Post on 11-May-2015
07/11/2012
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A Nexus for Whom?
Water Resources, Social Justice and
Environmental Insecurity
Larry Swatuk
University of Waterloo
lswatuk@uwaterloo.ca
Connectivity, Integration, Vulnerability,
Resources, Security
• Old news
• New thinking
• Enduring debates
New(s) to Some
• World Economic Forum, Global Risks 2012
• World Economic Forum, Water Security: the water, food, energy, climate nexus
• The World Bank, Grow in Concert with Nature: sustaining East Asia’s Resources Through Green Water Defense
• Bonn2011 Conference on The Water, Energy and Food Security Nexus – Solutions for a Green Economy (26 pages of recommendations; 12 lines to civil society)
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Integrated Water Resources Management
Water supply & sanitation
Irrigation & drainage
Energy Environ-mentalservices
Infrastructure for Infrastructure for management of management of
floods and floods and droughts, droughts,
multipurpose multipurpose storage, water storage, water
quality and source quality and source protectionprotection
Policy/ Policy/ Institutional Institutional frameworkframework
Management Management instrumentsinstruments
Political economy Political economy of water of water
managementmanagement
Other uses including
industry and navigation
Water Uses
Economicefficiency
Equity EnvironmentalSustainability
ManagementInstruments
�Assessment
� Allocation instruments
EnablingEnvironment
�Policies�Legislation
InstitutionalFramework
�Central- Local�River Basin�Public -Private
Balance “water for livelihood” and “water as a reso urce”
Gain?
• Insight
– [A]wareness is rising on how interconnected the
issues of water, energy, food and climate actually
are (Margaret Catley-Carlson, 2011)
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Awareness Raising
• ‘Water lies at the heart of a nexus of social,
economic, and political issues – agriculture,
energy, cities, trade, finance, national security,
human livelihoods, within rich and poor
countries alike.’ (WEF, Water Security, 2011)
Awareness Raising
• ‘Our political, economic and social stability
into the 21st Century will depend as much on
how we manage our freshwater resources as it
will on any of the other well-recognized “hard
power” global security issues of the 21st
Century, such as terrorism, nuclear
proliferation and fossil-fuel security.’ (WEF,
Water Security, 2011).
Lose?
• What should be a social project becomes a national security issue
• What should be provision of public goods becomes privatized delivery and resource capture
• What should be an opportunity to think creatively about what and where water is, becomes an exercise in protecting the status quo
Different Lenses, Better Insights?
• Human security: decentre ‘the state’
• Environmental insecurity
• Environmental justice
– ‘Rethink security from the bottom up’ (Booth,
2005)
– ‘how to grasp the radical environmental
insecurities confronting the global underclasses’
(Watts, backcover blurb)
If your point of departure accepts:
• Primacy of the state
• Security as consolidation of the status quo
• Environmental security as implications of
changing resource endowments for state
security
• Neoliberal capitalism
• Consumption as global ethos
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Then: The relevance of ‘Nexus thinking’
• [H]elps to identify mutually beneficial responses and
provides an informed and transparent framework for
determining trade-offs to meet demand without
compromising sustainability and exceeding
environmental tipping points. (Bonn2011)