Editors’ introduction

Dear readers,

After yielding to guest editors of special issues for the last three issues, we are happy to be back with an issue drawn from open submissions to close the year 2022. These articles are grouped under two of our usual categories: transboundary waters and water governance. But those are not all. We are continuing the special section devoted to the International Water Resources Association (IWRA) initiative to mentor early-career professionals to produce articles suitable for publishing in these pages; and we conclude with a review of a book on groundwater governance.

Under transboundary waters we offer two articles, both addressing issues of quality.

Petersen-Perlman and Feitelson concentrate on the environmental considerations that have only recently appeared in transboundary water agreements. They analyse 75 treaties to determine how and why they have incorporated the environment. They investigate how they have addressed the relative absence of consideration of environmental impacts in previous agreements, and identify conditions now permitting this lacuna to be filled.

Looking at one specific case where the lacuna is not being filled, Ba and co-authors review the legal framework for pollution control of the Niger River. They assess the available instruments (laws and regulations) at the level of the Niger Basin Authority and its nine riparian member countries addressing runoff, waste disposal and sewage discharges. As in many other basins, United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target 6.3 is not likely to be met in the Niger River basin with the current legal framework, which has not been updated since the SDGs were adopted. The authors provide recommendations to revise and upgrade the current instruments to address the goals of SDG target 6.3. This article is our editors’ choice for this issue, meaning that the publisher will make it available free of charge for a limited time, so do give it a read!

There is ample reason to read up on Africa. The continent has made substantial progress towards meeting other SDGs, especially in health and education, and some observers project that Africa will succeed Asia as the world’s growth node. Our water governance section opens with a group of articles on Africa, reflecting growing interest in the continent.

Varis sets the stage with a multifaceted perspective on the prospects for water security in Africa in our century. The continent does have many assets such as a young population in an ageing world and abundant natural resources. Yet it also faces higher risks than other continents in the form of an expected massive loss in biodiversity and very low resilience to global climate change. Varis sees the way forward for Africa is to enhance its value creation through human development – education, promoting gender and social equality, improving governance capacity, developing an innovation culture, and creating its own industrial and business models. In other words, it needs to take its development into its own hands, using the excellent frame of the SDGs. This is not to rule out the international community, whose strong encouragement is necessary.

Before we move on to the future, Africa, like the rest of us, has some unfinished business. Matanzima reviews an ongoing legacy problem in Zimbabwe: that of involuntary resettlement of tribal people due to the construction of large dams. The people are the Tonga-Goba the dam the Kariba, built in the 1950s during the colonial period. The same population experienced secondary displacements due to the Zimbabwe Liberation War of the 1970s, the independence of 1980, politico-economic crises of the 2000s and human–wildlife conflicts. These secondary displacements are long-term impacts from the inadequate selection of initial resettlement sites. Even when a secondary displacement is not directly linked to primary involuntary resettlement, it can worsen the impoverishment, vulnerability and precariousness of the resettled population.

From the Atlantic side of the continent, Dosu et al. look at the problems of another long-standing legacy, this time in Ghana, one of the first countries in Africa to introduce community-based approaches to rural water management in 1983, after an economic recession, and to meet the condition for receiving financial assistance from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Unsurprisingly, they find that it is not enough to involve local actors in the management of water systems if they are not provided with adequate power and resources to carry out their mandate. Financial capacity is a key not only to the technical needs but also to the human resource, without which rural communities end up by relying on volunteers to manage the water facilities. Everyone knows that this system cannot be sustainable. The community-based water management approach in Ghana can only be effective by paying and training those who manage the water. The study reveals that the water users are willing to support a reliable supply and management of potable water. Since in rural communities the ability to pay is low, alternative revenues such as donated farm harvest or cash crop deductions could supplement the limited income from water and support operations and maintenance of rural water infrastructure, including the required human resources. Traditional authorities can be included proactively as their influence can help build horizontal linkages necessary for effective management.

Moving across the Atlantic Ocean, the second group of articles takes us to the Andes. Leroy et al. explore institutional changes in two water users’ associations in the Venezuelan Andes with the aim of understanding, through a historical approach, the changes and conditions that allow such associations to define water management and usage regimes. In particular, they assess whether the characteristics of the resource can lead to differences in institutional change mechanisms. Through ethnographic work, including semi-structured interviews and participant observations, in two communities with similar socio-economic characteristics but differences in access to and availability of water, the authors show that water users’ associations’ definition of rules is never fixed in time, and that it is a continuous process under adjustment. They identify social capital as a fundamental factor allowing farmers to develop effective institutional arrangements and achieve successful self-governance. A water users’ association that plays a role outside its own scope, such as contributing to a local celebration, increases its legitimacy and social acceptance within its community. The physical condition of water supply also plays a role in the adjustment of rules in an irrigators’ community. Under extreme conditions the latter have difficulties coordinating any collective action.

Zapana et al. then show how different actors involved in water supply in the city of Arequipa, the second largest in Peru, responded to the health emergency caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. In Arequipa, as in many other cities of the Global South, water is provided by a combination of formal suppliers, the public company and the municipal authorities, and heterogeneous informal providers mainly operating in the urban periphery where the public network remains underdeveloped. The authors explore the strategies followed by the public water utility to secure water supply, the collaborations with stakeholders in urban water management, and the responses of small providers, including collective action, to guarantee the supply and access to water, such as payment in instalments, suspension of water shutoffs and distribution of free water in tanker trucks for the urban periphery with no network. However, these measures have mainly benefited households connected to the public network and which usually enjoy a relatively stable service. Success was more limited in the urban periphery, where water is often not available 24 hours a day. Positive collaborations took place to try to maintain and improve the water service during the health crisis between the public servants of the formal urban water management; between formal water suppliers and informal water trucks; and in the urban periphery, between small-scale providers and housing associations. The authors demonstrate the important role played by small-scale water systems in the cities of the Global South where water supply is fragmented, and the need to form positive modes of collaboration with them.

Finally, we move to Iran where Hosseinzadeh et al. investigate the applicability of the environmental Kuznets hypothesis of an inverted-‘U’ relationship between economic growth and water consumption, at the macro-level of the economy, as well as the agriculture, industry and services subsectors. The article focuses on Iran, but the situations discussed are not unique to Iran. The same method can apply to the countries of the Middle East and many developing countries.

We conclude the articles with our second designated section devoted to manuscripts produced out of the IWRA mentoring programme (Stephan & Nickum, 2022; Varady et al., 2022). There is one article this time, by Hilbert-Wolf and Gerlak, who write about the modern dam conflict on the Snake River (USA). For millennia humans have dammed waterways so as to control their flow. Dams have been important instruments for controlling floods, irrigating crops and generating electric power. Nearly everywhere, dams have aged and deteriorated. At the same time, in the United States values have shifted to the point that dam removal now outpaces dam-building. The authors adopt a social perspective to study dam-removal conflicts in a north-western US river basin. Their aim is to uncover lessons about conflicts in that basin so as to apply them elsewhere.

Before we let you go, we offer you a book review by IWRA Treasurer Renée Martin-Nagle on Wiley & Jarvis’ exploration of the applicability to collective aquifer governance of unitization and collective governance theory applied to hydrocarbons. While the book often lacks focus, it has valuable insights for groundwater practitioners who are committed to a collective approach.

And that is it for 2022. Enjoy the holidays and have a very happy New Year. We have an interesting mix of special and open issues planned for 2023. Stay tuned.