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2285 results in Ebooks in ecology and environment

Page 41 of 115

  • 14 - Sharing Our Water

  • from Part III - Exclusion and Struggles for Co-Decision
  • Edited by Rutgerd Boelens, Wageningen Universiteit, The Netherlands, Tom Perreault, Syracuse University, New York, Jeroen Vos, Wageningen Universiteit, The Netherlands
  • Book:
    Water Justice
    Published online:
    26 February 2018
    Print publication:
    15 March 2018, pp 259-274

  • Summary

    In the Anthropocene, an inclusive development perspective on water justice has three key implications. First, ecological inclusiveness implies recognizing the local to global limits to the use of water, water flows and their ecosystem services. Second, relational inclusiveness requires acknowledging that such limits must be democratically and discursively defined, and “glocally” governed. Furthermore, since water is closely linked to “growth”, there is a tendency for actors to monopolize control over water through (a) the discourses of liberalization, privatization, technocratization and securitization; and (b) de jure and de facto rules of water ownership and control through permits, infrastructure, finance, land owner-ship and “grabbing”, combined with market principles for water pricing. This can exacerbate water injustices. Hence, a socially inclusive model is required that acknowledges that water ecospace is a glocal public good, that access and allocation of rights, responsibilities and risks should be undertaken in a socially just manner and that accountable collectivities whether communities, states or intergovernmental entities should undertake this activity.

  • 2 - Water Governance as a Question of Justice

  • from Part I - Re-Politicizing Water Allocation
  • Edited by Rutgerd Boelens, Wageningen Universiteit, The Netherlands, Tom Perreault, Syracuse University, New York, Jeroen Vos, Wageningen Universiteit, The Netherlands
  • Book:
    Water Justice
    Published online:
    26 February 2018
    Print publication:
    15 March 2018, pp 43-58

  • Summary

    Drawing on wider environmental justice approaches, we use this chapter to propose a conceptualization of contemporary water problems as problems of justice – problems of distribution, recognition, and political participation. We contend that doing this first of all entails the active re-politicization of water questions: teasing out and making explicit those distributional assumptions and implications of water governance solutions that tend to remain hidden in mainstream approaches because of processes of technification, naturalization or universalization. A water justice focus further needs to be anchored in a sound understanding of the specific characteristics of water as a resource, as well as of the specific social relations and norms that shape its access and control. An interdisciplinary and relational approach that sees water as simultaneously natural (material) and social is important here, one that is anchored in a contextualized understanding of water rights. We illustrate these conceptual and theoretical suggestions with evidence from India.

  • 17 - The Meaning of Mining, the Memory of Water

  • from Part IV - Governmentality, Discourses and Struggles over Imaginaries and Water Knowledge
  • Edited by Rutgerd Boelens, Wageningen Universiteit, The Netherlands, Tom Perreault, Syracuse University, New York, Jeroen Vos, Wageningen Universiteit, The Netherlands
  • Book:
    Water Justice
    Published online:
    26 February 2018
    Print publication:
    15 March 2018, pp 316-329

  • Summary

    This paper uses memory – individual, collective, and historical – as a lens to theorize water justice. Memory, expressed verbally as spoken and written narratives, or visually through public art and monuments, plays a fundamental role in how we understand environmental suffering, its causes and potential remedies. In Bolivia, mining is memorialized as central to the collective national experience, constructing a national identity as a país minero (mining country). Memory is similarly important, though less public, for populations impacted by mining contamination and their claims for reparations. This chapter considers the case of indigenous campesino communities and their exposure to mine-related water pollution on the Altiplano. Drawing on ethnographic research, it argues that memory – as stories told about past experience – is best viewed as a political and ideological resource in its own right. In this sense, memory can be mobilized in various forms and at a range of scales. As representations of the past, memory is always also a representation of the present, and a reflection of contemporary realities, which in turn informs political demands.

  • 3 - Water Grabbing: Practices of Contestation and Appropriation of Water Resources in the Context of Expanding Global Capital

  • from Part I - Re-Politicizing Water Allocation
  • Edited by Rutgerd Boelens, Wageningen Universiteit, The Netherlands, Tom Perreault, Syracuse University, New York, Jeroen Vos, Wageningen Universiteit, The Netherlands
  • Book:
    Water Justice
    Published online:
    26 February 2018
    Print publication:
    15 March 2018, pp 59-70

  • Summary

    Contestation and appropriation of water is nothing new, but has received renewed attention in light of global debates on land grabbing. These large-scale land acquisitions are only the tip of the iceberg of a much wider and deeper process of transformation driven by the further enrolment of natural resources in the global economy. This includes agricultural production, but extends to mining, hydropower development and other businesses. This book chapter demonstrates that the fluid nature of water and its hydrologic complexity often obscure how water grabbing takes place. The fluid properties of water interact with the “slippery” nature of the grabbing processes: unequal power relations; unclear administrative boundaries and jurisdictions, and fragmented negotiation processes. Moreover, grabbing takes place in a field that is locally and globally plural-legal. Formal laws have been instrumental to both land and water grabs but formal water and land management have been separated from each other—an institutional void that makes encroachment even easier. Big land deals not always concretize and the information on current status of many land deals is unsure.

  • 16 - Critical Ecosystem Infrastructure?

  • from Part IV - Governmentality, Discourses and Struggles over Imaginaries and Water Knowledge
  • Edited by Rutgerd Boelens, Wageningen Universiteit, The Netherlands, Tom Perreault, Syracuse University, New York, Jeroen Vos, Wageningen Universiteit, The Netherlands
  • Book:
    Water Justice
    Published online:
    26 February 2018
    Print publication:
    15 March 2018, pp 302-315

  • Summary

    Five upland watersheds provide an estimated 75 percent of renewable surface water resources in the increasingly drought-prone country of Kenya. Combined, these five “water towers” support the livelihoods of millions of small-scale farmers and pastoralists – as well as a growing number of commercial agribusinesses and hydroelectricity generating schemes – causing multilateral and bilateral actors to declare that the conservation of these areas is crucial for securing the emerging “green economy” in Kenya. Numerous state agencies have sought to reconsolidate their control over the country’s upland forest estate, deploying military and paramilitary forces to carry out the violent eviction of a number of traditionally forest-dwelling indigenous groups. Such efforts suggest a shifting conceptualization of these areas not simply as commercially valuable ecosystems, but increasingly as a kind of critical ecosystem infrastructure. However, certain elements within the state are simultaneously colluding with both commercial and artisanal loggers to illegally deforest portions of these same protected areas, in some cases allocating the newly converted land to political supporters.

  • 9 - Large-Scale Dam Development and Counter Movements

  • from Part II - Hydrosocial De-Patterning and Re-Composition
  • Edited by Rutgerd Boelens, Wageningen Universiteit, The Netherlands, Tom Perreault, Syracuse University, New York, Jeroen Vos, Wageningen Universiteit, The Netherlands
  • Book:
    Water Justice
    Published online:
    26 February 2018
    Print publication:
    15 March 2018, pp 169-186

  • Summary

    Large-scale hydraulic interventions - for hydroelectric power, year-round water supply, flood control, or diversions to irrigate agricultural crops - have long been recognized as essential infrastructure that secures the needs of modern society. Historically, the social and economic goods generated by water enclosure and distribution systems allowed increased density in cities and towns and fueled the expansion of economic and political power. Today, large-scale hydrodevelopment is central to the national energy budget for the majority of the world’s States. However, the evidence of systemic damage to local and global ecosystems and the life such systems support is increasingly apparent, and the relative societal good of this enclosure and use of the water commons is both challenged and contested by the synergistic and cumulative impact of hydrodevelopment. With an entry point provided by the lens of historical events that shaped a specific case, Guatemala’s Chixoy Dam, this chapter explores how and why the relative perception of hydrodevelopment and the enclosure of the water commons fuels movements for water justice.

  • 1 - Introduction: The Multiple Challenges and Layers of Water Justice Struggles

  • Edited by Rutgerd Boelens, Wageningen Universiteit, The Netherlands, Tom Perreault, Syracuse University, New York, Jeroen Vos, Wageningen Universiteit, The Netherlands
  • Book:
    Water Justice
    Published online:
    26 February 2018
    Print publication:
    15 March 2018, pp 1-32
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  • Summary

    This first chapter explains how the book examines water conflicts and struggles for socio-economic re-distribution, political representation, and cultural justice that arise when there are questions about allocating water resources and water-related decision-making. We frame this struggle in the context of larger discussions about neo-liberal economic ideology and technocratic interventions. The chapter explains how modernist water policies and neoliberal globalization affect production and distribution of goods and also reconfigure ways of talking, existing and relating. In addition to questions about access to the resource, water justice entails struggles over formulating rules and rights; over the authority to make decisions and enforce norms; and over the systems to establish, legitimize or defend particular water policies. The chapter addresses bureaucratic water administrations, market-driven policies, desk-invented legislation, top-down project interventions, and the booming, unequal competition among multiple water users and uses; and also how marginalized, affected water user groups mobilize against dispossession, and the opportunities for multi-scale response strategies.

  • 19 - Conclusions: Struggles for Justice in a Changing Water World

  • from Part IV - Governmentality, Discourses and Struggles over Imaginaries and Water Knowledge
  • Edited by Rutgerd Boelens, Wageningen Universiteit, The Netherlands, Tom Perreault, Syracuse University, New York, Jeroen Vos, Wageningen Universiteit, The Netherlands
  • Book:
    Water Justice
    Published online:
    26 February 2018
    Print publication:
    15 March 2018, pp 346-360

  • Summary

    This final chapter integrates the previous chapters, their cases and concepts, and seeks to answer the book’s overall questions. The chapters in this book help readers understand the struggles that ensue as “modern” water policies and powerful water use and governance actors confront existing forms of control rooted in the cultures and identities of user groups and their networks. The book questions emerging water allocation patterns and governance arrangements, including the ways they are legitimized in policies or scientific discourses. Conflicts and possible answers go beyond the issue of equal access to water, as questions of water justice are entangled with larger political and economic doctrines. Different forms of interacting with – accessing, knowing, governing – water also form an important ingredient of cultural ways to be and belong, providing normative repertoires for expressing existential philosophies and cosmologies. In this way, the book shows that water provides an illuminating entry-point for grappling with wider environmental and societal justice dilemmas; dilemmas that lie at the heart of contemporary attempts to re-think and re-model human-nature relations.

  • 5 - Urban Water and Sanitation Injustice

  • from Part I - Re-Politicizing Water Allocation
  • Edited by Rutgerd Boelens, Wageningen Universiteit, The Netherlands, Tom Perreault, Syracuse University, New York, Jeroen Vos, Wageningen Universiteit, The Netherlands
  • Book:
    Water Justice
    Published online:
    26 February 2018
    Print publication:
    15 March 2018, pp 89-106

  • Summary

    Urban water injustices are frequently intense and widespread in shantytowns, informal settlements and other residential areas excluded from urban facilities by some combination of ethnic divisions, remnants of colonial regulations, economic and social forces, and municipal and national policies. Different from rural water injustices, urban water injustices over access to household water rarely have traditional rules or plural laws to guide water allocation. The relationship between households and municipal agencies is often central to the injustice. Access to household water is one of a range of capabilities required for city life and livelihood, including access to sanitation, garbage collection, electricity and digital connections. The comparison of capability exclusions in African and Asian cities teaches lessons about the particular historical, material and social influences on exclusion from a capability and the range of actions being used to challenge these injustices. Opportunities for action on water injustice may expand by considering a range of capability deprivations.

  • 11 - Sanitation Justice?

  • from Part III - Exclusion and Struggles for Co-Decision
  • Edited by Rutgerd Boelens, Wageningen Universiteit, The Netherlands, Tom Perreault, Syracuse University, New York, Jeroen Vos, Wageningen Universiteit, The Netherlands
  • Book:
    Water Justice
    Published online:
    26 February 2018
    Print publication:
    15 March 2018, pp 210-225

  • Summary

    This chapter reflects on if and how current development approaches to increasing access to sanitation services are just. To answer this question, we develop a concept of sanitation justice. We define three dimensions of sanitation (in)justice - distributive, procedural, and recognitional. Using a case study of sanitation projects in the city of Kampala, Uganda, we illustrate the utility of the concept for broadening current conceptualizations of inequalities in relation to sanitation. We argue that sanitation justice entails three dimensions: (1) access to physical infrastructure and related sanitation services to encompass the fair distribution of impacts associated with human health and environmental pollution, (2) participation in setting definitions of what is adequate sanitation and the range of infrastructure and service options, and (3) recognition of social and emotional dimensions of sanitation. We suggest that moving current development terminology of improved sanitation towards articulating what is a just sanitation can help to shift development approaches from a singular focus on sanitation infrastructure to a multidimensional understanding of sanitation services.

  • 18 - New Spaces for Water Justice?

  • from Part IV - Governmentality, Discourses and Struggles over Imaginaries and Water Knowledge
  • Edited by Rutgerd Boelens, Wageningen Universiteit, The Netherlands, Tom Perreault, Syracuse University, New York, Jeroen Vos, Wageningen Universiteit, The Netherlands
  • Book:
    Water Justice
    Published online:
    26 February 2018
    Print publication:
    15 March 2018, pp 330-345

  • Summary

    This chapter sets out to shed a feminist light on the mechanisms and implications of contemporary re-allocations of water from low to higher value uses. It does this by exploring how such re-allocations re-arrange gendered tenure, labor and consumption relations and water governance modalities, simultaneously re-shaping gendered cultural experiences of being and relating (to other humans and to nature). Inspired by experiences and first evidence from a field case study in the Saïss region of Morocco, the chapter reviews and discusses possible feminist approaches to grapple with these water re-allocations. It starts with a sympathetic revisiting of eco-feminist theories of the 1980s and 1990s aimed at re-thinking development in ways that place social, economic and environmental sustainability at the center, and continues by exploring more recent feminist political ecology approaches to understand connections between changes in the environment (water) and trade (commercial farming) from a critical feminist perspective of justice.

  • 4 - De-Politicized Policy Analysis: How the Prevailing Frameworks of Analysis Slight Equity in Water Governance

  • from Part I - Re-Politicizing Water Allocation
  • Edited by Rutgerd Boelens, Wageningen Universiteit, The Netherlands, Tom Perreault, Syracuse University, New York, Jeroen Vos, Wageningen Universiteit, The Netherlands
  • Book:
    Water Justice
    Published online:
    26 February 2018
    Print publication:
    15 March 2018, pp 71-88

  • Summary

    The interdisciplinary field of public policy, established to foster analysis to produce better policy, ought to be sensitive to differentials in the distribution of political power and access to water decision-making. Yet, as the chapter illustrates, most public policy approaches and frameworks slight issues of equity and participation in water governance. Several policy frameworks emphasize participation and collaboration, but not how dominant interests can be displaced. While some frameworks emphasize grassroots, decentralized decision making, they do not explain how minorities, and the poor who have little voice on the local level are to be represented. More discursive approaches to policy analysis do recognize equity and differences in access among different populations, but usually fall short when it comes to suggesting policy solutions that would work.

  • 15 - Neoliberal Water Governmentalities, Virtual Water Trade, and Contestations

  • from Part IV - Governmentality, Discourses and Struggles over Imaginaries and Water Knowledge
  • Edited by Rutgerd Boelens, Wageningen Universiteit, The Netherlands, Tom Perreault, Syracuse University, New York, Jeroen Vos, Wageningen Universiteit, The Netherlands
  • Book:
    Water Justice
    Published online:
    26 February 2018
    Print publication:
    15 March 2018, pp 283-301

  • Summary

    Global virtual water trade has increased enormously during the past decades. Agricultural, mining and hydrocarbon exports are promoted and increasingly governed by international financing, free trade agreements, and water stewardship policies. Increased water extraction, consumption and pollution by agribusiness and extractive industries affect many local communities directly, depleting fragile water balances, re-patterning local water flows and livelihoods, and altering the local-national-global structure of costs and benefits associated with water use. Moreover, governance restructuring is accompanied by emerging global water stewardship discourses that have profound effects on local water user communities’ ideas about water governance and justice. Global extractive industry and agrifood chains endeavor to re-pattern not only hydro-social territories’ material and hydrological foundations but they strategize to also spread and overlay a new water justice imaginary and discourse. However, these new corporate water justice discourses are increasingly contested. The chapter concludes with several examples of “movements against the current”.

Water Justice
  • Edited by Rutgerd Boelens, Tom Perreault, Jeroen Vos
  • Published online:
    26 February 2018
    Print publication:
    15 March 2018
  • Water justice is becoming an ever-more pressing issue in times of increasing water-based inequalities and discrimination. Megacities, mining, forestry, industry and agribusiness claim an increasingly large share of available surface and groundwater reserves. Water grabbing and pollution generate poverty and endanger ecosystems' sustainability. Beyond large, visible injustices, the book also unfolds the many 'hidden' water world injustices, subtly masked as 'rational', 'equitable' and 'democratic'. It features critical conceptual approaches, including analysis of environmental, social, cultural and legal issues surrounding the distribution and management of water. Illustrated with case studies of historic and contemporary water injustices and contestations around the world, the book lays new ground for challenging current water governance forms and unequal power structures. It also provides inspiration for building alternative water realities. With contributions from renowned scholars, this is an indispensable book for students, researchers and policymakers interested in water governance, environmental policy and law, and political geography.

Towards a European Energy Union
  • European Energy Strategy in International Law
  • Volker Roeben
  • Published online:
    01 February 2018
    Print publication:
    25 January 2018
  • The European Union is poised to establish a genuine European Energy Union with the new powers conferred on it by the Lisbon Treaty. Since 2014, it has been developing and implementing an energy strategy that responds to the three overarching priorities of climate change, political security, and economic competitiveness by 2030. The European Energy Union aims to provide secure, sustainable and affordable energy throughout the cycle of production, transport and consumption. This book outlines the legal regime underpinning this regulatory strategy, which integrates EU law with international law and with the law of the member states and affiliated states. It analyses and explains the increasing interaction between these legal orders in achieving the shared objective of transforming the European and global energy systems. This book will appeal to scholars and students of energy law and policy at both European and international levels.

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