12 books like Water Politics

By comparing the struggles against water charges in Ireland with struggles over the extraction of unconventional gas in Australia, Madelaine Moore provides a fascinating account of common roots of resistance underpinning different forms of water grabbing.

Drawing on feminist Social Reproduction Theory she clearly demonstrates how these moments of contestation not only contest profit-making with water, but capitalist reproduction as a whole. 

Coming from an anthropological, ethnographic approach, Andrea Muehlebach provides an illuminating account of the motives, hopes, and disappointments driving activists in their struggle against the financialization of water.

Through a close engagement with water struggles on the ground Muehlebach paints a rich picture of the large variety of forms of resistance in the very struggle over life itself. 

This edited volume provides an insightful collection of successful examples of the wave of re-municipalisations of water around the world.

Overall, there were 235 cases of water remunicipalisation in 37 countries, affecting over 100 million people between 2000 and 2015.

Reviewing the experiences of these instances of taking control of water back into public hands, the book provides a valuable discussion of what is necessary for making water re-municipalisation a success of progressive politics.

It outlines what is possible, but also what the dangers are, which need to be confronted. 

In Whose Water Is It Anyway, Maude Barlow, one of the world’s foremost activists in the struggle against water grabbing, provides an account of the rich history of resistance against profit-making with water.

Importantly, the book is not just about the history of resistance. By introducing the Blue Communities project it provides people with an opportunity of engaging in concrete grassroots action, accomplishing something in the here and now.

To become a Blue Community, a municipality must recognize water as a human right, run water and sanitation services as a public company and ban or phase out bottled water in municipal events. 

In Western thinking based on the ideal of the rule of law, there is a distinct preference for regimes or governance systems that are articulated in legally binding instruments negotiated by states (e.g. treaties or conventions) and that emphasize the central role of rules in the form of mandatory requirements and prohibitions.

But the key to effective governance treated as a matter of social steering is to find ways to guide or channel the behavior of those states and nonstate actors whose actions are relevant to any given need for governance. 

One alternative to rule-based governance is goal-based governance or, in other words, a strategy that emphasizes setting collective goals (e.g. keeping temperature increases at the Earth’s surface to less than 1.5° C) and then launching a vigorous and coordinated effort to meet these goals within a specified period of time.

Goal-based governance is familiar at the domestic level… show more.

Governance is a social function centered on steering societies toward collectively desirable outcomes.

By contrast, a government is an organization (or collection of organizations) authorized to deal with issues of governance in a particular society.

While governments are responsible for addressing needs for governance in many settings, this distinction allows us to explore situations featuring efforts to respond to needs for governance in the absence of a government.

This is a critical observation at the global level where there are many needs for governance but no world government.

It has freed the community to analyze a range of governance systems (often called regimes) dealing with matters of security, economics, and the environment, while setting aside unproductive debates about the pros and cons of efforts to create a world government.

This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the actors, interests, and politics that define contemporary global governance. Pouliot and Therien break down the “bricolage” of global governance policy-making, establishing a clear framework and methodological approach for assessing global governance in practice.

This book stands out for its “how-to” approach and reframing of global governance, not as a functional response to global problems but as the outcome of struggles about transboundary practices and universal values. It is a must-read for making sense of the patchwork of our increasingly connected but simultaneously conflicted global society.

In recent times, international regimes have arisen to address a wide range of specific needs for governance.

With regard to environmental concerns, specific regimes deal with marine issues like fishing and shipping, atmospheric issues like transboundary air pollution and ozone depletion, and global concerns like the loss of biological diversity and climate change.

Some regimes are effective (e.g. the regime to protect the stratospheric ozone layer). But others are much less effective (e.g. the regime to protect biological diversity). This makes it critical to focus on regime effectiveness.

What is the proper way to think about effectiveness? What are the determinants of effectiveness? Adopting a problem-solving perspective, this book initiates a process of addressing this subject systematically.

Some problems are more difficult to solve than others. Some regimes have a greater capacity to solve problems than others. Some issue-specific regimes are located within broader political settings that are more conducive… show more.

Toward a Politics of the Planet Earth is one of the most important foundational texts in global environmental governance. 

The authors recognize the urgency and scope of global environmental problems, and identify their salient properties along with developing a novel holistic approach which reflects the complexity of ecosystems.

They stress the need for scientific knowledge, the challenges to the international system from environmental threats, and the probabilistic nature of human behavior.

They also introduced the concept of an “ecological world view” which has come to inform much of global environmental governance.

There is a tendency to focus on regimes as self-contained governance systems.

But in reality, there are typically more or less complex interactions between or among environmental regimes. Some regimes (e.g. the ozone regime and the climate regime) interact with one another in significant ways.

In other cases, a number of distinct regimes play influential roles in dealing with the same problem (e.g. climate change). This leads to the emergence of regime complexes regarded as sets of institutional elements that are not arranged in a hierarchical order but that all play roles in dealing with major issues like climate change.

The research challenge then is to identify conditions leading to mutually beneficial or synergistic interactions in contrast to conditions giving rise to interactions that are harmful or that produce interference in the operations of distinct regimes.