Editors’ introduction

Dear readers,

Happy New Year! We hope you and yours have all enjoyed a nice and warm holiday season, and that you had a good start to 2023.

In the same way as we have closed 2022, we are pleased to open the year with a collection of open submissions articles, which concern two main areas: water coping in African communities and urban water governance. As has been the case in the last open issues, we also provide an article from the International Water Resources Association’s (IWRA) mentored programme.

But first we start the issue with Stoler and Staddon, who question the evolution and the transformation of the publishing landscape, with a focus on the category of water journals. The authors note that a significant increase in the number of water journals testifies to the importance of the sector in addressing global challenges. Most of these new titles function on a fee-based open-access publication model, which is certainly promising for democratizing access to knowledge, but is also creating unintended consequences. The authors reiterate principles that can help researchers, editors and funders to navigate through this transformative period and keep up with quality and ethical requirements.

This piece is our editors’ choice for this issue, and as usual will be made freely accessible by our publisher for a limited period. So do not miss this opportunity to read it. As editors of a changing but still more conventional water journal, we are aware of these new trends, but hopefully we have managed to hold the journal to its high standards. We invite you to provide us with your reactions and opinions on this viewpoint and we will be happy to consider them for publication.

We then offer three research articles under the revived category of ‘Water coping in African communities’. The first, by Bukari et al., is an innovative study exploring the connection between urban and rural water systems in Ghana. Despite the separation of rural and urban water services delivery, there is still evidence of urban water service extensions to some rural communities. This happens without giving the rural poor households any preferential treatment under water tariff regulations and policies, impeding their affordability to safe water. The authors conclude with policy recommendations to differentiate between the rural communities based on their access to another source of water, usually groundwater, and their eventual need to be linked to urban water services. A preferential water tariff should be recognized for the vulnerable population.

Balana and Akudugu investigate water for agriculture in northern Ghana. They study the economic viability of public investments in three small-scale irrigation technologies and water infrastructure representing alternative agricultural water management schemes. Their results show that investing in these technologies has a positive impact and is economically feasible. Nonetheless, they observe that these new schemes are not used at their full potential, showing a significant lack of capacity among the end users. The authors highlight that technology cannot be a solution when it is not accompanied by capacity-building, even if it is innovative. Furthermore, they stress the need to shift from fossil fuels to provide energy to operate these infrastructures to renewable energy, mainly solar in the study area. The authors also believe that future policies aiming at the development of small-scale irrigation need to encourage the involvement of the private sector and the development of innovative credit and insurance schemes to help smallholders access these technologies.

This section concludes with an article by Ford et al. on water insecurity among the Daasanach, a pastoralist population in northern Kenya. Living in an arid environment, these pastoralists were historically mobile and followed water availability. With changing environmental and social conditions, however, many Daasanach have had to find alternative solutions to cope with their water insecurity. The authors examine whether the pastoralists’ new strategies contribute to reduce their psychosocial stress associated with water insecurity. Following interviews with concerned communities, the authors first quantify water insecurity among the Daasanach population and examine how it is associated with water borrowing. They conclude that water borrowing contributes to reducing the psychosocial burden of water insecurity. Their findings contribute to the growing literature on pastoralist and semi-nomadic groups in the arid regions of eastern Africa. They can also be useful to preparing policies promoting water borrowing, which could become a mechanism to mitigate psychosocial stress in situations of water insecurity (for water borrowing, see also Jepson et al., 2021).

Our second category is ‘Urban water governance’. Sanchez et al. study the case of the city of Chihuahua (Mexico) where the water companies have responded to the reduction of available water resources, due to climate change, urban population growth and management problems, by switching from a full-time on-demand water supply to intermittent delivery. But the delivery system was designed for a constant water flow, so operating it intermittently causes complex problems such as the unreliable provision of water, water quality issues, inequitable water distribution and network deficiencies. The authors present a methodology for gradually returning to constant water supply based on knowledge of the drinking water system in practice and the determination of the drinking metered areas. It introduces a preparatory stage of data and input validation. The approach using network sectorization and pressure management at the drinking metered areas has enabled a hybrid model between the operation of the physical system and the technical model obtained from hydraulic analysis. The authors note that the implementation of the methodology has contributed to the improvement of the water supply in Chihuahua, and that well-designed and administered sectors contribute to saving water and gradually achieve a round-the-clock water supply. They conclude by suggesting paths for future research such as the analysis of the potential water savings and the leakages while adding the interdependency of pressure management and active leakage control. Other measures can include the updating of the user registry and the micro-measurement to carry out a commercial analysis and establish real balances for the water operating agency to determine its physical and commercial efficiencies.

From Chihuahua, we move to the mega-city of Delhi (India), where Sharma and Harvey adopt a neo-Polanyian Instituted Economic Process theoretical approach to compare and contrast multiple water economies operating within the city and show how they are embedded in the wider socio-political, economic and environmental milieu. They note the absence of a comprehensive, integrated, socially sustainable water economy. The citizens of the city have developed coping strategies (‘bricolage economies’) to meet their water needs. These economies build either on defective public piped water or on a community appropriation of groundwater. These strategies exacerbate existing social inequalities, making it harder for the poor to secure their water needs, whereas the rich can cope with water unavailability by resorting to costly technological means. Yet the rich as well as the poor resort to illegal and informal appropriation of water resources! These bricolage economies contribute to reinforcing and institutionalizing social divisions and inequalities and they can thereby hinder the development of a more sustainable and equitable economy of water. They also threaten both groundwater and surface water through over-abstraction and pollution. Nevertheless, the authors conclude on a positive note with the hope of seeing the jungle of competing economies of water in Delhi leading to a historical transformation adequate for the water needs and rights of the population of a 21st-century capital city.

Sarbu and Popa-Albu provide a review article on the optimization of urban water distribution networks using heuristic methods. Urban distribution networks face difficulty in finding optimum layouts that satisfy requirements such as pressure, power consumption and demands, while minimizing costs and meeting performance criteria. Without such an optimization, the system tends to be inefficient. Growing demand and unplanned development creates further challenges to optimization. The authors present a comprehensive survey of modern heuristic techniques for optimizing water distribution networks. They indicate the advantages of these methods over more classical ones, and give directions for future research needs in this field.

The last article in this section is by Walter and Schmidt who search the City Blueprint Approach through the lens of political ecology to determine if it includes aspects of hydrosociality to assess urban water security. The City Blueprint Approach, common in Europe, aims at assessing the sustainability and resilience of an urban water cycle and supporting municipalities in improving their water management. Hydrosociality refers to the co-production between water and society, and it is analysed and studied by concepts such as socionature, waterscapes, the hydrosocial cycle and hydrosocial territories (on which, see the special issue by Boelens et al., 2016). Unsurprisingly the authors find that the City Blueprint Approach integrates only certain aspects of hydrosociality, and that it predominately analyses the material dimension of water. They conclude that future studies should seek to integrate hydrosociality in indexes such as the City Blueprint Approach to gain a better understanding of the relations constituting urban water security.

We conclude the articles with our third designated section devoted to manuscripts produced out of the IWRA mentoring programme (Stephan & Nickum, 2022; Varady et al., 2022). Again, there is one article, this one by Cruz and Tortajada, who offer legal, management and financial proposals aimed at improving the legal framework governing groundwater in Mexico drawing on the experience of three managed aquifer recharge projects. More articles from the first round of this exciting collaboration will be coming shortly, and a second round is in the works.

This year promises to be particularly significant with the forthcoming United Nations Water meeting in March. We have several interesting special issues planned, and of course more open issues with manuscripts from a wide range of perspectives on critical issues facing people and their relation to water in a turbulent and uncertain future. Stay tuned!

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.