officers, and social workers—reflect their understanding of urban water reforms. The introduction of technology-driven solutions and new public management instruments, such as benchmarking, e-governance, and evaluation procedures, has transformed the nature of frontline staff’s responsibilities but has not solved the structural constraints they face. In regard to implementing solutions to improve access in poor neighborhoods, SLBs continue to play a key role in the making of formal and informal provision. Their daily practices are ambivalent. They can be both predatory and benevolent, which explains the contingent impacts on service improvement and the difficulty in generalizing reform experiments. Nevertheless, the discretionary power of SLBs can be a source of flexibility and adaptation to complex social settings.
Article
The Street-Level Bureaucracy at the Intersection of Formal and Informal Water Provision
Marie-Hélène Zérah
Article
Where Is Equity in Integrated Approaches for Water Resources Management?
Jeremy Allouche
The challenges of integrated approaches and equity in water resources management have been well researched. However, a clear division exists between scholars working on equity and those working on integration, and there is remarkably little systematic analysis available that addresses their interlinkages. The divide between these two fields of inquiry has increased over time, and equity is assumed rather than explicitly considered in integrated approaches for water resources management. Historically, global debates on water resources management have focused on questions of distributional equity in canal irrigation systems and access to water. This limited focus on distributional equity was side-lined by neoliberal approaches and subsequent integrated approaches around water resources management tend to emphasize the synergistic aspects and ignore the political trade-offs between equity and efficiency. The interlinkages among equity, sustainability, and integration need deeper and broader interdisciplinary analysis and understanding, as well as new concepts, approaches, and agendas that are better suited to the intertwined complexity of resource degradation.
Article
Hydropolitics
Mattia Grandi
The lack of a settled definition for hydropolitics—a prismatic concept that acquires specific meanings according to both the disciplinary boundaries within which it is used and the theoretical perspectives of those employing it—is consistent with the disagreement over its nomenclature (hydro-politics vs. hydropolitics). The term has had many meanings and idiosyncratic usages over time, and there has been hardly any attempt to advance a clear definition for it. The strength of the concept of hydropolitics, its inter-disciplinary conceptual heterogeneity, is also its weakness. While the crystallization of some of the core features of hydropolitics in the literature—especially with regard to scale (namely, the focus on the inter-state level and the range of issues covered, that is, the politics of international water basins)—has anchored hydropolitics to “standard cases” of the concept, its theoretical underpinnings are still blurred. The study of hydropolitics has substantially delved into trans-boundary, not just any, waters. Yet, both the ontology and epistemology of the concept are debatable, so few eclectic definitions for hydropolitics have emerged. Hence, by addressing the relationships between knowledge, theory, and action of hydropolitics, the scientific community, in particular scholars of international relations, political geography, and critical geopolitics, has struggled for theoretical coherence as well as for conceptual clarity over the use of the term. This is not an easy task, though, because the fluid essence of hydropolitics escapes not only definition but also easy classification.
Article
Economic Instruments to Control Greenhouse Gas Emissions: REDD+
Rawshan Ara Begum
Deforestation causes up to 10% of global anthropogenic carbon emissions. Reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation and enhancing forest carbon stocks can contribute to controlling greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and limit global warming and climate change. However, global warming cannot be limited without decreasing the use of fossil fuel or emission-intensive energy sources. The forestry sector could contribute 7%–25% of global emissions reduction by 2020. Apart from emissions reduction and sink (mitigation), forests also provide cobenefits such as ecosystem services (providing food, timber, and medicinal herbs); biodiversity conservation; poverty reduction; and water quality, soil protection, and climate regulation. In 2005, the UNFCCC introduced a cost-effective mitigation strategy to reduce emissions from deforestation (RED) in developing countries.
The UN’s initiative to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) aims to transform forest management in developing countries, where the majority of tropical forests are located, using finances from developed countries. REDD+ seeks to reward actors for maintaining or restoring forests, acting as an economic instrument by putting a monetary value on every tonne of CO2 that is prevented from entering the atmosphere. Implementation of REDD+ requires economic and policy instruments that can help to control GHG emissions by enhancing carbon sinks, reducing deforestation and forest degradation, and managing sustainable forests.
Payment for environmental services offers opportunities for either cofinancing or economic valuation in regard to REDD+ implementation. The challenge is to identify the most appropriate and cost-effective instrument.
REDD+ fulfills the current needs for economic instruments and incentives that can be implemented with existing land use and forestry policies to control global GHG emissions. However, REDD+ requires forest governance, law enforcement, clarification of land and resource rights, and forest monitoring to work in the long term. REDD+ payments can be made for results-based actions, and the UNFCCC has identified potential ways to pay for them, but challenges remain, such as clarifying financing or funding sources, distribution of funding and sharing of benefits or incentives, carbon rights, and so on. Different aspects pf the implementation, effectiveness, and scale of REDD+ and their interactions with economic, social, and environmental benefits are important for successful REDD+ implementation.
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Exploring the Politics of Institutional Fragmentation in Transboundary River Basins
Christian Bréthaut and Laura Turley
Institutional fragmentation has been less addressed by research when considering the specific context of transboundary river basins, settings that are often characterized by multiple regulatory frameworks as well as by a great range of uses and users of the river that intervene at different institutional levels. Considering that such contexts represent fertile ground for reinforced use rivalries and exacerbated power relations, it is key to focus on the very nature and results of such institutional fragmentation; in other words, it is necessary to explore the politics of institutional fragmentation in transboundary rivers. Three main bodies of literature are suggested as insightful perspectives to provide enhanced understanding of such contexts: (a) institutional fit literature: challenges of fits between institutions and ecosystems, (b) legal pluralism: interplay and co-existence of different normative orders, (c) polycentric governance: coordination modalities between different and independent decision-making centers.
Article
Water Security
Claudia Sadoff, David Grey, and Edoardo Borgomeo
Water security has emerged in the 21st century as a powerful construct to frame the water objectives and goals of human society and to support and guide local to global water policy and management. Water security can be described as the fundamental societal goal of water policy and management. This article reviews the concept of water security, explaining the differences between water security and other approaches used to conceptualize the water-related challenges facing society and ecosystems and describing some of the actions needed to achieve water security. Achieving water security requires addressing two fundamental challenges at all scales: enhancing water’s productive contributions to human and ecosystems’ well-being, livelihoods and development, and minimizing water’s destructive impacts on societies, economies, and ecosystems resulting, for example, from too much (flood), too little (drought) or poor quality (polluted) water.
Article
Excluded Uses: Indigenous Rights to Water
Barbara Cosens
Indigenous rights to water follow diverse trajectories across the globe. In Asia and Africa even the concept of indigeneity is questioned and peoples with ancient histories connected to place are defined by ethnicity as opposed to sovereign or place-based rights, although many seek to change that. In South America indigenous voices are rising. In the parts of the globe colonized by European settlement, the definition of these rights has been in a continual state of transition as social norms evolve and indigenous capacity to assert rights grow. From the point of European contact, these rights have been contested. They have evolved primarily through judicial rulings by the highest court in the relevant nation-state. For those nation-states that do address whether indigenous rights to land and water exist, the approach has ranged from the 18th- and 19th-century doctrines of terra nullius (the land (and resources) belonged to no one) to a recognized right of “use and occupancy” that could be usurped under the doctrine of “discovery” by the conquering power. In the 20th and 21st centuries the evolution of the recognition of indigenous rights remains uneven, reflecting the values, judicial doctrine, and degree to which the contested water resource is already developed in the relevant nation-state. Thus, indigenous rights to water range from the recognition of cultural and spiritual rights that would have been in existence at the time of European contact, to inclusion of subsistence rights, rights sufficient for economic development, rights for homeland purposes, and rights as guardian for a water resource. At the forefront in this process of recognition is the right of indigenous peoples as sovereign to control, allocate, develop and protect their own water resources. This aspirational goal is reflected in the effort to create a common global understanding of the rights of indigenous peoples through declaration and definition of the right of self-determination articulated in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Article
Politics of Water Flows: Water Supply, Sanitation, and Drainage
Tatiana Acevedo Guerrero
Since the late 20th century, water and sanitation management has been deeply influenced by ideas from economics, specifically by the doctrine of neoliberalism. The resulting set of policy trends are usually referred to as market environmentalism, which in broad terms encourages specific types of water reforms aiming to employ markets as allocation mechanisms, establish private-property rights and full-cost pricing, reduce (or remove) subsidies, and promote private sector management to reduce government interference and avoid the politicization of water and sanitation management. Market environmentalism sees water as a resource that should be efficiently managed through economic reforms.
Instead of seeing water as an external resource to be managed, alternative approaches like political ecology see water as a socio-nature. This means that water is studied as a historical-geographical process in which society and nature are inseparable, mutually produced, and transformable. Political ecological analyses understand processes of environmental change as deeply interrelated to socioeconomic dynamics. They also emphasize the impact of environmental dynamics on social relations and take seriously the question of how the physical properties of water may be sources of unpredictability, unruliness, and resistance from human intentions. As an alternative to the hydrologic cycle, political ecology proposes the concept of hydrosocial cycle, which emphasizes that water is deeply political and social. An analysis of the politics of water flows, drawing from political ecology explores the different relationships and histories reflected in access to (and exclusion from) water supply, sanitation, and drainage. It portrays how power inequalities are at the heart of differentiated levels of access to infrastructure.
Article
The Forest Transition
Thomas Rudel
Forest transitions take place when trends over time in forest cover shift from deforestation to reforestation. These transitions are of immense interest to researchers because the shift from deforestation to reforestation brings with it a range of environmental benefits. The most important of these would be an increased volume of sequestered carbon, which if large enough would slow climate change. This anticipated atmospheric effect makes the circumstances surrounding forest transitions of immediate interest to policymakers in the climate change era. This encyclopedia entry outlines these circumstances. It begins by describing the socio-ecological foundations of the first forest transitions in western Europe. Then it discusses the evolution of the idea of a forest transition, from its introduction in 1990 to its latest iteration in 2019. This discussion describes the proliferation of different paths through the forest transition. The focus then shifts to a discussion of the primary driver of the 20th-century forest transitions, economic development, in its urbanizing, industrializing, and globalizing forms. The ecological dimension of the forest transition becomes the next focus of the discussion. It describes the worldwide redistribution of forests toward more upland settings. Climate change since 2000, with its more extreme ecological events in the form of storms and droughts, has obscured some ongoing forest transitions. The final segment of this entry focuses on the role of the state in forest transitions. States have become more proactive in managing forest transitions. This tendency became more marked after 2010 as governments have searched for ways to reduce carbon emissions or to offset emissions through more carbon sequestration. The forest transitions by promoting forest expansion would contribute additional carbon offsets to a nation’s carbon budget. For this reason, the era of climate change could also see an expansion in the number of promoted forest transitions.
Article
The Mirage of Supply-Side Development: The Hydraulic Mission and the Politics of Agriculture and Water in the Nile Basin
Harry Verhoeven
In an era of calamitous climate change, entrenched malnutrition, and the chronic exclusion of hundreds of millions of people from access to affordable energy, food, and water, evaluating the policy options of African states to address these challenges matters more than ever. In the Nile Basin especially, a region notorious for its poverty, violent instability and lack of industrialisation, states have invested their scarce resources and political capital in a “hydraulic mission” in the belief that they can engineer their way out of international marginalization. Incumbents have bet on large-scale hydro-infrastructure and capital-intensive agriculture to boost food production, strengthen energy security, and deal with water scarcity, despite the woeful track-record of such a supply-side approach to development.
While ruling elites in the Nile Basin have portrayed the hydraulic mission as the natural way of developing the region’s resources—supposedly validated by the historical achievements of Pharaonic civilization and its mastery over its tough environment—this is a modern fiction, spun to justify politically expedient projects and the exclusion of broad layers of the population. In the last two hundred years, the hydraulic mission has made three major political contributions that underline its strategic usefulness to centralizing elites: it has enabled the building of modern states and a growing bureaucratic apparatus around a riverain political economy; it has generated new national narratives that have allowed unpopular regimes to rebrand themselves as protectors of the nation; and it has facilitated the forging of external alliances, linking the resources and elites of Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan to global markets and centers of influence. Mega-dams, huge canals and irrigation for export are fundamentally about power and the powerful—and the privileging of some interests and social formations over others. The one-sided focus on increasing supply—based on the false premise that this will allow ordinary people to access more food and water—transfers control over livelihoods from one (broad) group of people to (a much narrower) other one by legitimizing top-down interventionism and dislocation. What presents itself as a strategy of water resources and agricultural development is really about (re)constructing hierarchies between people. The mirage of supply-side development continues to seduce elites at the helm of the state because it keeps them in power and others out of it.
