A cursory glance at the literature on water governance reveals that stakeholder engagement has long been considered an integral part of sound governance processes. However, a closer look at the literature reveals that, beyond this general assertion,...
Accra, the capital city of Ghana, is characterized by limited networked supply, heterogeneous water providers, and various forms of provision. In this paper, we explore how the people delivering water through water tankers shape the distribution of w...
Cambodia has abundant water resources in the wet season and a scarcity of water in the dry season. These phenomena undermine the development in this country and pose a threat to long-term development. Hence, the governance of water becomes critically...
25 April 2014
This article presents the first comprehensive review and analysis of the uptake of the Canadian Drinking Water Quality Guidelines (CDWQG) across Canada’s 13 provinces and territories. This review is significant given that Canada’s approach to drinki...
This Special Issue on water governance features a series of articles that highlight recent and emerging concepts, approaches, and case studies to re-center and re-theorize “the political” in relation to decision-making, use, and managemen...
Water governance has emerged as an important topic in the international arena and is acknowledged to be a crucial factor for adequate and sustained progress towards achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6. However, there is not enough clarity...
Most empirical research on drinking water governance and regional transformations in Bangladesh has focused on developed and urban regions. We focus on coastal rural areas to address this gap and employ a three-step methodology for the systematic ana...
This paper addresses water governance in the context of dissolved organic matter emissions into water bodies and cultural eutrophication. Through a comparative interdisciplinary analysis of cases from Norway, the Czech Republic, and China, it seeks t...
Water safety and water governance are critical concerns, as water is a vital and finite resource that is essential for ecological processes, human survival, and economic and social development, requiring collaborative and coordinated work of all rela...
Water problems extend beyond the watershed of local communities and single countries. A novel governance approach must comprise coordination and institutional arrangements at the global scale, and rely on a set of axioms that guide the decision-makin...
Water governance and stakeholder engagement are receiving research attention for their role in formulating and implementing solutions to the world’s critical water challenges. The inspiration for this Special Issue came from our desire to provide a p...
Integrated river basin management (IRBM) has been proposed as a means to achieve water security (WS), maximizing economic and social well-being in an equitable manner and maintaining ecosystem sustainability. IRBM is regulated by a governance process...
Water governance is a widely acknowledged as an important factor for sustainable development. This study attempts to assess if the water governance in eight Indian states has improved after the announcement of the United Nations Sustainable Developme...
21 March 2020
China is increasingly facing water-related problems, such as water scarcity, pollution, and overexploitation of groundwater. This paper discusses the water status in China and claims that governance is the cause of water-related problems. The structu...
Combined impacts of sea-level rise, river flooding, increased frequency and magnitude of extreme rainfall, heatwaves, water scarcity, water pollution, ageing or lacking infrastructures for water, wastewater and solid waste in rapidly urbanising regio...
This paper considers how learning for transformation of water governance in the context of climate change adaptation can be designed for and supported, drawing examples from the international climate change adaptation and water governance project (CA...
The transboundary nature of stressors impacting shared water bodies has been traditionally recognized in agreements between nation states. Several developments have led to new layers of cross border environmental actors, including regional and city l...
Humans have historically chosen to develop their cities close to rivers due to the need for water and food security. In Brazil, water security represents a growing challenge, despite advances in the National Water Resources Management System. While m...
The water crisis can alternatively be called a governance crisis. Thus, the demand for good water governance to ensure effective water resources management and to attain specific water goals is growing. Many countries subscribe to the Integrated Wate...
Water crises are prevalent globally, but effective water governance can help mitigate these issues. This study, conducted in Soc Trang, a coastal province of the Vietnamese Mekong Delta, assessed water governance trends and identified local challenge...
Research in water governance and management is a complex subject that involves the appraisal of social, economic, and environmental–biophysical aspects. Cultural and social values are regarded as key drivers in decision-making processes in both...
Developing countries face the dilemma of balancing economic development with the governance of the water environment. In the 21st century, water environment governance has become a core theme in Chinese society, prompting governments at all levels to...
The article constructively critiques the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) 12 Principles on Water Governance (the OECD Principles). The human rights standard, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigeno...
This paper asks what lessons can be learned from experiences with coproduction in water governance. For this, we review a comprehensive corpus of articles in the field of water governance that relies on the term. We find that there are radically diff...
Public water services are still failing rural Tanzanians. Emboldened by advances in information communication technologies, the Ministry of Water has been developing computing, financial and administrative technologies to update and visualise the sta...
Effective water governance is the key to achieving water security and sustainable water management. This study promotes water efficiency and supports the shift towards climate-resilient agriculture in Mediterranean countries through the development a...
Despite huge differences in population, household income and development levels, Australia and Brazil have some temporal convergences in their water governance systems. Over the last 20 years, both countries have significantly reformed their water po...
Governing and managing the allocation and use of freshwater has always been a complex and fraught undertaking. The challenges to effective and equitable management have been exacerbated by rising pressures on supplies caused by such drivers as popula...
Adapting water governance to changing needs, while coping with the uncertainties caused by climate change and the consequences of urbanisation and demographic growth, is key for inclusive, safe and resilient cities. The urgency of the challenges call...
Freshwater scarcity can weaken water governance when hydrological pressure interacts with intensive agricultural demand, regulatory weakness, and political conflict. This research evaluates whether Irrigation District 005 (IR 005) in Chihuahua, north...
Hydrosocial spatio-temporalities—aspects of water belonging to space, time, or space-time—are central to water governance, providing a framework upon which overall hydrosocial relations are constructed, and are fundamental to the establis...
This paper presents the development and pilot validation of an enhanced water governance assessment tool developed within the European InnWater project. Grounded in OECD Principles on Water Governance, the study combines literature review, thematic f...
Human activities contribute to the degradation of water quality on the Galapagos Islands, affecting human health and Galapagos’ fragile ecosystem. Despite the numerous resources vested in water management, programs have yet to achieve measurabl...
The concept of agenda-setting has resulted in vibrant research in political science. The aim of this Special Issue is to advance the state of research on water governance by alluding to the possibilities for applying this particular theoretical persp...
Water governance and ecosystem function in the Canadian prairies are in a state of crisis. Compounding this crisis, and adding complexity, is the relationship between the water governance authority of the state with Canada’s First Peoples. Mean...
18 February 2022
Comprehensive governance of the watershed environment is one of the keys to urban and regional development and construction, which will affect not only the overall quality of urban economic development, but also the production and lives of urban resi...
Nicaragua enacted its Water Law in 2007, with the Dublin Principles for sustainable water management and integrated water resources management as its guiding framework. Implementation of the law remains a challenge, but significant efforts have been...
Public participation is central to the IWRM discourse and often associated with claims of improved environmental policy outputs and their implementation. Whilst the involvement of nonstate actors in environmental decision-making has attracted scholar...
Deltas worldwide have been experiencing pressures and challenges exacerbated by climate change. An explicit focus on deltas is lacking in various bodies of literature, although present in those bodies focusing on the resilience of social-ecological s...
Water crises are often crises of governance. To address interrelated issues of securing access to sustainable sources of safe water for the world’s populations, scholar and practitioners have suggested fostering improved modes of water governance tha...
We introduce ten studies in the field of water footprint assessment (WFA) that are representative of the type of papers currently being published in this broad interdisciplinary field. WFA is the study of freshwater use, scarcity, and pollution in re...
This paper undertakes a comparative analysis of the governance systems of nature areas in relation to resilience measures in the field of water and nature management. The main question is to identify the key characteristics of governance that influen...
This article explores the relationship between informality and water infrastructure in informal areas in Egypt. I apply three concepts drawn from the wider literatures on state power and governance: Topological power, flexible governing, and the &ldq...
In this study, the systemic challenges of water governance in Guanajuato, Mexico, are examined through a political ecology framework, identifying how governance failures, power asymmetries, and socio-environmental inequalities contribute to water sca...
Amid a deepening global socio-ecological crisis, Indigenous eco-spiritual practices are gaining renewed relevance for environmental governance. This article examines the water-caring practices of the Papallaqta, an Indigenous community in the Colombi...
Social-ecological systems and governance are complex systems and crises that affect those systems are likely to be complex as well. Environmental topics are multi-faceted with respect to both structure and content. Structural complexity is about soci...
Water governance in Europe faces mounting challenges from climate change, demographic pressures, and aging infrastructure—especially in Southern regions increasingly affected by drought and institutional fragmentation. In contrast, Nordic count...
While international instruments and a few state governments endorse the “free, prior and informed consent” of Indigenous peoples in decision-making about the water in their traditional territories, most state water governance regimes do n...
Indigenous Peoples in Canada have shown great strength and resilience in maintaining their cultures and ways of life to date in the face of settler colonialism. Centering the Water crises within Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination, we explo...
In 2018, I began an exploratory study involving fourteen Ontario First Nation participants that examined some First Nation water security challenges and opportunities. In acknowledgment that many of the government assessments, reports, and investment...
of 130