Water governance

Mauritius faces a problem of water shortages, especially at the end of the winter season, which is revealed by seasonal water accounts. A household survey shows that 43% of households adapt to those shortages using water tanks and pumps. The study forecasts an increase in water demand of up to 51% by 2030 leading to a water shortage of up to 52 million m 3 taking the effects of climate change into account. After analyzing different options, it seems that improvements in the water sector necessitates restructuring tariffs in different sectors with new roles of institutions in raising revenues. Current water sector governance, however, seems ineffective to solve these issues. The micro-institutional setting according to the distribution of tasks for each of the main transactions reveals a multitude of water actors at the national level. Responses from these water actors collected for this study point to a certain number of challenges putting sustainability at stake, including a lack of political commitment and discontinuity of reforms. These issues seem to be aggravated by a lack of independence of the main water agencies. The study concludes with policy recommendations to increase efficiency of the water sector.

A surfeit of service delivery disapprovals in South Africa is a clear reflection of the failure of the Public Service of South from the local, provincial, and national government to effectively and efficiently deliver service to its citizenry. The rise in a dissatisfied citizenry stems from a precise social realization, which envisions the failure of the state to deliver services to the public in an impartial, responsible, translucent, and befitting manner. This has resulted in widespread service delivery protests, which has become the most famous form of response to poor service delivery by frustrated citizens. This article argues for the mandelafication of the South African public service against the background of a cocktail of factors ranging from corruption, lack of transparency and accountability, incompetence, and lack of commitment to work ethics personified by Mandela. The article further argues for the upholding of the dominant constructs in which this mandelafication is grounded in such as proper ethics, human-itarianism, transparency, accountability, empathy, and selflessness, which characterized Nelson Mandela. "It is too-familiar a story: Wayward politicians violating the public trust and finding themselves behind bars. We are sometimes confronted with untrustworthy public servants whose behavior has recently had me reflecting on a man whose service and leadership were partially forged in prison, long before he held elective office Nelson Mandela, the ultimate public servant," (Mbembe, 2008:8)

Water diplomacy will play an increasingly important role in preventing, mitigating and resolving a growing number of water-related conflicts around the world. However, the theory and practice of cooperation over shared waters and the implementation of multi-track water diplomacy are not sufficiently developed. Concepts and approaches such as multilevel water governance, adaptive water governance, the mutual-gains approach and instruments for benefit sharing need to be further developed and operationalized. The objective of this publication is to specify a conceptual and analytical water diplomacy framework that identifies the key factors that affect water cooperation. Knowledge of these key determinants of cooperation not only contributes to the existing body of academic knowledge, but can also help to bolster cooperation over shared waters. This framework helps to diagnose water problems across sectors and administrative boundaries, and at different levels of governance. To this end, it identifies intervention points, and proposes sustainable solutions that are sensitive to diverse views and values, and can accommodate ambiguity and uncertainty as well as changing and competing needs. The framework has great potential to build a sound bridge from actual or potential conflict to effective cooperation and practical solutions Its initial application to the Brahmaputra basin uniquely identifies a zone of possible effective cooperation (ZOPEC), and has already gained strong commitment from delegates representing all riparian countries (including China, India, Bangladesh and Bhutan), to identifying and developing benefit-sharing arrangements across sectors. This case study demonstrates the potential of the framework to facilitate a paradigm shift among key stakeholders in water-related disputes from a zero-sum approach to one of mutual gains.

This policy brief summarizes the findings and analysis of a study on water governance in Bangalore, India and offers recommendations to curb the negative impact of urban expansion on the city's water distribution networks. Today, the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB) pumps around 1,500 million litres of water per day from the Cauvery river (Rajashekhar, 2015). This is distributed unevenly across the city and fails to meet current water demand. Rampant groundwater extraction, a private market of water vendors, and the destruction of Bangalore's many water bodies, characterizes the precarious water infrastructure of the city. A lack of sufficient water supply is a key reason agriculture has become untenable for many small farmers on the city's fringe, enabling the government and developers to acquire and convert peripheral rural land into the expanding urban real estate market. Urban expansion onto the agrarian landscape-fields, forest and pasture commons, complex water-catchment system-has undermined water-intensive agrarian livelihoods as well as important avenues of recharge. This intensifies the prevailing insufficiencies surrounding water supply and access.

Dam development in southeastern Turkey is a highly-disputed issue, fanned by the Turkish–Kurdish conflict , socio-environmental and historical–cultural concerns, and international geopolitical interests. This paper focuses on discussions around the Ilisu Dam and shows how different actor coalitions imagine different hydrosocial territories regarding this mega-hydraulic project currently under construction. Imaginaries, counter-imaginaries and endeavours to materialize them go far beyond technical projects, portraying the dam to (re)configure the territory physically, ecologically, socioeconomically , symbolically and discursively. The paper embeds competing hydro-territorial constructs and claims within an analysis of governmentality and the multi-scalar and multi-issue politics of dam opponents.

In 2017, multiple claims and declarations from around the legal world appeared to signal a tipping point in the global acceptance of a new and evolving legal status for nature. Whether it was litigation in the United States, India, and Colombia, or legislation emanating from New Zealand and Australia, the law seems to be grappling with a new normative order in relation to the legal status of nature. However, this shift has been a long time coming, being at least forty- five years since Christopher Stone famously asked whether trees should have legal standing.1
This Article explores what this emerging Ecological Jurisprudence means for the legal personhood of rivers. Nature, the environment, and even single complex ecosystems, are seldom easily quantifiable as bounded entities with geographically clear borders. Within the complex spectrum of establishing where a legal subject ends and another begins, however, rivers are more easily identifiable. A river’s very being is premised on historicized boundaries that measure its watery ambit from riverbed to riverbank. Still, rivers elude a final, clearly defined, and uncontroversial description. As a result, they inhabit a liminal space, one that is at the same time geographically bounded, yet metaphorically transcendent, physically shifting, and culturally porous.
Drawing on comparative case studies from Ecuador, Colombia, India, New Zealand, the United States, and Australia, this Article explores the deep and often murky bond of the river and us. This relational, ancient, and ultimately environmentally urgent bond forms the prism through which the rich story of legal personhood, ontological change, and the consequential nitty-gritty of river governance is told. Indeed, this complex story is best heard through the metaphor of song, since “[i]f we are to take metaphor seriously, we must explore its poetic dimension, the persuasive power of its rhetoric, coupled with its aesthetic appeal.”2 In seeking to discern a river’s legal personality, we ask, can we hear the rivers sing?