This article examines how Dutch water utilities implement and justify disconnection policies under the conflicting imperatives of cost recovery and the human right to water. Based on 12 semi-structured interviews and discourse analysis, it identifies 3 dominant narratives-technocratic, socially engaged, and human rights-based; it then maps these along two dimensions: the framing of water and the interpretation of non-payment. Despite operating within a uniform legal framework, utilities interpret and apply practices differently, reflecting variations in organisational contexts and discursive understandings of responsibility and vulnerability. The analysis shows how actors engage in discursive manoeuvring, using strategic ambiguity to reconcile regulatory obligations with social concerns. These findings challenge assumptions of technocratic neutrality and demonstrate how discretion and institutional discourse shape regulatory practice. The study contributes to regulatory governance debates by showing how formal compliance can coexists with informal adaptation in the provision of essential services.
In recent years, Uzbekistan has embarked on an expansive agricultural modernisation programme, cast under the banner of the 'Green Economy'. Within the agriculture sector, this has entailed an overhaul of the former cotton-centred production model in favour of high-value crops and vertically integrated clusters that are irrigated using the most up-to-date technologies. This paper argues that such a process entails 'hydrosocial re-territorialisation', which is characterised by a shift from horizontal, socially mediated surface-flow interdependencies to vertical and individualised groundwater access. Using the case of the pseudonymised village 'Dostlik' in Samarkand Province, the paper looks at local manifestations of Uzbekistan's current hydro-agrarian overhaul, arguing that hydrosocial re-territorialisation-by facilitating water grabbing-becomes the locus of agrarian change, experienced as 'slow violence' by rural residents. The effects are felt most acutely by scattered, informal homestead farmers who must continually dig deeper wells to irrigate their plots.
Seasonal rivers in East Africa’s drylands have become destabilised by climatic disruption and landscape changes. Despite widespread adaptation practices and interventions, recurrent droughts and floods continue to damage the agropastoral livelihoods dependent on these rivers. Few studies have explored how destabilising rainfall, river flows and adaptations have transformed hydrosocial relations among agropastoralists living near seasonal rivers. This paper reports on a case study in the Tiva River Basin in Kenya, exploring how agropastoralists have experienced changing river flows, rainfall and adaptation processes over the past 75 years. Based on storytelling workshops and a survey, we find that river flows and rainfall have been experienced as increasingly unpredictable and damaging. Water’s perceived role has shifted from being rhythmic and regenerative to being an erosive force and scarce resource to be captured and mobilised. Adaptation has materialised in multiple forms, each of which has, and continues to, reshape reshape the ways in which water is perceived and used. This requires attention from adaptation research with regard to policy and practice in agropastoral drylands. First, public hydraulic infrastructures inscribe norms for capturing and controlling water, while the limits of their functionality are layered into existing arrangements for accessing water. Second, the spread of private irrigation along seasonal rivers supports adaptation, but is only accessible for a small group and leads to inequalities in water access and adaptive capacities. Third, many agropastoralists pursue bottom-up adaptive practices to retain water, but face various hindrances in sustaining their efforts.
Istanbul is Turkey's economic and cultural capital. With a population approaching 16 million, it uses resources, particularly water, from far beyond its borders. The city's persistent water scarcity, exacerbated by its exponential growth, has necessitated large-scale infrastructural interventions, including interbasin water transfer projects such as the Great Melen Project (GMP). This project, the nation's second largest water transfer scheme, entailed the displacement of numerous rural communities via urgent expropriation decisions by the government-a procedure designed for use only in extreme circumstances such as war or natural disasters. This study investigates the social ramifications of this project, focusing on the 2014 evacuation of Ortakoy village in the basin. Through indepth interviews with diverse stakeholders, particularly former residents, the researchers examine the project's impact on local people's lives and livelihoods. The project has been hailed as a technological and engineering marvel; however, the findings demonstrate how readily the Melen region is being sacrificed for the sake of the nation's economic growth ideals. These are embodied in an idealised 'modernisation' narrative that justifies prioritisation of the needs of Istanbul as the country's economic and cultural engine and thereby produces consent among the villagers.
Between 2012 and 2020 in Syria, water was weaponised, but the manner of its weaponisation was constrained by the material and infrastructural characteristics of the country’s water system. Weaponisation took the form of infrastructure targeting, flow manipulation and access denial; at the same time, forms of interaction were structured by interdependence and material constraints. Drawing on geospatial analysis, remote sensing and interview-based data, this article develops the concept of hydro-coercive negotiation to explain how access to water emerges through the interaction of asymmetrical power relations, coercive pressure and infrastructural interdependence. The findings identify four overlapping configurations through which actors engage in temporary and reversible forms of coordination; these are: mutual dependency, resource-based exchange, truce-based arrangements, and civilian solidarity. These dynamics challenge binary interpretations of water as a source of either conflict or cooperation, highlighting instead its role as a sociotechnical system that simultaneously produces coercion, constraint and negotiated interdependence.
Water is a vital but underexplored dimension of older women’s leisure. While aquatic activity is often framed through health promotion or 'active ageing' discourses, such framings can obscure the complex entanglements of embodiment, gender, environment and social life. This paper presents findings from a scoping review of 36 peer reviewed studies that examined older women’s engagements with water across diverse contexts and activities including swimming, aqua aerobics, surfing, rowing and wild swimming. Four clusters of meaning emerged: water as supporting physical and mental well-being; water as a medium for identity and agency; water as a site of belonging, memory and spirituality; and water as context for social connection and mutual support. These practices illuminate water’s role not only as a therapeutic resource but also as an agentic, affective and political force. By foregrounding older women’s watery leisure, we highlight tensions of safety and autonomy and of inclusion and exclusion, and we call for a hydrological turn in gerontology that is attentive to joy, risk and belonging.
This article examines how Dutch water utilities implement and justify disconnection policies under the conflicting imperatives of cost recovery and the human right to water. Based on 12 semi-structured interviews and discourse analysis, it identifies 3 dominant narratives – technocratic, socially engaged, and human rights-based; it then maps these along two dimensions: the framing of water and the interpretation of non-payment. Despite operating within a uniform legal framework, utilities interpret and apply practices differently, reflecting variations in organisational contexts and discursive understandings of responsibility and vulnerability. The analysis shows how actors engage in discursive manoeuvring, using strategic ambiguity to reconcile regulatory obligations with social concerns. These findings challenge assumptions of technocratic neutrality and demonstrate how discretion and institutional discourse shape regulatory practice. The study contributes to regulatory governance debates by showing how formal compliance can coexists with informal adaptation in the provision of essential services.
Since Elinor Ostrom was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2009, research on the commons, and particularly on water commons, has expanded significantly in volume and theoretical diversity. This paper offers a scoping review of 61 'water commons' studies to identify theoretical strands and ways in which water commons are currently operationalised and problematised. First, the review reflects on the evolution of water commons research from the Ostromian – that is, more institutional – approach, towards one that is more critical, relational and social constructivist. The papershows that recent contributions have the potential for both constituting an inflection point and expanding the Ostromian tradition. Second, the review identifies four interconnected ways of operationalising water commons, that is, as a resource, an organisation, a community and a process. It highlights a shift away from purely resource- and right-centric understandings towards more complex sociopolitical conceptualisations. Also, water commons are predominantly framed as responses to market- and state-driven governance failures, though warnings against romanticisation remind us of their limits in addressing large-scale challenges and internal power asymmetries. The analysis further identifies two major debates – on the role of the state and on the relationship between rights-based approaches and relational commons governance – and two emerging threads concerning commons endurance under external pressures and the ambivalent role of social movements. Overall, the review enriches our understanding of the literature on water commons beyond the ‘institutional vs. critical studies’ dichotomy, and sheds new light on the diverse ways in which scholars have empirically worked with, and on, water commons.
River basin organisations are frequently portrayed as technically grounded and politically neutral instruments of water governance, but this framing conceals the contested social and political processes through which they are constituted and transformed. This article reviews the hundred-year trajectory of Spain's confederaciones hidrogr & aacute;ficas-established in 1926 and among the oldest RBOs in the world-through three analytical threads: 1) vertical governance (the central state versus peripheral regional powers), 2) horizontal governance (social participation), and 3) shifting ideological projects. Drawing on critical institutionalist and political ecology perspectives across four periods of institutional reconfiguration, the analysis shows that each one of those components has been variously interpreted, diluted, instrumentalised, or contested across radically different political regimes. Crucially, while the first three periods were organised around the hydraulic mission as a shared political project, the fourth reorients the confederaciones hidrogr & aacute;ficas towards the European Union's Water Framework Directive. This illustrates a decoupling between an institution's continuity and its political purpose. Meanwhile, social participation has oscillated between irrigation associations having genuine autonomy, their authoritarian subordination, and procedural formalism that achieves no substantive redistribution of decision-making power to a broader range of social actors. Basin unity, though technically legitimised, has been persistently contested by provincial, regional, and sectoral interests. The centralisation-decentralisation balance has proven no less volatile, reflecting broader disputes over territorial organisation rather than water-related governance needs. These findings challenge the narrative of the confederaciones hidrogr & aacute;ficas as a pioneering and exemplary model and contribute to debates on the institutional plasticity of river basin organisations-understood as their capacity to accommodate divergent political projects while preserving formal institutional continuity. Ultimately, they underscore that the performance of basin organisations cannot be understood in isolation from the historically specific power configurations and hydro-social conflicts in which they are embedded. These socio-political relations must be rendered visible, and governance arrangements must not only incorporate broader participation but actively challenge entrenched power asymmetries.
This paper provides a review of the literature on peri-urban water (in)security in India. Articles were selected using a mix of a Google Scholar search and snowball sampling. The literature is dominated by the experience of peri-urban water insecurity in a few large cities that grew in response to the neoliberal expansion policies of the early 1990s. Peri-urban water insecurity is experienced in a variety of ways including: weakened access to water commons such as lakes, tanks, ponds and wetlands; increasing competition for groundwater; the physical flow of water from peri-urban spaces to urban centres; uneven access to safe drinking water; and declining water quality. Social and power relationships mediate how residents of peri-urban spaces experience changing access to water sources. A wide variety of approaches to improved peri-urban water security have been put forward by actors such as academics, NGOs, corporations and civil society groups. A gender and intersectionality lens should be used in further research that focuses on the peri-urban dynamics of water insecurity around smaller towns and urban centres.
Water issues in South Africa have been a subject of fascination for numerous scholars around the world. Its ground-breaking National Water Act 36 of 1998 (NWA), promulgated during the democratic political transition, was meant to introduce a complete overhaul of the water sector and ensure access to water for all. In a society haunted by a long legacy of racial discrimination and exploitation, water was deemed to bring about a process of reconciliation. The NWA quickly became one of the cardinal policy reforms of the newly elected African National Congress (ANC). Twenty-five years after its adoption, however, the results are disappointing. While access to drinking water for previously discriminated-against populations was dramatically improved (especially in urban areas), the same cannot be said of access to water for productive use. Indeed, regarding the water allocation reform in rural South Africa, 'water apartheid' is still alive and well. In their accounts of the failure of the reform, scholars often blame politicians and political elites for their supposed lack of willingness to follow up on the intentions of the progressive Act. In the tradition of public policy analysis, I concentrate on the policy side rather than on the politics to explain the failed promise of the water allocation reform. Reviewing the law implementation process, I analyse how policy objectives have been filtered through state departments' organisational culture and professional routines and operationalised on the ground through technical policy instruments. Ultimately, I shed light on how, despite new political principles and dispensations that claim the contrary, it has been possible to reproduce racial inequality and to further entrench inequalities inherited from the past. I show that this has been done by concealing water grabs from political attention through resorting to discreet policy instruments and practices that obscure the critical question of water sharing.
This article analyses the historical trajectory of landscape transformation in Sepaku Subdistrict, East Kalimantan, Indonesia, in order to clarify the extensive impacts of Indonesia’s capital relocation project, officially framed as a 'forest city'. To do this, we specifically focus on the relationship between the river and urbanisation. Theoretically, we draw on the political ecology of urbanisation, which generally focuses on uneven spatial development, and we focus empirically on the historical transformation of the river. Based on seven months of fieldwork (2022-2023), including semi-structured interviews, document analyses, and participant observation, we detail how two moments of state intervention have shaped the relationship between the river and urbanisation. The first moment involves the territorialisation of Sepaku as a productive forest area in the 1960s, transforming natural forests into industrial forests and resettlement zones through extensive transmigrant flows. The planned urbanisation marks the second moment, aimed at transforming Sepaku into a new, sustainable, and inclusive 'forest city'. We argue that the current condition of the river and the city has been iteratively shaped by two moments of socio-spatial and socio-natural transformation. In order to move away from these extractive legacies, further planning for the new capital city should consider this relationship and incorporate the river into its vision of sustainable and inclusive urbanisation.
Water issues in South Africa have been a subject of fascination for numerous scholars around the world. Its ground-breaking National Water Act 36 of 1998 (NWA), promulgated during the democratic political transition, was meant to introduce a complete overhaul of the water sector and ensure access to water for all. In a society haunted by a long legacy of racial discrimination and exploitation, water was deemed to bring about a process of reconciliation. The NWA quickly became one of the cardinal policy reforms of the newly elected African National Congress (ANC). Twenty-five years after its adoption, however, the results are disappointing. While access to drinking water for previously discriminated-against populations was dramatically improved (especially in urban areas), the same cannot be said of access to water for productive use. Indeed, regarding the water allocation reform in rural South Africa, 'water apartheid' is still alive and well. In their accounts of the failure of the reform, scholars often blame politicians and political elites for their supposed lack of willingness to follow up on the intentions of the progressive Act. In the tradition of public policy analysis, I concentrate on the policy side rather than on the politics to explain the failed promise of the water allocation reform. Reviewing the law implementation process, I analyse how policy objectives have been filtered through state departments’ organisational culture and professional routines and operationalised on the ground through technical policy instruments. Ultimately, I shed light on how, despite new political principles and dispensations that claim the contrary, it has been possible to reproduce racial inequality and to further entrench inequalities inherited from the past. I show that this has been done by concealing water grabs from political attention through resorting to discreet policy instruments and practices that obscure the critical question of water sharing.
This paper explores the everyday practices of street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) in Vietnam's Bac Hung Hai (BHH) irrigation system, a vast hydrosocial machine in the Red River Delta. Drawing on interviews and detailed ethnographic fieldwork, we document how SLBs (hydraulic cluster managers, station workers and water guides) navigate multiple sociomaterial interfaces, in the course of which they deal with a diversity of day-to-day sociomaterial constraints to make irrigation and drainage work. Far from being faceless agents of a rigid hydrocracy, SLBs care for the infrastructure they manage and engage in continuous sociotechnical tinkering and ethical improvisation to balance competing demands that include farmers' needs, infrastructure decay, electricity costs, and bureaucratic oversight. We stress how SLBs engage in processes of intermediation, negotiation and bricolage, thereby shaping a particular form of everyday politics that combines formal rules with practical fixes and is epitomised in specific locales, the pumping stations where professional and social lives intertwine. As the Red River Delta faces mounting socio-environmental changes, understanding the hard work, gendered dynamics and situated ethics that characterise SLBs' daily realities is crucial to anticipating the future of water governance in Vietnam.
Water is widely considered to be a basic need, a human right, a resource and a gift from nature, yet there are costs associated with providing it. As states seek to ensure access, controversies remain over water service type, ownership and funding. This paper traces debates over equity, access and costs, and points to a gap between justice-oriented debates and more quantitative studies of non-payment. We respond to this gap by considering the ethical, political and social dimensions of payment, as well as framing it as a relational practice connected to reliable provision. Drawing on surveys, focus groups and interviews from eThekwini Municipal Area-where the legacy of colonialism and apartheid continues to shape material inequality and political positions-we develop a typology for understanding beliefs and practices about payment for water services. Our mixed methods approach enables us to highlight that payment is relational, social and political, and is constructed through conflicting narratives. We consider both the value of a heuristic set of categories and the difficulties of drawing sharp distinctions between the reasons for non-payment. We conclude by reflecting on the difficulty and importance of integrating diverse economic, political economic, and ethical arguments around payment for services.
Dwindling groundwater levels and compromised water quality have led to concerns about the potential for near-and longer-term groundwater crises in the Bandung Metropolitan Area (BMA), located in the Bandung Groundwater Basin of Indonesia. The BMA is a rapidly urbanising region where much of the population relies on groundwater to meet its household needs and and where challenges are being encountered in accessing a reliable groundwater supply. There are multiple perspectives on what aspects of the crisis are most critical and many ideas as to what can and should be done, and with what urgency. Assemblage thinking can help to understand this complex field by highlighting the sociomaterial construction of environmental problems in ways that are always contingent, heterogeneous and influenced by the agency of multiple actors. In this case study, we use media analysis, semi-structured qualitative interviews, document analysis, and participant observation to examine how problematisations of groundwater emerge and coexist. Findings reveal that media narratives, the behaviour of local institutions, and the everyday practices of groundwater users influence water-crisis-related interactions with government and even shape the crisis itself. These dynamics contribute to fragmented groundwater governance where community-led practices coexist with formal institutional arrangements. The study highlights the potential of hybrid governance models to support adaptive and context-sensitive management, particularly in the BMA and in similar urbanising regions.
Attempts to establish collaborative groundwater governance (CGG) have so far generally produced limited results in low- and middle-income countries. These shortcomings have been attributed to the high transaction costs associated with such approaches, making them impractical in informal water economies. This paper examines the obstacles to designing and implementing such an approach, through the analysis of a multistakeholder process conducted in a groundwater-depleted area in Northern Morocco. The process brought together farmers, staff members of public organisations, and other stakeholders to explore options for CGG. During the process, farmers created groundwater users associations and together the participants drafted an aquifer contract. The participatory process helped overcome several obstacles to CGG, particularly those related to farmers’ engagement. The finalisation of the aquifer contract was put on hold, however, due to the limited follow-up by state actors, the insufficient coordination among the numerous public actors involved, and weak political support. The study shows that CGG may not be inherently unfit for purpose in at least some low- and middle-income countries. Moreover, the participatory design of CGG can be an opportunity for horizontal dialogue between farmers operating in informal water economies and state administrations.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has established itself since 2009 as an authority in water governance. This paper examines the strategies behind that emergence, applying quantitative and qualitative text analysis techniques to a corpus of 55 OECD documents produced between 2009 and 2022. We discern five legitimating strategies. First, the OECD followed a formula from its earlier engagement in other fields that had three components: 1) reframing existing knowledge and manufacturing a declared consensus in contentious areas, 2) formulating and disseminating blueprints for good governance, and 3) formulating and disseminating corresponding frameworks with which to evaluate performance. Its second strategy has been to stress topics and themes where it already had an established reputation, that is, 'good governance' and 'new public management'. The third strategy involved referencing a limited pool of external sources that were mostly from other international organisations and consultancy groups, and underutilising the academic literature on the subject. Fourth, it referenced itself extensively in both formal citations and frequent in-text references. Fifth and finally, it orchestrated temporary networks of actors to endorse its efforts and tools. Taken together, these strategies point to the self-referential nature of the OECD’s authority in this new field. We call attention to these legitimating strategies with the goal of challenging the OECD and other international organisations to adopt more adequate and inclusive knowledge bases.
There is an increasing emphasis in India on building climate resilience through public investments in irrigation. Maharashtra’s Project on Climate Resilient Agriculture is a first such state implementation. Although resilience is a systems concept, the project targets individual farm-level investments. Our aim is to evaluate how these investments reshape water access amongst all farmers and how they impact resilience. In our study area in Jalna district, we evaluate the proposed interventions by combining field data with a modelling approach. Two indices are developed to indicate resilience: Irrigation Risk Index and Lock-in Index. We find that though the project increases the volume of water harvested, farmers are incentivized to use most of it through agricultural intensification with no buffer to deal with shocks. Despite an apparent focus on the resilience, the implementation prioritises increasing productivity of the irrigators over addressing vulnerability of rainfed agriculture. Moreover, the promotion of multiyear orchards creates a lock-in and reduces the adaptive capacity of irrigators. At the same time, due to the common-pool-resource property of water, less is available for the supplemental irrigation needs of other farmers. We conclude that the programme not only reduces resilience but also exacerbates inequity in water access. The research contributes to debates on investments for productive versus supplemental irrigation in rainfed areas. It also highlights the need for incorporating an equity lens when designing for resilience.
Urban wetlands are essential for sustaining biodiversity, mitigating floods and supporting livelihoods, yet they are among the planet's most threatened ecosystems. In Guwahati, a rapidly urbanising capital city in Northeast India, wetlands are a critical urban commons. They are shared spaces managed and used by urban communities, and are vital to collective wellbeing. They currently face threats from urban agglomeration, and there remains a significant gap in the understanding of how different and often contesting discourses shape perceptions, uses and governance of these wetlands. This research, therefore, addresses the key question: How are the discourses surrounding Guwahati's wetlands contested? Employing critical discourse analysis, data collection methods included semi-structured interviews with residents across Guwahati and field observations in the two wetland areas of Deepor Beel and Silsako Beel. Findings suggest that the state (municipal and other line agencies) primarily frames wetlands as a resource for driving urban development-a discourse that is reinforced by the state's practices. This reflects a growing detachment from these ecosystems and a clear progression towards state control and commodification, where wetlands are transformed from urban commons and meaningful 'places' into abstract, commercialised 'spaces'. These discourses are used by both the state and several residents, but are challenged by environmentally conscious residents and civil society groups advocating for wetland preservation. These contestations illustrate the complex and conflicting values attributed to urban wetlands. Currently, the state's modernity agenda seems to take precedence, resulting in their increasing commodification.
