We are writing this introduction under lockdown like half of the world’s population (so far), continuing to work and interact thanks to the miracle of modern technology, but very much missing our ‘normal’ lives. The current pandemic, due to the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (causing COVID-19), brings into question whether we will have to adjust to a new normal, both in our own lives and in the water sector. Vulnerable populations, in developing but also in developed countries, are all the more left behind, especially when they have access to such a limited supply of clean water that washing their hands frequently is out of the question; or when they cannot leave their houses to fetch water from distant sources. Utility revenues, often already inadequate, are threatened by the rise in unemployed users. Infrastructure budgets even in developed countries are at risk from the effects on national budgets of the enormous bailouts being used to try to ease the economic fallout. Even the temporary closure of national borders raises the spectre of further challenges to the governance of shared waters. And so on. As the IWRA readies to celebrate its 50th anniversary in November 2021, it and the water sector will have to face novel and increasingly complex water governance problems in the next half century.
But let us turn to the issue at hand. Water International offers both special thematic issues and open issues, in approximately equal measure on average. But like hydrological cycles in much of the world, averages are dominated by strings. Last year we had a string of excellent special issues. Several are incubating for publication later this year and beyond.
For now, the string is one of open issues, here the fourth in a row, where we offer a choice selection from among the hundreds of individual submissions we receive each year. These cover a range of topics and approaches. Yet, miraculously, we do not have to abandon thematic integrity.
The articles in this issue are assembled in three thematic categories, per our now established custom. The first is engineered rivers. The second, much related to the pandemic at hand, is water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH). And lastly, we bring back the water coping in African communities category we introduced in issue 43.5.
We begin with engineered rivers, and the problems that arise as rivers and societies co-evolve with engineering efforts. The three articles assembled under this category look at major rivers in three countries on different continents: China, Peru and Spain.
Yan, Zhou, Liu, Wang and Li take a fine-grained look at the evolution of water use in the Yellow River basin since 1980 at a subbasin level As a whole, the basin, extensive but with limited runoff, has been overexploited to meet increased demand, especially from irrigated agriculture, which remains by far the largest user of water, with approximatively 70% of the total water use, including extensive areas irrigated outside the basin. Yet a kind of inverted Kuznets curve seems to apply to both agricultural and industrial water use, and overall consumption has stabilized since the year 2000. This stabilization is mainly a result of higher water use efficiency, driven in large part by policies such as the Three Red Lines. Domestic water use has continued to increase with rapid urbanization, but is expected to flatten. Yan et al. show how the stresses and possible ways to relieve those stresses vary by subregion. The South-to-North Water Transfer Project brings water from southern China to about 40 cities, and to agriculture, in the lower reaches and adjacent basins, providing partial but expensive relief. A rapidly growing mining and energy sector places pressure on water resources in the arid and semi-arid upper reaches. Water rights transfer schemes have been promoted, but remain problematic. The Yellow River basin, perhaps more than most others, is in a continuous process of co-evolution.
Next, Paerregaard, Ullberg and Brandshaug focus on the Majes Siguas Special Project in Peru, a water supply system declared of national interest and envisioned as a support to small-scale farming. The authors study the impact of the design and governance of the project on the social practices and cultural values of its stakeholders, contributing to the current debate on hydrosocial cycles, hydrosocial territories and hydrosocial networks. (Water International, in special issue 41.1 in 2016, helped pioneer the discussion of hydrosocial territories.) The authors argue that the Peruvian state’s attempt to make the management of water resources more inclusive is an important step in alleviating the water crisis, but that the cooperation this inclusion implies is hampered by the relations of power and the cultural divides included in the design and hierarchical governance of its water infrastructure. In the Majes Siguas Special Project, the stakeholders are engineers, administrators and four user groups (three of small farmers on the coast, and one of rural communities in the highlands). The cooperation among all these stakeholders induced by the project has resulted ironically in greater water shortage. The authors look at the Majes Siguas Special Project’s water infrastructure as assemblages of not only material objects but also social relations and knowledge traditions. They conclude that a productive approach to understanding the inherent power structures of hydrosocial communities is to examine the encounters between experts, managers and users of large-scale irrigation systems, where they negotiate water claims, and at the specific sites of the systems’ infrastructural assemblages where the stakeholders contest their organizational hierarchy.
The third engineered river considered here is the Tagus, the longest river of the Iberian Peninsula, which flows from central Spain through Portugal into the Atlantic Ocean. The Tagus is the most populated river in Spain, with almost eight million people living in its basin, including more than six million in the Madrid region. Urban supply accounts for 27% of extractive uses, and agricultural demand for around 70%. The river has the largest total and hydroelectric reservoir capacity in Spain. San-Martin, Larraz and Gallego focus on the governance of the Tagus in this intensively used upstream Spanish portion, with the inevitable environmental, social and economic consequences. The authors analyze the situation of the river in Spain from a global perspective to try to evaluate why three cycles of hydrological planning have had such limited effect on the river’s protection and improvement. The water transfer from its upper part to the Segura basin in south-eastern Spain limits the ability of the middle part to cope with the poorly treated effluent from Madrid, while a string of dams in the lower part reduces the flow for local communities and Portugal. All these factors are exacerbated by the absence of fluvial dynamics (due to the water transfer) and climate change. The authors relate these problems to three dimensions of sustainability: environmental, social and economic. In addition, serious dysfunction appears in the political-institutional dimension. The authors propose that improved governance of the Tagus river requires a public participation process, and consideration of the social dimension, such as water justice, common heritage and hydrosocial territories.
This article is our editors’ choice, and access to it will be free for three months.
In the WASH category we have a review paper by Wali, Georgeou, Simmons, Gautam and Gurung which examines the relationship between gender and WASH services in Nepal. The authors undertook a scoping review to summarize research findings related to women and WASH in Nepal, to identify thematic trends in the literature, and to inform policy and practice for future WASH-related aid programmes. The authors analyzed about 20 relevant studies. They find that while women have played a central role in providing and safeguarding household WASH, they have had limited participation in policy development and implementation of water and WASH projects. The literature highlights the role of social structure and social status, including economic class, caste and gender, in shaping women’s access to water, water projects and WASH in Nepal, along with the level of women’s participation in water projects. This scoping review shows there are clear links between access to water, gender equity, education, good health and poverty, linking SDGs 6 (Clean Water and Sanitation), 1 (No Poverty), 3 (Good Health and Well Being), 4 (Quality Education), and 5 (Gender Equality).
We close this issue with a review by Rossella Alba of a book on water coping in African communities. Keough and Youngstedt deal with the profound intra-urban socio-spatial inequalities that characterize water supply in Niamey, the capital of Niger. The authors offer a deep examination of urban water provision in Niamey and demonstrate how the intersection between profit-making, cultural and associational practices, gender, ethnicity and material relations contributes to the production of urban water inequalities and to the commodification of water. The lessons apply well beyond the banks of the Niger River to cities elsewhere in Africa and much of the developing world.
We hope you will enjoy reading these articles while staying safe and healthy, and we look forward to introducing our next open issue to you, hopefully under better sanitary conditions.