07/11/2012

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A Nexus for Whom?

Water Resources, Social Justice and

Environmental Insecurity

Larry Swatuk

University of Waterloo

lswatuk@uwaterloo.ca

Connectivity, Integration, Vulnerability,

Resources, Security

• Old news

• New thinking

• Enduring debates

New(s) to Some

• World Economic Forum, Global Risks 2012

• World Economic Forum, Water Security: the water, food, energy, climate nexus

• The World Bank, Grow in Concert with Nature: sustaining East Asia’s Resources Through Green Water Defense

• Bonn2011 Conference on The Water, Energy and Food Security Nexus – Solutions for a Green Economy (26 pages of recommendations; 12 lines to civil society)

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Integrated Water Resources Management

Water supply & sanitation

Irrigation & drainage

Energy Environ-mentalservices

Infrastructure for Infrastructure for management of management of

floods and floods and droughts, droughts,

multipurpose multipurpose storage, water storage, water

quality and source quality and source protectionprotection

Policy/ Policy/ Institutional Institutional frameworkframework

Management Management instrumentsinstruments

Political economy Political economy of water of water

managementmanagement

Other uses including

industry and navigation

Water Uses

Economicefficiency

Equity EnvironmentalSustainability

ManagementInstruments

�Assessment

� Allocation instruments

EnablingEnvironment

�Policies�Legislation

InstitutionalFramework

�Central- Local�River Basin�Public -Private

Balance “water for livelihood” and “water as a reso urce”

Gain?

• Insight

– [A]wareness is rising on how interconnected the

issues of water, energy, food and climate actually

are (Margaret Catley-Carlson, 2011)

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Awareness Raising

• ‘Water lies at the heart of a nexus of social,

economic, and political issues – agriculture,

energy, cities, trade, finance, national security,

human livelihoods, within rich and poor

countries alike.’ (WEF, Water Security, 2011)

Awareness Raising

• ‘Our political, economic and social stability

into the 21st Century will depend as much on

how we manage our freshwater resources as it

will on any of the other well-recognized “hard

power” global security issues of the 21st

Century, such as terrorism, nuclear

proliferation and fossil-fuel security.’ (WEF,

Water Security, 2011).

Lose?

• What should be a social project becomes a national security issue

• What should be provision of public goods becomes privatized delivery and resource capture

• What should be an opportunity to think creatively about what and where water is, becomes an exercise in protecting the status quo

Different Lenses, Better Insights?

• Human security: decentre ‘the state’

• Environmental insecurity

• Environmental justice

– ‘Rethink security from the bottom up’ (Booth,

2005)

– ‘how to grasp the radical environmental

insecurities confronting the global underclasses’

(Watts, backcover blurb)

If your point of departure accepts:

• Primacy of the state

• Security as consolidation of the status quo

• Environmental security as implications of

changing resource endowments for state

security

• Neoliberal capitalism

• Consumption as global ethos

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Then: The relevance of ‘Nexus thinking’

• [H]elps to identify mutually beneficial responses and

provides an informed and transparent framework for

determining trade-offs to meet demand without

compromising sustainability and exceeding

environmental tipping points. (Bonn2011)