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i

WAT E R JUSTI CE

Water justice is becoming an ever-more pressing issue in times of increasing water-based

inequalities and discrimination. Megacities, mining, forestry, industry, and agribusiness
claim an increasingly large share of available surface and groundwater reserves. Water
grabbing and pollution generate poverty and endanger ecosystems’ sustainability. Beyond
large, visible injustices, the book also unfolds the many “hidden” water world injustices,
subtly masked as “rational,” “equitable,” and “democratic.” It features critical conceptual
approaches, including analysis of environmental, social, cultural, and legal issues sur-
rounding the distribution and management of water. Illustrated with case studies of historic
and contemporary water injustices and contestations around the world, the book lays new
ground for challenging current water governance forms and unequal power structures. It
also provides inspiration for building alternative water realities. With contributions from
renowned scholars, this is an indispensable book for students, researchers, and policy mak-
ers interested in water governance, environmental policy and law, political geography, and
cultural anthropology.

Rutgerd Boelens is Professor of Water Governance and Social Justice in the

Department of Environmental Sciences at Wageningen University and Professor of Political
Ecology of Water in Latin America with CEDLA (Centre for Latin American Research
and Documentation) and the University of Amsterdam. He is also Visiting Professor at
the Catholic University of Peru and the Central University of Ecuador and coordinates
the international Justicia Hídrica/Water Justice alliance. His work focuses on water rights,
water grabbing, hydrosocial territories, legal pluralism, cultural politics, governmentality,
and social mobilization.

Tom Perreault is Professor of Geography at Syracuse University in New York. His

research examines the intersections of political ecology, resource governance, agrarian
transformation, and indigenous and campesino social mobilization in the central Andes
and western Amazon. His research has been funded by Fulbright, the Inter-American
Foundation, the United Nations, and the US National Science Foundation.

Jeroen Vos is Assistant Professor of Water Governance in the Department of Water

Resources Management at Wageningen University where he teaches on agricultural water
governance and political ecology of water. As a water policy advisor he has also worked
in Peru and Bolivia with different international development organizations. His current
research interests are the dynamics and discourses of water use and governance by agri-
businesses in Latin America.

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ii

“This is a major book on the political ecology of water conficts by the top experts in the feld. It
defnes a new feld of study, ‘water justice.’ It’s a great addition to the study of local and global move-
ments against environmental injustice with a focus on water grabbing and unequal access to water for
irrigation, mining, urban sanitation, and hydroelectricity.”
– Joan Martinez-Alier, Emeritus Professor of Economics and Economic History, ICTA, Autonomous
University of Barcelona

“Boelens, Perreault and Vos have assembled a genuinely impressive set of authors to tackle the
nature, meaning, and drivers of water injustices across the world, and to explore the possibilities
of water justice. While the picture is far from rosy, the book provides rich theoretical and empirical
perspectives through which to understand the inequities surrounding the control and use of water and
to imagine alternative futures. This text will be a point of reference for many years to come.”
– Anthony Bebbington, Australian Laureate Fellow, University of Melbourne, and Milton P. and Alice
C. Higgins Professor of Environment and Society, Clark University

“This timely and engaging volume by some of the world’s foremost scholars on water constitutes a
loud sound of alarm. Not only that, it shows why liberal and neoliberal water rationalities … won’t
work. Proposed instead is a sophisticated approach to the question of water as nature, and of its
relation to justice, from which emerges a powerful framework for alternative hydrosocialities. By
reminding us that what is at stake … is people’s very right to exist, Water Justice enables us to imag-
ine and construct other paths for fair and wise water policies.”
– Arturo Escobar, Professor of Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

“It would be diffcult to overstate the global signifcance of water injustice, which continues to be
a major obstacle preventing millions of human beings from enjoying a dignifed life. Water Justice
addresses key aspects of this complex problem, bringing together a unique international team of
scholars. This is not only a timely collection, but also one that provides access to rich theoreti-
cal arguments and empirical examples, allowing an in-depth treatment of the topic. The book is a
welcome contribution for academics, students, and practitioners, and will attract a wider readership
among those concerned with the future of civilized human life.”
– José Esteban Castro, Emeritus Professor, Newcastle University

“ ‘Water justice!’ is the rallying cry of this book. It explores in an illuminating and comprehensive
way the multiple dimensions of water injustice and the diverse struggles to change them.”
– Cristóbal Kay, Emeritus Professor, International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University
Rotterdam, and Professorial Research Associate, Department of Development Studies, SOAS
University of London

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iii

WAT E R JU S T ICE

Edited by

RUTGER D B OE L E NS
Wageningen University and University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

TOM PER R E AULT

Syracuse University, New York

and

JEROEN VOS
Wageningen University, The Netherlands

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iv

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Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107179080
DOI: 10.1017/9781316831847
© Cambridge University Press 2018
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and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2018
Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Boelens, Rutgerd, editor. | Perreaultm, Tom, editor. | Vos, Jeroen, editor.
Title: Water justice / edited by Rutgerd Boelens, Wageningen University
and University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Tom Perreault, Syracuse University,
New York, and Jeroen Vos, Wageningen University, The Netherlands.
Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom: New York, NY, USA:
Cambridge University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifers: LCCN 2017046247 | ISBN 9781107179080 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Water supply – Social aspects. | Water rights – Social aspects. | Water security.
Classifcation: LCC HD1691.W3245 2018 | DDC 333.91–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017046247
ISBN 978-1-107-17908-0 Hardback
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v

Contents

List of Contributors page viii

1 Introduction: The Multiple Challenges and Layers of

Water Justice Struggles 1
Rutgerd Boelens, Jeroen Vos, and Tom Perreault

Part I Re-Politicizing Water Allocation 33

Introduction 34
Tom Perreault, Rutgerd Boelens, and Jeroen Vos

2 Water Governance as a Question of Justice: Politics, Rights, and Representation 43

Dik Roth, Margreet Zwarteveen, K. J. Joy, and Seema Kulkarni

3 Water Grabbing: Practices of Contestation and Appropriation of Water

Resources in the Context of Expanding Global Capital 59
Gert Jan Veldwisch, Jennifer Franco, and Lyla Mehta

4 De-Politicized Policy Analysis: How the Prevailing Frameworks

of Analysis Slight Equity in Water Governance 71
Andrea K. Gerlak and Helen Ingram

5 Urban Water and Sanitation Injustice: An Analytic Framework 89

Ben Crow

Part II Hydrosocial De-Patterning and Re-Composition 107

Introduction 108
Rutgerd Boelens, Tom Perreault, and Jeroen Vos

6 “… And Not a Single Injustice Remains”: Hydro-Territorial Colonization

and Techno-Political Transformations in Spain 115
Erik Swyngedouw and Rutgerd Boelens

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vi

vi Contents

7 Making Space for the Cauca River in Colombia: Inequalities and

Environmental Citizenship 134
Renata Moreno- Quintero and Theresa Selfa

8 Reconfguration of Hydrosocial Territories and Struggles for Water Justice 151

Lena Hommes, Rutgerd Boelens, Bibiana Duarte- Abadía, Juan Pablo
Hidalgo-Bastidas, and Jaime Hoogesteger

9 Large-Scale Dam Development and Counter Movements: Water Justice

Struggles around Guatemala’s Chixoy Dam 169
Barbara Rose Johnston

Part III Exclusion and Struggles for Co-Decision 187

Introduction 188
Jeroen Vos, Tom Perreault, and Rutgerd Boelens

10 Indigenous Peoples and Water Governance in Canada: Regulatory

Injustice and Prospects for Reform 193
Karen Bakker, Rosie Simms, Nadia Joe, and Leila Harris

11 Sanitation Justice? The Multiple Dimensions of Urban Sanitation Inequalities 210

Maria Rusca, Cecilia Alda- Vidal, and Michelle Kooy

12 Uniting Diversity to Build Europe’s Right2Water Movement 226

Jerry van den Berge, Rutgerd Boelens, and Jeroen Vos

13 Everyday Water Injustice and the Politics of Accommodation 246

Frances Cleaver

14 Sharing Our Water: Inclusive Development and Glocal Water Justice

in the Anthropocene 259
Joyeeta Gupta

Part IV Governmentality, Discourses and Struggles over Imaginaries

and Water Knowledge 275
Introduction 276
Tom Perreault, Rutgerd Boelens, and Jeroen Vos

15 Neoliberal Water Governmentalities, Virtual Water Trade, and Contestations 283

Jeroen Vos and Rutgerd Boelens

16 Critical Ecosystem Infrastructure? Governing the Forests–Water Nexus

in the Kenyan Highlands 302
Connor Joseph Cavanagh

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vii

Contents vii

17 The Meaning of Mining, the Memory of Water: Collective Experience

as Environmental Justice 316
Tom Perreault

18 New Spaces for Water Justice? Groundwater Extraction and Changing

Gendered Subjectivities in Morocco’s Saïss Region 330
Lisa Bossenbroek and Margreet Zwarteveen

19 Conclusions: Struggles for Justice in a Changing Water World 346

Tom Perreault, Rutgerd Boelens, and Jeroen Vos

Index 361

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viii

Contributors

Cecilia Alda-Vidal is a PhD researcher at the University of Manchester, School of

Environment, Education, and Development, and Sustainable Consumption Institute. In her
PhD project she examines the production of unequal sanitation and hygiene experiences in
the peri-urban areas of Lilongwe, Malawi. Prior to commencing her PhD, she worked and
conducted research in different water and sanitation projects in Latin America and Africa.
Karen Bakker is a professor and Canada Research Chair at the University of British
Columbia. She is the Co-Director of the University’s program on Water Governance.
Her research covers a range of issues related to water justice, including water privatiza-
tion, water access, water as a human right, and Indigenous water governance. Her books
include Privatizing Water (2010), and the co-edited Water Security: Principles, Practices
and Perspectives (2013). She acts as an advisor to a wide range of international organi-
zations, and is currently a Board Member of the International Institute for Sustainable
Development.
Jerry van den Berge is an independent researcher and consultant on water and sanitation
for sustainable development. Previously he was policy offcer in the European Federation of
Public Services Unions, based in Brussels, dealing with water, energy and waste services,
EU and corporate policies, European works councils, and climate change and sustaina-
ble development issues. He coordinated the frst successful European Citizens’ Initiative,
“Water is a human right!” He has been involved in the international trade union movement
since 2004 and has a drive for social justice as the pillar for sustainable development.
His work involves linking social and environmental justice, forming alliances between
trade unions and non-governmental organizations.
Rutgerd Boelens is Professor of Water Governance and Social Justice in the Department
of Environmental Sciences at Wageningen University, and Professor of Political Ecology
of Water in Latin America with CEDLA (Centre for Latin American Research and
Documentation), the Department of Geography, Planning and Institutional Development,
and the Faculties of Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Amsterdam. He
is also Visiting Professor at the Catholic University of Peru and the Central University of
Ecuador, and coordinates the international Justicia Hídrica/Water Justice alliance. He is

viii

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ix

List of Contributors ix

the main scientifc editor of the book series Water and Society, bringing together various
Latin American publishing houses. His work includes many articles and books focusing on
water rights, water grabbing, hydrosocial territories, legal pluralism, cultural politics, gov-
ernmentality, and social mobilization, in Latin America and Spain. His most recent book is
Water, Power and Identity: The Cultural Politics of Water in the Andes (2015).
Lisa Bossenbroek obtained her PhD in rural sociology at the University of Wageningen,
the Netherlands. As part of her research she studied the role of young people in agrar-
ian dynamics and the interactions of processes of agrarian change and gender relations.
Currently, she works as a post-doc at the Faculty of Governance, Economics and Social
Sciences (EGE–RABAT), Morocco. She is conducting comparative research that focuses
on the interaction of agrarian change and gender relations and subjectivities in Morocco
and India.
Connor Joseph Cavanagh is a research fellow in the Department of International
Environment and Development Studies (Noragric), at the Norwegian University of Life
Sciences. Recent articles have appeared in Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space, Antipode, Journal of Peasant Studies, Forest Policy and Economics, and Geoforum.
Frances Cleaver is Professor in Environment and Development in the Geography
Department at the University of Sheffeld, UK. Her work is centered on understanding the
ways in which institutions shape access to natural resources (especially water and land).
Her interests link theoretical and methodological advances with practical policy applica-
tion. Main research themes are: institutions, collective action and participatory natural
resource management; water governance, poverty and wellbeing; and the everyday poli-
tics of natural resource access and gendered livelihoods. She has published several books
including Development Through Bricolage: Rethinking Institutions and Natural Resource
Management (2012) and many scientifc articles on these subjects.
Ben Crow is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His
research areas include international development, sociology of water, famine and hunger,
political economy, environment and development. He trained and worked as an engineer
in London and Africa, and was an activist and volunteer in South Asia, before becom-
ing a social scientist. His PhD is from Edinburgh University, and he has taught at the
Open University (UK), Stanford and UC Berkeley. He has written several books, including
Sharing the Ganges: The Politics and Technology of River Development; and The Atlas
of Global Inequalities (with Suresh Lodha). Recent work explores water access by low-
income households in urban settlements. He is currently helping to organize a four-city,
collaborative research initiative on “capabilities and domestic work, dignity and depriva-
tion in entangled urbanization.”
Bibiana Duarte-Abadía is a research fellow at the University of Amsterdam and asso-
ciated researcher with Wageningen University, the Netherlands, and the Alexander von
Humboldt Research Institute, Bogota. Her research interests include: water govern-
ance, political ecology, water conficts analysis, landscape ecology, biophysical studies

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x

x List of Contributors

in river basins and watersheds, geographical information systems and participatory action
research. Her latest book (in Spanish) (with Cristina Yacoub and Rutgerd Boelens) is Water
and Political Ecology: Extractivism in Agribusiness, Mining and Hydropower Development
in Latin America (2015).

Jennifer Franco is a researcher in the Agrarian and Environmental Justice program at the
Transnational Institute, the Netherlands, and an Adjunct Professor at the China Agricultural
University in Beijing. Her regional focus is Southeast Asia, particularly Myanmar and
the Philippines. Her research interests include: social movements, agrarian change, rural
democratization, and the political dynamics of regulating access and control of land, water,
fsheries, and forests.

Andrea K. Gerlak is an associate professor in the School of Geography and Development

and Associate Research Professor at the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy at the
University of Arizona. Her research examines cooperation and confict in water govern-
ance, including questions of institutional change and adaptation to climate change in river
basins, and human rights and equity issues in water governance.

Joyeeta Gupta is Professor of Environment and Development in the Global South at

the University of Amsterdam and IHE Institute for Water Education. Her research felds
include changing geopolitics and multi-level governance patterns in relation to environ-
ment and development with a focus on climate change and water. She is editor-in-chief of
International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics. Her publications
include many books and scientifc articles. Her book History of Global Climate Governance
was published by Cambridge University Press in 2014 and won the Atmospheric Science
Librarians International (ASLI) Choice Award for 2014 in its history category. She is pres-
ently co-chair of UNEP’s Global Environmental Outlook.

Leila Harris is an associate professor at IRES Institute on Resources Environment and

Sustainability and the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice; faculty
associate at UBC Department of Geography; faculty associate at Peter Wall Institute for
Advanced Studies, as well as Co-Director of the Program on Water Governance; and
member of EDGES (Environment and Development: Gender, Equity, and Sustainability)
Research Collaborative, University of British Columbia. Trained as a political and socio-
cultural geographer (PhD Minnesota), her work examines social, cultural and political-
economic dimensions of environmental issues. Her latest book (with J. Goldin and C.
Sneddon) is Contemporary Water Governance in the Global South: Scarcity, Marketization
and Participation (2013).

Juan Pablo Hidalgo-Bastidas is a research fellow at the Center for Latin American
Research and Documentation (CEDLA), and the Department of Geography, Planning and
International Development, University of Amsterdam, and associated researcher with the
Department of Water Resources Management, Wageningen University. His current research
is on hydrosocial territories, power, the politics of implementing mega-hydraulic projects,
and environmental transformations in Ecuador.

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xi

List of Contributors xi

Lena Hommes is a research fellow with the Department of Water Resources Management,
Environmental Sciences, at Wageningen University. Her current research focuses
on hydrosocial territories, rural–urban water connections, water justice, and socio-
environmental transformations in Turkey and Peru.
Jaime Hoogesteger is an assistant professor with the Department of Water Resources
Management, Environmental Sciences, at Wageningen University. His research focuses on
themes of (ground)water policies and governance, democracy and equity which he relates
to processes of agrarian change. His research experience is in Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, Iran
and Mozambique. As part of his research he has made two documentaries, published book
chapters, a monograph, two co-edited books and peer-reviewed journal articles. At pre-
sent he is chair of the Netherlands Association of Latin American and Caribbean Studies
(NALACS) and member of the Mexican Network of Researchers (SNI).
Helen Ingram is Professor Emerita at the University of California at Irvine, and Research
Fellow at the Southwest Center at the University of Arizona. Her publications span the
felds of public policy theory and water resources governance. Fairness, equity and democ-
racy are major themes in her work, beginning with her collaboration on the book Water
and Equity in the Southwest with F. Lee Brown in 1984. Her most recent publication,
co-authored with Margaret Wilder, is “Knowing Equity When We See It: Water Equity
in Contemporary Global Contexts” in Ken Conca and Erika Weinthal (eds.), The Oxford
Handbook of Water Politics and Policy (2016).

Nadia Joe (Gugula) is Nlaka’pamux on her mother’s side and southern Tutchone/Tlingit –
belonging to the Crow Clan of the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations – on her father’s
side. She was privileged to receive an education both on the land and in the classroom. She
currently works as an environmental scientist specializing in water management and waste-
water treatment and supports Indigenous communities across Canada to bridge cultural
divides over water governance.

Barbara Rose Johnston is Michigan State University Adjunct Professor of

Anthropology and the Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Political Ecology (Santa
Cruz, California). Her research and publications examine the intersect between envi-
ronmental quality, health, human rights and social justice, work that has led to numer-
ous scientifc and public policy advisory appointments in international, national, and
community-based forums. Major publications on water justice include Water, Culture,
Power: Local Struggles in Global Context (with John Donahue, 1997) and Water,
Cultural Diversity and Global Environmental Change (editor-in-chief, 2012). Her work
on reparation and the right to remedy for Chixoy dam-affected communities serves as
an evidentiary source that supports the historic reparation agreement for indigenous
communities in Guatemala.

K. J. Joy is a senior fellow at the Society for Promoting Participative Ecosystem

Management (SOPPECOM), Pune, India. He has been an activist-researcher for more than
30 years, working on people’s rights to natural resources at grassroots and policy levels.

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xii

xii List of Contributors

His research interests also include drought-proofng, participatory irrigation and river basin
management, water conficts and people’s movements. He coordinates “Forum for Policy
Dialogue on Water Conficts in India,” a national level network in India that engages with
various types of water conficts. He has published extensively on water-environment-devel-
opment issues including a co-edited book, Water Conficts in India: A Million Revolts in the
Making.

Michelle Kooy is an associate professor of the Politics of Urban Waters at the IHE-Delft
Institute for Water Education, and a faculty associate at the Department of Human Geography,
Planning, and International Development at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands.
She was trained as a human geographer (PhD University of British Columbia) and she
applies her academic interest in the politics of urban planning, urban water infrastruc-
ture systems and social justice through her work with international development agencies
and non-governmental organizations. She is an associate editor of Wiley Interdisciplinary
Reviews on Water, and a member of the Advisory Committee to the UNESCO International
Hydrological Program in Cities.

Seema Kulkarni is a senior fellow at the Society for Promoting Participative Ecosystem
Management (SOPPECOM), Pune, India. She holds an MA degree in Social Work
from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. She has over 20 years of experience
of working in drought-prone rural areas of Maharashtra. Her key area of interest is
gender and natural resource management. She is associated with the women’s move-
ment in Maharashtra, working on peasant women’s claims and rights over land and
water resources. She has contributed many articles for various journals and confer-
ences about gender and rural livelihoods.

Lyla Mehta is a professorial fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, UK, and a
visiting professor at Noragric, Norwegian University of Life Sciences. A sociologist work-
ing in development studies, she uses the case of water and sanitation to focus on rights
and access to resources, resource-grabbing, the politics of scarcity, gender, power and
policy processes. Her work also concerns gender, displacement and resistance and climate
change and uncertainty from ‘below’. She has extensive research and feld experience in
India and southern Africa. She has published about 90 scientifc publications, including the
most recent edited book, Flows and Practices: The Politics of Integrated Water Resources
Management in Southern and Eastern Africa.

Renata Moreno-Quintero is a lecturer-researcher in the Faculty of Humanities at the

Universidad Autónoma de Occidente in Cali, Colombia. She holds a PhD degree in
Environmental Policy from the State University of New York, College of Environmental
Science and Forestry (SUNY-ESF), USA, where she was a Fulbright fellow from 2011 to
2016.

Tom Perreault is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of

Geography at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York, USA. He received his PhD from

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xii

List of Contributors xiii

the University of Colorado and has two decades of research experience in Ecuador and
Bolivia. His research focuses on the intersections of political ecology, resource governance,
indigenous campesino social mobilization, and agrarian change. He is editor of Minería,
Agua y Justicia Social en los Andes: Experiencias Comparativas de Perú y Bolivia (2014),
and lead editor of The Handbook of Political Ecology (2015).

Dik Roth is an associate professor at the Department of Sociology of Development and

Change, Wageningen University, the Netherlands. His research areas are the anthropol-
ogy of law and policy, legal plurality and complexity, property rights and justice, natural
resources, resource conficts, management and governance, with a focus on land and water.
His regional focus is on South Asia/Southeast Asia and the Netherlands. He is editor-in-
chief of the Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unoffcial Law.

Maria Rusca is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at King’s College London. Her
work examines urban socio-ecological dynamics of (waste)water governance in various geo-
graphical contexts and scales. Her research themes include multiple aspects of water justice,
including informality in the urban waterscape, gendered water supply and everyday hygiene
practices, the production of uneven drinking water contamination and understanding water
governance challenges in the everyday. She believes that understanding socio-ecological
dynamics requires interdisciplinary approaches and promotes research that equally accounts
for the ecological and socio-political dimensions of water governance.

Theresa Selfa is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at the State University

of New York, College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY ESF), USA. Her
research focuses on environmental governance and politics of agrifood, energy and water
systems, and on household livelihood impacts of land use change, in Latin America and
the USA.

Rosie Simms holds an MA from the Institute for Resources, Environment and
Sustainability at UBC, and a BA&Sc from McGill University. Throughout her stud-
ies, Rosie’s work focused on intersections between water governance and Indigenous
rights and governance. She currently works as a water law and policy researcher at the
University of Victoria.

Erik Swyngedouw is Professor of Geography at the University of Manchester, UK. He

previously held a professorship at Oxford University. He was also a visiting professor at the
University of Ghent, Belgium and at Sciences Po, Paris. His research focuses on political
ecology and political economy, with a particular interest in theorizing the society-nature
articulation from a broadly historical-geographical materialist analysis. He has worked
extensively on issues of water politics and the political ecology of water and urbanization.
Recent work focuses on new political movements. He has authored many books, among
which: Social Power and the Urbanization of Water (2004), The Post-Political and its
Discontent (edited with J. Wilson, 2014) and Liquid Power: Contested Hydro-Modernities
in Twentieth-Century Spain (2015).

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xiv List of Contributors

Gert Jan Veldwisch is an assistant professor with the Department of Water Resources
Management, Wageningen University, the Netherlands. His areas of research include
participatory irrigation and development, water grabbing, small-scale irrigation, agrar-
ian change, and issues around water justice. Currently he works mostly in Southern and
Eastern Africa, but he has also worked in Latin America and Central Asia. He has published
several articles on water grabbing.
Jeroen Vos is an assistant professor in the department of Water Resources Management at
Wageningen University, the Netherlands. As a water policy adviser he worked for a decade
in Peru and Bolivia with different international development organizations. He was edi-
tor of two Spanish language books on water management in Latin America. His current
research interests are the dynamics and discourses of water use by agribusinesses in Latin
America. He has published on the effects of virtual water trade and private water steward-
ship certifcation.
Margreet Zwarteveen is Professor of Water Governance with the Integrated Water
Systems and Governance Department at IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, and with
the Governance and Inclusive Development group, University of Amsterdam. Approaching
water governance from perspectives of equity and justice, she defnes water governance
as the practices of coordination and decision-making between different actors around
contested water distributions. She is concerned both with looking at actual water distri-
bution practices and with analyzing the different ways in which water distributions can
be regulated (through technologies, markets and institutions), justifed (decision-making
procedures) and understood (expertise and knowledge). Her work is based on an interdis-
ciplinary approach that sees water distributions as interactions between technology, nature
and society.

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1

1
Introduction: The Multiple Challenges and Layers
of Water Justice Struggles
Rutgerd Boelens, Jeroen Vos, and Tom Perreault

1.1 Introduction
Water is a resource that triggers profound conflicts and close collaboration, a source
of deep injustices, and fierce struggles for life. In many regions of the world, rising
demand and declining availability of adequate- quality water foster severe competi-
tion and ferocious clashes among different water uses and users. People also suffer
from flooding; contamination caused by industry and mining; privatization of public
water utilities; corruption; and displacement by large dam projects. Climate change
intensifies most human-made water problems. In struggles for water security, the poor
tend to lose (e.g. Crow et al., 2014 ; Escobar, 2006; Harvey, 1996 ; Perreault et al. ,
2011).
Through exemplary cases, the chapters in this book show how new competitors – includ-
ing megacities, mining, forestry, and agribusiness companies – demand and usurp a mount-
ing share of available surface and groundwater resources (e.g., Donahue and Johnston,
1998; GRAIN, 2012). Water deprivation and water insecurity affect marginalized urban
households, and rural smallholder families and communities. In many regions, this poses
profound threats to environmental sustainability and local and national food security (e.g.,
Escobar, 2008; Mehta et al., 2012; Mena et al., 2016).
Such proliferating problems of material and social “water injustices” provide the back-
drop for this book. Distribution of access water rights and water-related decision-making is
extremely skewed. Smallholder communities’ water-based livelihoods and rights in many
countries of the global South are constantly threatened by bureaucratic administrations,
market-driven policies, and top-down project intervention practices.
Despite the fact that water injustices have existed throughout human history, water
justice problems and related policy interventions have changed rapidly over recent
decades (Zwarteveen and Boelens, 2014). For instance, rather than focusing on simply
enlarging water fows through new hydraulic engineering projects, new perspectives
focus on water saving and conservation (Vos and Marshall, 2017; Zwarteveen, 2015).
New scientifc felds and water professionals have entered the water policy-making
and intervention worlds to accompany (increasingly high-tech) hydraulic engineering

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2

2 Boelens, Vos, Perreault

(Buscher and Fletcher, 2015; Goldman, 2007, 2011). Also, climate change threats and
water-related disasters have changed science and policy debates and water funding pro-
jects related to issues such as “mitigation and adaptation,” food control and drought
prevention (Heynen et al., 2007; Lynch, 2012; Martínez-Alier, 2002). Further, global
neoliberalism has assured that water development and governance are no longer seen
as the exclusive realm of the state, with water knowledge and authority concentrated
in powerful public agencies (Hommes et al., 2016; Loftus, 2009; Zwarteveen, 2015).
Water governance scales have changed: the nation-state has lost territorial sovereignty
in water control. Civil-society organizations and, particularly, multinational companies
and global policy institutes have entered the water governance scene (Molle et al.,
2009; Perreault, 2015; Swyngedouw, 2004). In practice, this has shifted accountability
relations, from publicly-elected governments or local water user groups to non-
democratic multilateral fnancial institutions (Zwarteveen, 2015; see also Bakker, 2010;
Swyngedouw, 2004).
An important starting point of the book is the authors’ shared recognition that under-
standing and challenging water injustices requires conceptual tools to recognize the
power and politics of water use, management and governance. Beyond their expres-
sion in laws, explicit rules and formal hierarchies, the book calls attention to how
power and politics also signifcantly work through more invisible norms and rules that
present themselves as naturally or technically ordered. These rules are part of estab-
lished water development intervention procedures and practices, and are embedded
in water expert communities’ cultural codes of behavior (Zwarteveen and Boelens,
2014). Therefore, in addition to dealing with the urgent issues such as water grabbing
and dam building, the book’s attention goes beyond such overt water injustices and
open conficts, showing how unfairness and injustices are intrinsic to standard ways of
knowing and governing.
Understanding how water injustices are embedded and situated, and possible ways to
remedy them, is a central aim of this book. This entails an acknowledgment of diversity
and plurality – in views, knowledge, rights systems, ideas and norms about fairness etc. –
without embracing a stance of cultural relativism or denying the broader similarities across
specifc instances of injustice (Roth et al., 2005).
This introductory chapter provides some starting points for the water justice explora-
tions that the book will elaborate on. As we argue in the next sections, the evolving feld
of water’s political ecology builds on transdisciplinarity (Perreault et al., 2015). As such,
it treats nature, technology and society as mutually constitutive (Haraway, 1991; Latour,
1993; Swyngedouw, 2009), forming hydrosocial networks that establish how water and
decision-making power over water control are (to be) distributed. By deconstructing tech-
nical discourses of effciency, economists’ stories of productivity and naturalized ideas
of scarcity, it searches for new insights to challenge unequal power structures as mani-
fested in and through water. The sections examine the multiple layers of water injustices,
ranging from the brutal, visible practices of water grabbing and pollution to the subtle

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Introduction 3

powers and politics of misrecognition and exclusion, and covert equalization and subjuga-
tion techniques.

1.2 Examining Water Justice

The combination of intensifed resource extraction, land and water degradation, increas-
ing competition over water access and control, and growing reliance on market forces and
forms of water expertocracy, have profound implications for debates over water rights and
justice. On the one hand, it is increasingly clear that water scarcity and insecurity are not
so much related to the absolute availability of fresh and clean water, but rather are expres-
sions of how water, and water services, are unequally distributed among societal groups.
Unequal water distribution and exposure to contaminated water, fooding and failed water
projects often reveal elite capture of the state and related biased policies and corrupt prac-
tices. In other words, the so-called “water crisis” is less a consequence of generalized
scarcity than a manifestation of uneven power geometries (UNDP, 2006). On the other
hand, the mainstream water policy community tends to avoid scrutinizing the root causes
of water problems. Instead, in accordance with its own positivist, universalist epistemolo-
gies and its belief in expert knowledge systems, formal legal structures and market forces,
it blames the victims: local water user groups, communities and their “chaotic, ineffcient
plural rights systems” (Boelens and Zwarteveen, 2005).
Recently implemented global water reforms tend to ascribe water inequities and unsus-
tainability to incomplete implementation of the universalistic, market-based expert model
(Achterhuis et al., 2010). Therefore, paradoxically, the remedy that is often prescribed
is to follow the rationality and forces that largely have caused the problem in the frst
place: to increase free-market rules in local communities, and give more leeway to outside
and private-interest groups (Bauer, 1997; Heynen et al., 2007; Perreault et al., 2015).
Such policy practices form part of a larger phenomenon in the water world: most inter-
national policy models and national water laws are not adapted to local populations’
contexts, assuming that it is these local populations, rather than offcial plans, laws and
theories, that need to adapt. These models aim to create their own, utopian water world.
Consciously or subconsciously, such policies hold that local water territories are basi-
cally unruled – or at least unruly: disorganized humans, irrational values, unproductive
ecologies, ineffcient resource use, and continual water conficts. Existing water norms
and practices are misrecognized by overlooking water values, identities, rights systems,
and users on the ground. Mainstream water policy-makers then construct imaginary water
users, with identities that conveniently ft the models, with needs and rationales matching
the interests and knowledge of those in power, shored up in their science, technology and
policy towers. This way, policy models justify dramatic interventions, even when well-
intended (Boelens, 2015a).
It is for these reasons that we base our understandings of “water justice” on a notion
that sees environmental governance not as the “governance of nature” but “as ‘governance

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4 Boelens, Vos, Perreault

through nature’ – that is, as the refection and projection of economic and political power
via decisions about the design, manipulation and control of socio-natural processes” (Bridge
and Perreault, 2009: 492). More specifcally, we situate “water justice” conceptually and
politically in the feld of the “political ecology of water,” which may be defned as: “the poli-
tics and power relationships that shape human knowledge of and intervention in the water
world, leading to forms of governing nature and people, at once and at different scales, to
produce particular hydro-social order” (Boelens 2015a: 9). This political ecology of water
thus focuses on unequal distribution of benefts and burdens, access to and control over
water, winners and losers, and disputed water rights, knowledge, and culture. It is also about
practical and theoretical efforts to build alternative water realities. Therefore, our questions
address fundamental issues regarding how water scarcity is being constructed by dominant
agents, and how power relations infuence water knowledge and development to produce
particular claims to truth. Our questions also intrinsically engage research and transdisci-
plinary social action, focusing for instance on how knowledge production can contribute
to strategies that contest water dispossession and accumulation; and how the knowledge
systems of scholars, activists and water users can be mutually enriching and complementary.
Approaching such questions requires an understanding of “justice” as based on a com-
plex set of notions and dynamic principles that are grounded in particular social realities.
It means that we must deviate from prevailing liberal political-philosophical theories that
have tried to present justice as a universal, transcendent concept (Lauderdale, 1998; Roth
et al., 2005). We therefore differ with positivist traditions, such as the utilitarian philoso-
phy of eighteenth-century political economist Jeremy Bentham, who defned justice as
that particular societal order that would bring the greatest happiness to the greatest num-
ber of citizens. To this end, the rights and happiness of some may be sacrifced – generally,
this means society’s most vulnerable social groups. Bentham sought to establish a system
“that aims to construct happiness societally by means of reason and law” (1988 (1781):
1–2), whereby happiness could be exactly calculated. Echoing the current water expertoc-
racy, this calculated design of happiness and overall wellbeing would be the task of moral
and justice experts; common people would lack reason. Utilitarian justice as defned
by Mill (1874, 1999) – advocating legal rationalization and the use of economic theory
in political decision-making to, ultimately, devise a politics oriented by human
happiness – also means excluding “irrational deviants” from (Western positivist) justice.
Most legal justice constructs deploy variations of these liberal-universalist ideas and theo-
retical ideals of justice.
We also differ with “social contract” notions of distributional justice based on Rawls
(1971), which stress “procedural fairness” and “ethics-based autonomous decision-
making.” Rawlsian justice takes place behind abstract, illusory “veils of ignorance”
(which supposedly allow people to make just decisions without knowing the impact these
decisions will have on themselves), but ignores actually existing class, gender, education
and ethnic inequality structures. And in the same vein, we challenge liberal-individualist
or socialist-collectivist theories that concentrate only on distributive justice but overlook
sources of everyday injustices based on discrimination, misrecognition, and exclusion from

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5

Introduction 5

decision-making. Young (1990), Fraser (2000), Schlosberg (2004) and Escobar (2008)
have shown how such (universalistic) distributive models and procedures fail to “exam-
ine the social, cultural, symbolic and institutional conditions underlying poor distribu-
tions in the frst place” (Schlosberg, 2004: 518). Next, we are profoundly distant from
libertarian entitlement (e.g. Nozick, 1974) and neoliberal appropriation theories (e.g.
Hayek, 1944, 1960; Friedman, 1962, 1980) that stress the relationship between individ-
ual freedom and private property maximization. Hayek and Friedman see no conceptual
or empirical problems in building “justice” precisely on expanding economic-distribu-
tive inequalities and further dis-protection of the vulnerable: equality is defned as all
individuals’ freedom to become rational market actors (Swyngedouw 2005; Ahlers and
Zwarteveen 2009).
For these reasons, differing with these universalistic (mis)understandings of justice, we
deploy a relational perspective (see also Boelens, 2015a; Perreault, 2014; Roth et al., 2005,
2014; Zwarteveen and Boelens, 2014): to understand the embeddedness of particular ideals
of justice, and the way these get constituted through social practices, requires a grounded,
comparative and historical approach (Lauderdale, 1998). Such critical, grounded justice
perspectives must understand how diverse people see and defne justice within a specifc
context, history and time (Joy et al., 2014; Perreault, 2014; Zwarteveen and Boelens,
2014). They also examine the effects that particular defnitions of justice have on how a
society distributes wealth and authority (Roth et al., 2005). Justice proposals based solely
on abstract, universalistic criteria, have been unable

to respond to indigenous and peasants throughout the world who are still experiencing the full pres-
ence of injustice in the form of poverty, landlessness, dispossession, political and religious oppres-
sion, and genocide. Philosophical formulas become hollow without systematic explorations of the
sources of injustice, including those within indigenous and peasant societies.
(Lauderdale, 1998: 5–6)

Consequently, we argue for the need to analyze, in all their diversity, how living peo-
ple experience injustice, facing political oppression, cultural discrimination and economic
marginalization. We relate these injustice experiences to, on the one hand, locally prevail-
ing perceptions of equity and, on the other, hegemonic discourses, constructs and proce-
dures of formal justice. Moreover, we also call for an analysis of the actors who develop
or impose these views, and why certain perspectives on justice or equity are promoted
while others are ignored, plus the effects of these views and conceptualizations for specifc
groups.
As Fraser (2000) has argued, injustice combines issues of distribution with
those of (cultural) recognition, in often complex and sometimes paradoxical ways
(also see Schlosberg, 2004; Young, 1990). Cultural, ethnic and gender discrimina-
tion often constitute the (implicit or explicit) foundation to privilege allocation of
water rights to some over others. For example, in many African countries, a com-
mon feature of irrigation modernization projects is that they have cut off women
from any possibility to control land or water. In Mali, after 50 years of investment

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6 Boelens, Vos, Perreault

in irrigation, only 12 of the 2,500 farmers under the Offce du Niger were women. In
Burkina Faso, all land titles granted by the Volta Valley Authority went to male house-
hold heads. In Senegal, women own less than 4 percent of the newly irrigated areas. In
Mauritania, nearly 20 percent of the households in the river area are headed by women,
and yet women comprise only 5 percent of participants in new schemes (Dankelman and
Davidson, 2013; Zwarteveen, 2006).
Exclusion from decision-making often has direct effects on unequal allocation of and
access to water. In turn, decision-making authority is determined by economic power rela-
tions and cultural and behavioral norms that interlink with how particular forms of water
knowledge are legitimized and privileged. Indeed, questions of participation, recognition
and distribution are intimately linked to water control. Further, in addition to Fraser’s three
domains of justice struggle (“recognition” and “participation” and “distribution”), a fourth
domain of water justice may be expressed as “socio-ecological justice.” This refers to the
ways in which water-allocation decisions and struggles are embedded in sensitive, dynami-
cally shaped socio-natural environments, seeking to sustain livelihood security for contem-
porary and future generations (Boelens, 2015a; Zwarteveen and Boelens, 2014; Escobar,
2008). Before returning to this relational, engaged understanding of water justice, and what
we see as important ingredients of an approach to identifying, understanding, challeng-
ing and defying water injustices (in Section 6), we frst consider some examples of water
injustice in practice.

1.3 The Cruel Face of Water Injustice: Some Expressions in Practice

1.3.1 Agribusiness Water Grabbing
The world is experiencing a boom in transnational agricultural produce trade. Exports
of fresh vegetables, fruits, and fowers have doubled in the last decade (Vos and
Hinojosa, 2016). Governmental policies support large agribusiness companies that
buy up land in countries in the South on a massive, unprecedented scale (Rulli and
D’Odorico, 2013; Woodhouse, 2012). Land grabs of this sort lead to competition for
water with local communities, degrade local ecosystems, jeopardize local food secu-
rity, and profoundly alter existing modes of production and income distribution (Van
der Ploeg, 2008; Zoomers and Kaag, 2014). The land purchased is worth little if not
accompanied with access to water. In most cases, therefore, land grabs are in fact water
grabs, a process that dispossesses and displaces existing water users (Mehta et al.,
2012; Woodhouse, 2012).
Based on the data set of The Land Matrix (2012), Rulli and D’Odorico (2013) cal-
culated that total land deals reported by foreign companies amounted to some 43 mil-
lion ha. Water used in agricultural products can be seen as “virtual water” embedded
in those products. Export of crops from the 43 million ha would represent some 497
billion cubic meters of virtual water exported to rich consumers. This would increase
current virtual water exports by one-third, as calculated by Hoekstra and Mekonnen

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Introduction 7

(2012: Table 1). Some 22 percent of these reported land deals was under production in
2013.
Clearly, this “hydro-colonialism” goes beyond classic North-South opposition: compa-
nies from Asia have in recent years bought more than 8 million ha in the Nile basin, to grow
export crops that need water far beyond the entire water availability of the basin. According
to GRAIN (2012: 8) this is “hydrological suicide: four countries alone already have irri-
gation infrastructure established for 5.4 million ha of land and have leased out a further
8.6 million. Irrigating just these lands would require much more water than is available to
all ten countries in the Nile basin.” As GRAIN reported, the Ethiopian Government aims
to evict 1.5 million people from their territories to make irrigated land available (GRAIN,
2012: 18).
National policies often allocate water to where “its marginal returns are highest” and
link this to promotion of commercial (export) crops, which replace staple crops. This
may endanger food security. Gaybor (2011) provides an illustration of this for Ecuador.
Nationally, according to offcial registration, the large-scale export sector represents 1 per-
cent of the farms, but has concessions for 67 percent of the total available irrigation water.
Peasant and indigenous producers in community irrigation systems represent 86 percent of
the water users, but own only 22 percent of irrigated land and have access to only 13 per-
cent of the total allocated irrigation water. In some provinces, water allocation inequality
is outright appalling. In Imbabura Province in the north, for example, a small number of
large landholdings (>100 ha) account for 91 percent of the total allocated volume of water
(Gaybor, 2011: 200). Actual water distribution is even worse than offcial fgures show, as
more than half of the water that is used by large-scale agribusiness companies is not regis-
tered and is illegally tapped.
In Peru, we can witness similar practices. In the dry Ica Valley, with fertile soils and
strategically located near Lima, rainfall is close to zero. Groundwater, therefore, is a vital
resource for thousands of small farmers. For the past decade, however, the aquifer has
been dramatically over-pumped, with its water table dropping by nearly one meter per
year (Progressio, 2010). New agro-export companies have purchased most valley land to
produce high water-consumption export crops such as grapes and asparagus. Small and
medium farmers, who are unable to compete with these large owners’ powerful water
pumping technologies, have seen their wells run dry. Agro-exporters, who constitute 0.1
percent of the users, consume 36 percent of the water. Small farmers, who account for 71
percent of all users, have access to only 9 percent of the water (Cárdenas, 2012). As in
India, Mexico, Chile and other regions around the world, only those who can afford to pur-
chase powerful pumps and ever-deeper wells are able to access groundwater. The resulting
inequality is a major source of confict (Joy et al., 2014; Roth et al., 2005, 2015).
This also places the dominant neoliberal logic regarding the benefts of virtual water
export in a different light. The discourse on virtual water effciency assumes that, through
global trade liberalization, virtual water fows from water-rich to water-poor areas (Vos and
Hinojosa, 2016). In many cases, however, this is simply incorrect. Water-poor countries
such as India and China, Kazakhstan, Australia, and Tanzania are net exporters of virtual

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8 Boelens, Vos, Perreault

water. Water-rich countries such as the Netherlands, UK and Switzerland are net importers
of virtual water. The NAFTA agreement between Mexico and USA led to virtual water fow
from dry areas in Mexico to the USA. As mentioned above, asparagus and grapes exported
by large-scale agribusiness, from the desert coast of Peru, deprive local communities of
water and income. Flower production for the USA and Europe in vulnerable areas of Kenya
and the Andean mountains of Colombia and Ecuador profoundly affects the quantity and
quality of local community water sources, as well as overall livelihood conditions (Mena et
al., 2016; Vos and Boelens, 2014).

1.3.2 Extractive Industries

Encroachment on water territories by extractive industries provides another illustrative
example of brutal water injustice. In many parts of the world, mining companies make use
of water in headwater catchments, thereby diverting and polluting the downstream fows
on which peasant and indigenous communities (and sometimes entire cities) depend. In
the highlands of the Andean countries, for instance, mining companies buy up water rights
and gain de facto control over water resources, which sometimes leads to confict (e.g.
Budds, 2010; Preciado-Jeronimo et al., 2015; Sosa and Zwarteveen, 2012). In the low-
lands, hydrocarbon industries are increasingly dominating water control. As Bebbington
et al. (2010) show, in Ecuador’s Amazon region, approximately half of the total area is
allotted in concessions to oil companies (see also Lu et al., 2017). In neighboring Peru, it
is even worse: nearly three-quarters of the Amazon region is allocated or subject to leasing
to hydrocarbon transnationals (Bebbington et al., 2010: 309–11).
A telling illustration is a Canadian gold mine intervention in San Luis Potosí, Mexico.
Cerro de San Pedro is an ecological reserve and cultural heritage site. Water is funda-
mental for local livelihoods and the large city of San Luis Potosí. New water extrac-
tion is entirely forbidden in this desert region. In 2007, however, international laws and
Mexican politics led the mining company to circumvent all local rules, annexing the
previously untouchable communal land and water rights, with disastrous effects for the
ecological reserve (Peña and Herrera, 2008; Stoltenborg and Boelens, 2016). Cerro de
San Pedro has been converted into a large, toxic cyanide dump. Land and waterscapes
have been destroyed, and the river has stopped fowing. National politicians forced the
local mayor to accept the mine. He had no alternative: the former mayor, his father,
had opposed the mine and was murdered. Internationally, however, the Canadian com-
pany is recognized for its corporate social responsibility, suggesting deep concern for
community development and the environment. It has been issued a Confict-Free Gold
Certifcate. International agreements actively support the mine’s plunder. The NAFTA
water charter forced the local population to accept the mine. Complaints from local com-
munities receive no consideration. They have no right to participate in decisions about
their own future.
Meanwhile, Latin American governments increasingly invoke anti-terrorist laws and
discourses – initially a response to civil wars in the 1980s but given new impetus by the

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Introduction 9

global war on terror – to label and imprison protesting villagers as “environmental ter-
rorists.” A Peruvian environmental movement leader said: “We now have a state that no
longer protects people’s rights and instead protects investment” (The Guardian, 2014).
In 2014, the Inter-American Human Rights Commission (IACHR, 2014) investigated 22
large-scale Canadian mining projects in nine Latin American countries, concluding that
they all caused profound environmental impacts, contaminating rivers, displacing people,
impoverishing communities, and dispossessing water rights. Protesters have been killed.
As the report observes, development cooperation increasingly promotes mining; Canada
has advised Latin American governments on how to circumscribe protective laws and cur-
tail civil rights to facilitate mining. China, Australia, Europe, and the United States may
follow suit (Stoltenborg and Boelens, 2016).

1.3.3 Hydropower and Mega-Hydraulic Development

Water injustice also originates from hydropower development, large irrigation schemes and
other mega-hydraulic infrastructure, triggering broad societal struggle (e.g. Baviskar, 2007;
Kaika, 2006; McCully, 2001). Mega-dams drastically change hydrological regimes, food
important cultural landscapes, and often alter local rural livelihoods irreversibly. In many
places around the world, dispossessed or resettled people bear the burdens, while bene-
fts accrue to distant cities, fnancial institutions and construction, hydropower and mining
industries (see Duarte et al., 2015; Hidalgo et al., forthcoming; Hommes et al., 2016).
Notwithstanding growing public criticism of this top-down, supply-driven hydraulic
development, these projects have gained new impetus worldwide, since they are portrayed
as key ingredients of the new “green economy” (Goldman, 2011; Hommes and Boelens,
2017; Huber and Joshi, 2016; Sneddon and Fox, 2008). Hydropower generation as “clean
development” is currently a basic justifcation for dam projects. However, new mega-works
often ignore the lessons of past decades, also disregarding these projects’ contribution to
climate change (Jasanoff, 2010; Moore et al., 2010). The nexus among state bureaucracies
and politicians, private companies, engineering schools and global capital lending steers
policy, giving preference to large-scale hydraulic works over context-sensitive, less capital-
intensive, interactively designed alternatives (e.g. Hommes et al., 2016; Moore et al., 2010;
Sneddon and Fox, 2008).
Mega-hydraulic development tends to be neatly integrated with a market-based capitalist
model of economic growth, triggering rights and resources accumulation by some players
and the simultaneous dispossession of vulnerable groups.
A horrifying example is the Chixoy Dam in Guatemala, detailed by Barbara Johnston
in Chapter 9. In order to construct the dam, the Achi Maya indigenous population living
there was labeled a “backward people” without territorial rights or homestead properties,
and the dam site was labeled “unruled, empty space.” Project documentation ignored the
Achi Maya’s strong cultural-productive roots in their territory. The project blended par-
ticipatory jargon with racist ideas to explain why these ignorant people resisted displace-
ment. An Inter-American Development Bank report states: “In the native peoples’ world

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10 Boelens, Vos, Perreault

view, traditional lifestyles and agricultural practices are expected to remain changeless for
evermore, which explains why native campesinos … have proven resistant to change and
innovation” (IDB, 1991, annex II-2:1, cited by Lynch, 2006: 14). When Achi Maya com-
munities peacefully resisted displacement from their homes, the World Bank, donor gov-
ernments and international consultants actively ignored state-sponsored military violence
(Johnston, 2005; Lynch, 2006). As a consequence, many years of intimidating, torturing,
and raping the local population left 440 men, women, and children dead and displaced
thousands of local families (Aguirre, 2014).

1.3.4 Rural-Urban Transfers and Intra-Urban Water Provision Inequality

In many places in the world, the expanding thirst of cities and industries is quenched at
the expense of rural communities and smallholder families. Ironically, supply-oriented
engineering projects that divert water from increasingly distant rural areas to urban areas
are justifed, among others, by references to the Human Right to Water, the Millennium
Development Goal of ensuring safe drinking water access for all, and the national impor-
tance of megacities (Hommes and Boelens, 2017). While such references may be well-
intended, water transfers are represented as neutral, scientifcally justifed options, while
the societal power relations inscribed in such technologies generate very unequal outcomes
for different groups (Bakker, 2010; Yacoub et al., 2015). They often evoke the image of
water-supplying watersheds and forests as being uninhabited or even virgin lands, in which
water is freely accessible for “high-priority demands.” Historically grounded customary
water rights are often considered clandestine.
An exemplary case is Peru’s capital, Lima. As Hommes and colleagues have shown,
much of its drinking water is transferred from the Andean highland territories, and any
opposition by smallholder communities is characterized as backwardness, ignorance or
stubbornness, to be resolved by “awareness-raising.” As the national drinking water agency
writes in its public relations book, tellingly entitled The Land of the Lagoons,
Living in a natural paradise, they [communities affected by water extraction] fnd themselves a bit
distant from the reality which our country lives, and even more so from the necessities of other
Peruvian regions. Accordingly, their initial attitude was one of indifference towards the great project
that will beneft the regions of Lima and Callao with new water sources … Nevertheless, SEDAPAL
planned actions to beneft the community, such as this book, which … has the value of striving
to integrate the most remote communities and those least informed about the country’s reality …
Explanations about the project’s kind-heartedness … conquered local leaders’ resistance.
(SEDAPAL, 1998: 17–18, cited in Hommes and Boelens, 2017: 77)

Drinking water extraction is sustained and legitimized by a discourse and policy that pre-
sent the countryside as embodied by abundant resources and backwardness, and the city
as a place of civilized society and progress that has natural water scarcity. At the same
time, the discourse naturalizing water scarcity, legitimizes ever-larger rural–urban water
transfers without touching upon the fundamental issues of obsolete water infrastructure

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Introduction 11

and low effciency inside the city, plus huge inequality in water access within the city’s
neighborhoods (Hommes and Boelens, 2017; Ioris, 2016). As elsewhere, Lima’s water
scarcity is referred to as a natural problem caused by its arid environment and by climate
change, rather than as a problem of distribution or of uneven power relations (Bakker,
2007; Linton, 2010; Lynch, 2012). Around one million inhabitants in Lima lack access
to public drinking water and sanitation systems, but in the wealthy neighborhoods pools
are flled and parks intensively irrigated (Ioris, 2016). As can be witnessed in Lima, as in
many of the world’s megacities, “water transfers are promoted as charitable ‘water for all’
projects even though the water often does not reach those most in need” (Hommes and
Boelens, 2017: 78).

1.3.5 Water Service Privatization

Neoliberal thinkers and policy-makers advocate treating water as an economic good.
According to neoliberal logic, policy measures such as privatizing water and water ser-
vice provision, granting concessions to operate distribution networks, and implement-
ing full-cost recovery in water service pricing would lead to improved water service,
increased investments in infrastructure, and more effcient operation and maintenance.
However, several studies have shown that privatizing public utilities has often failed to
beneft water users; rather, tariffs hiked, investments in infrastructure lagged behind,
quality of service provision did not improve, and the environment was jeopardized.
Companies also faced disappointing returns and now retreat from selected countries
and intensify privatization in more proftable regions (Bakker, 2010, 2013; Van den
Berge, et al., Chapter 12 of this book). In recent years, protests have been organized
in various parts of the world to stop privatization of drinking water utilities or demand
cancelation of these contracts: e.g. in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, Jakarta in Indonesia,
and in different cities in South Africa, India, Brazil and Spain. Because of these social
protests, the meager service provision results for the people, and lower-than-expected
profts for companies, many drinking water companies have been “re-municipalized.”
By 2014, over 180 water utilities worldwide had been returned to public management
(Lobina et al., 2014).
Water services are often privatized by means of public-private partnerships (PPPs).
However, in many cases the public partners in a PPP assume a relatively higher share
of the burdens and risks, while the private partners take a higher part of the benefts.
The “commons” partners are not even considered in such alliances, which exclude
local water-management collectives from decision-making about their own systems
or territories. A PPP example is the recently built irrigation system in Olmos, on
Peru’s desert coast, promoted internationally as a high-tech, modern project. Locally,
it met with resistance from communities that envisioned completely different hydro-
territorial development. Building the dam, tunnel and irrigation canal cost an estimated
US$800 million, of which the Peruvian state put in US$450 million and the Brazilian

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12 Boelens, Vos, Perreault

company, Odebrecht, that constructed the infrastructure put in US$350 million (Eguren,
2014). The 43,000 ha of land that will get irrigation water was sold to ten agribusiness
companies at very low prices. Amnesty International reported gross violations of human
rights when local farmers and goat farmers were evicted from the land claimed by the
project (Amnesty International, 2013). Two major companies acquired large tracts of
land: the Peruvian agribusiness company Grupo Gloria (15,600 ha) and Odebrecht itself
(18,000 ha). The average cost per hectare was only US$4,723 (implying US$3,370 state
subsidy per hectare, and far below market value). Eguren (2014) calculated that, after 50
years of operating the Olmos irrigation system, Odebrecht would have made a net proft
of US$464 million by selling land, water and energy, and the Peruvian state would be
left with a loss of US$328 million (at current market prices). This loss could be seen as
an investment in water infrastructure that would create jobs for poor people. However,
the total value of income for feld laborers generated over these 50 years would hardly
amount to this “investment.” After Odebrecht CEO Marcelo Odebrecht was sentenced
to 19 years of prison for acts of corruption in Brazil, the Odebrecht company sold their
share in the Olmos system to Suez in December 2016. The press release by Suez CEO
Jean-Louis Chaussade on this deal stated:
We are proud to bring our expertise and our solutions to a project that is vital to the development
of the Olmos region and its inhabitants. In a world of scarce resources, the agricultural sector needs
sustainable, effcient solutions in order to nourish expanding populations. It is therefore crucial that
we work to distribute water more equally.
(SUEZ, 2016, emphasis added)

Similar modernist promotion and elite capture of the state (resulting in vast subsidies for
agribusiness) happen in many parts of the world (e.g. Vos and Marshall, 2017).

1.4 The Subtleties of Water Injustice

Although water injustices sometimes become manifest through large or even violent con-
ficts, they more often occur in less visible ways, where resistance or disputes may (seem
to) be absent altogether. For example, the ferce global policy effort to make water rights
transferable by formalizing and standardizing rights systems typically results in silent
water take-overs, rather than open disputes. Use of technological or policy innovations,
such as deep tube wells, or fnancializing the water sector, can also induce silent water
take-overs.
Throughout the world, we can witness how social norms and scientifc standards in
water governance naturalize and normalize injustices and inequities (Boelens and Vos,
2012), with water policies often sanctioning rather than questioning concentration of water
rights in the hands of a few private powerful actors (e.g. Loftus, 2009; Swyngedouw, 2005;
Venot and Clement, 2013). Neoliberal discourses have become so dominant in framing the
terms of water debate that they have come to be accepted as normal or inevitable, making
it diffcult to recognize them for what they are: deeply ideological ideas (Achterhuis et al.,

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Introduction 13

2010). Eduardo Galeano underscored the subtlety of this process in News about the
Nobodies:
Up till recently, poverty was the fruit of injustice. But times have changed greatly: now, poverty is the
just punishment that ineffciency deserves, or simply a way of expressing the natural order of things.
The world has never been so unfair in dividing up resources, but the system that governs the world –
now discreetly called “the market economy” – takes a daily dip in the bath of impunity.
(Galeano, 1995: 1)

Water (in)justices involve both quantities and qualities of water, the modes of accessing
and distributing water, and the meanings, discourses, truths and knowledge that shape
water control (Zwarteveen and Boelens, 2014). Therefore, water conficts include ques-
tions about decision making, authority and legitimacy, which extend into questions of cul-
ture, territory and identity.

1.4.1 Equalization, Commensuration and Inclusion

Modernist water policies emphasize unity and uniformity in water governance, whereby the
state is increasingly instrumentalized to protect and enforce market rules and forces. At the
same time, the state’s monopoly on water rule-making, rule-enforcement and dispute-solv-
ing overrides all other tribunals or rights frameworks. A fundamental principle is blanket
enforcement throughout national territory, based on the proclaimed equality of all citizens.
Though the referent model of “being equal” is, in practice, often based on the class, gender
and cultural standards and interests of a powerful minority, the image of a neutral legal-jus-
tice framework is strong.
The diversity of context-based, “intangible” water rights systems in most countries
poses a tremendous problem for water bureaucrats, planners, and international companies.
The diverse authorities, territorial autonomies and community rules make state domina-
tion or free-market operation very diffcult (Achterhuis et al., 2010; Boelens, 2015b). To
bring about a uniform property framework, the construction and functioning of law in
social action tends to be conveniently ignored. Participation and consensus-seeking policy-
making presume the commensurability of values and equal power of social groups to voice
their ideas and preferences. Formal water laws and institutions are presented as objective,
rational systems for designing societal life, rather than as deeply cultural and political
products, developed and enacted by societal groups, classes, and governmental agents who
ply their strategies to foster their interests (Benda-Beckmann et al., 1998; Roth et al., 2015;
cf. Sousa-Santos, 1995).
Mainstream water policies and discourses tend to pay much attention to the issues of
“participation,” “integration,” and “recognition of local rights and cultures,” appealing
to common-sense notions of justice and equality. The hidden principle, however, is the
active destruction of “inconvenient otherness” through subtle strategies of “managed multi-
culturalism” (Baud, 2010; Boelens, 2015b; Hale, 2002), while “convenient expressions”
of local water-rights pluralism are, as much as possible, included in the modern private

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14 Boelens, Vos, Perreault

property market economy. Compared to the earlier top-down state-centric and neoliberal
policy interventions, we see here how current ideas about redistribution, private property
rights and market-based governance represent a shift. Rather than being based on explicit
top-down hierarchies, visible rulers, exclusion, and sometimes brutal violence, modern
equality ideologies aim to subtly seduce, include, and make equal. Indeed, in modern water
policies everybody is potentially equal and should be equal.
Evidence from around the world regarding water allocation and administration makes
clear, however, that this ideology of “equality of all” is not used to abolish the enormously
unequal distribution of water property or stop water grabbing. Rather, making water users
equal means: oppressing their deviation from the formal rules, norms and rights. Modern
water policies impose “equalization.” Following universalistic good governance discourse,
governments differentiate “responsible water citizens,” who are state- and market-compat-
ible, from “irrational water spoilers,” who devise their own rights systems. Nowadays,
all too often, “making water use and rights rational” has become a missionary process of
supplanting relationships of community, local property, knowledge and ethics, often in
combination with large-scale water transfer and grabbing practices.

1.4.2 Knowing Water, Naturalizing Water Solutions, and Expertocracy

Water policy plans and intervention models commonly rely on professional-discipline
knowledge and the expertise of international water research centers, and are imple-
mented by established water bureaucracies (Linton, 2010; Molle et al., 2009;
Whatmore, 2009). Water problems are increasingly framed in global expert terms, pro-
moting standardized expert solutions, assuming that these have generalizable answers
and global applicability (see e.g. GWP, 2000; UNDP-CLEP, 2008; World Bank, 1999,
2012). At the same time, emerging proposals for dealing with water management issues
increasingly look to private actors. Assuming that water has globally commensurable
meanings and values, and treating water as a scarce and “therefore” economic good, is
closely coupled with this tendency to extend expert roles and involve the private sector,
even in water allocation and management functions (e.g. Duarte and Boelens, 2016;
Mollinga, 2001). This shows how water knowledge production and implementation is
deeply political.
When examining water (in)justice practices it is therefore important to consider that
knowledge about water, including scientifc knowledge, does not spring from natural real-
ity but instead helps to construct these realities. Water knowledge and truth claims are inter-
nal to the socio-natural networks that constitute reality (e.g. Foucault, 1980; Whatmore,
2009). The choice and classifcation of concepts and their interrelationships do not repre-
sent the nature of water control, but the human intentions to tame and order water affairs.
As Haraway (1991) argued, they sprout from situated knowledge. Water knowledge, power
and truth all depend on and reproduce each other. As Foucault (1975) argued, power can-
not be exercised without knowledge, and knowledge necessarily engenders power. Power,
therefore, produces water reality and knowledge claims.

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Introduction 15

Naturalizing one version of “water reality” helps justify and depoliticize unequal
water orders – as sedimented hegemonic practices (Mouffe, 2005, 2007). Dominant
water-governance discourses, for instance, aim to unequivocally present the water prob-
lems and solutions. They tend to invalidate other types of knowledge, making it diffcult
or impossible to see other, “inconvenient” (non-dominant) water realities. Global dis-
courses and transnational relationships infuence the articulation of water problems and
promote authorized water knowledge and governance models, applying concepts that
often obscure the contextual and political nature of water management. Universalizing
policy concepts such as “good governance,” “rational and effcient water use,” “decen-
tralization,” “transparency and accountability,” or “best practices,” often conceals and
reproduces inequalities and misrecognition (Boelens and Vos, 2012). These presumably
value-free, depoliticized concepts, cornerstones of leading water-policy models, erase
context, situatedness and power.

1.4.3 Some Important Expressions in Water Use and Governance Practice

1.4.3.1 Formalizing Local Water Rights amidst Legal Plurality
and Divergent Water Securities
Water rights express the legitimacy of claims to water and to water management decision-
making. Rights need endorsement by an authority that has legitimacy in the eyes of users
and non-users and that is able to enforce these rights. State offcials commonly equate
“legal” and “legitimate” water rights, but local user groups usually differentiate between
the two and challenge this confation: in many water-control settings around the world,
water-user collectives consider that they have several authorities, both state and non-
state, simultaneously – each representing different socio-legal systems and often taking
divergent positions on the legitimacy of water-use claims (Perreault, 2008; Rasmussen,
2015). These different water-rights regimes coexist, complement or even contradict each
other. In this way, users actively produce inter-legality and pluralism. Everyday water
control is a product of this pluralism (cf. Cleaver and de Koning, 2015; Roth et al., 2005;
Sousa-Santos, 1995).
Despite this empirical, context-based heterogeneity of what constitutes a “water right,”
water rights and property relations in modern global expert centers (and government insti-
tutes and intervening agencies that follow their advice) tend to consider water rights as
merely standard black boxes that juxtapose the frameworks of positivist technical and
economists’ water science (e.g. GWP, 2000; Ringler et al., 2000; World Bank, 2012).
Habitually, water law and rights are seen both as instruments to “engineer” water society
and as the standards according to which existing water reality is judged (Roth et al., 2005).
Indeed, this follows from a long tradition in which water rights have been treated under the
paradigm of state-defned, centralized water control. Today, this state-centric water rights
model is fused with a market-focused neoliberal paradigm.
One enduring supposition of modernist water policy programs is that standardized rule-
making will beneft all and produce effcient rights, mutually benefcial exchange, and

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16 Boelens, Vos, Perreault

rational organization (Boelens, 2009). In direct relation to this, there is a widespread

assumption in policymaking that “formalizing local water rights” is the key to increasing
water security for local user groups – as also attested by international fnancing institutions’
worldwide support for numerous large water-rights formalization programs (e.g. Soussan,
2004; World Bank, 2012). Hernando de Soto, the infuential World Bank policy scholar,
for example, explains that the lack of such universal norms in “closed” countries in the
South is the main reason they cannot fully enter the world system of capitalist exchange.
Thus, the civilizing mission of the academic community would be “to help governments
in developing countries build formal property systems that embrace all their people” (De
Soto, 2000: 180).
Not just mainstream policies but equally many critically engaged policy scholars and
benevolent “pro-poor advocates” assume that formally recognizing customary water rights
will directly enhance water security for marginalized communities. Nevertheless, many
in-depth studies have shown how the widespread (techno-economic and rationalized-
legalistic) recognition of local water access and water control rights contradicts existing
use and allocation practices, authority, and management modes. This might weaken rather
than strengthen water security, with a negative impact for food and livelihood security
(Boelens and Seemann, 2014; Lankford et al., 2013; Seemann, 2016; Zeitoun et al., 2016).
As one country example out of many, Peru has received US$200 million from the Inter-
American Development Bank to foster water rights security by formalization while battling
the country’s “limited water culture” and “irrational water use” (Ministerio de Economia y
Finanzas, 2007: 3, 24). In the modernist minds of the Bank’s formalizers and national elites,
these two are seen as two facets of a single objective. That is no coincidence, since local
understandings of water-rights autonomy and water security tend to be a primary obstacle for
formal rule-makers and intervening agents. Their multi-faceted, dynamic character makes
them intangible and unrecognizable in positivist, bureaucratic, neoliberal frameworks.

1.4.3.2 Payment for Environmental Services

In many of the world’s regions, national governments and international policy, develop-
ment and funding agencies have worked to re-scale water governance structures: upwards
to transnational governance scales and simultaneously downwards to local governments
operating in public-private partnerships. Cities, often situated in downstream areas, seek
regular, reliable supplies of suffciently clean water, which governments, drinking water
utilities and industries increasingly want to secure through Payment for Environmental
Services (PES) schemes, which have boomed in Costa Rica, Colombia, Ecuador,
Mexico, South Africa, China, and the Philippines, among others. The idea behind PES
schemes is that downstream users pay upstream land managers to implement land and
water conservation measures, such as erosion control, afforestation programs, reduced
use of pesticides, and nature reserves around water sources. These measures should
increase base fows, reduce peak fows and increase water quality. PES schemes are
portrayed as “win-win” deals: city dwellers and industries pay for a necessary service

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Introduction 17

and upstream farmers receive extra income (Büscher and Fletcher, 2015; Duarte-Abadía
and Boelens, 2015; Rodríguez-de-Francisco et al., 2013). PES schemes are presented
as alternatives to state-imposed land-use planning and conservation in the catchment
areas, applying voluntary free-market principles of supply and demand for ecosystem
services. This principle reduces water security to a monetary value relationship (Castro,
2007; Robertson, 2007).
In practice, many of these schemes do not function as predicted. City dwellers, water util-
ities and industries are unwilling to pay for conservation measures upstream. This is partly
because increased water security is attained only in the long run, and effects of conserva-
tion on water fows are hard to measure (Schröter et al., 2014). Many PES schemes receive
large subsidies and conservation measures rely more on imposed conservation regulation
than on free-market initiatives (Schomers and Matzdorf, 2013). On balance, PES favors
the largest landowners but tends to have negative effects on most upstream communities,
particularly the poorest families, who lose their livelihoods (Rodríguez-de-Francisco et al.,
2013). Moreover, these PES schemes are usually imposed non-democratically, favoring the
companies that install them. Policy discourses highlight win-win neoliberal “PES-speech”
in the foreground, commodifying production/reproduction relations, and sidelining alter-
native ways to organize conservation. In many cases, PES deeply transforms vernacular
community reciprocity bonds (cf. Li, 2011; Neumann, 2004; Rodríguez-de-Francisco and
Boelens, 2015; Sullivan, 2009).

1.4.3.3 Water Rationality and Effciency

Many of today’s water deprivations are justifed or presented on grounds of privileging
effcient uses and users over ineffcient ones (Achterhuis et al., 2010; Bakker, 2010; Ioris,
2016; World Bank, 2012). However, concepts such as irrigation effciency, water produc-
tivity, or crop water requirements are not socially neutral (Roa-García, 2014; Zwarteveen,
2006). These dominant analytical/policy tools are developed in particular scientifc/policy
settings. They have political, material, and discursive force.
Policy documents often relate the need for water effciency to the necessity to produce
more food for the growing population, easily leading to promotion of “effcient” technolo-
gies such as drip irrigation. However, irrigation water that percolates beyond a crop’s root
zone is often not “lost”: it is used downstream, or pumped again from the groundwater.
Consequently, installing drip technology concentrates water for the early implementer, but
does not necessarily generate more crops per drop (Seckler, 1996; Venot and Clement,
2013).
Similar problems arise when solely “economic water effciency” criteria are applied, to
“increase water productivity” by introducing water pricing and marketing, and “maximize
water allocation effciency” from a neoclassical economist’s perspective. Policies based on
such notions generally entail full-cost water pricing to encourage water saving and reallo-
cate water to the economically “most effcient” user. Also here, different stakeholders’ nor-
mative frameworks are likely to hold different notions of values, risks, costs and benefts.

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18 Boelens, Vos, Perreault

Reallocating water (rights) to gain “productive effciency” implies that some groups win
and others lose access to water (Boelens and Vos, 2012; Budds, 2009; Moore, 1989).
Aside from technical and economic reasoning, effciency/ineffciency labels imply
moral judgment. Blaming ineffcient farmers is a powerful discursive practice with
political consequences. For example, Diemer and Slabbers (1992, 7) found that many
project planners classifed African farmer-managed irrigation systems as “unscientifc
and wasteful.” According to Gelles (2010), project planners in the Majes project in
Peru found that local farmers lacked water culture and were morally backward. In gen-
eral, in many places around the world, irrigation modernization and economic devel-
opment is promoted as a civilization project based on moral superiority/inferiority
relationships.

1.4.3.4 Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability Certifcation Schemes

As we have argued above, transnational agro-export companies have depleted and con-
taminated water sources the world round. They have accumulated land- and water-use
rights at local users’ expense, and appropriated water without formal use rights. Partly in
response to critics, and partly to secure stable supplies, food industry and retail companies
from the Global North demand environmental and social certifcation of producers that
export fresh products to Europe and the US. The standards increasingly include criteria
that inhibit and prescribe certain water management practices. The certifcations form part
of a wider politics of corporate social responsibility, that alters local-global relations of
production and water use. Multinational export companies proudly display the multiple
certifcations on signs at the entrances to their production units and on their websites.
However, the standards are problematic because they do not take into account local diver-
sity in social and biophysical conditions: they are expensive to obtain and thus exclude
smallholders from the export market, they seek to standardize smallholder practices, they
are non-democratic, and in many instances they fail to prevent depletion or contamination
of water sources (Vos and Boelens, 2015; Vos and Hinojosa, 2016).
Private environmental and social standards are defned by a variety of organizations,
which are dominated by major retail companies. These dominant standards reshape knowl-
edge frameworks and truth claims about water realities (Goldman, 2011). Producers’ com-
pliance with production standards is monitored by third-party private audit companies that
usually inspect production facilities once a year. Competition between the various stand-
ards and also among the audit companies contributes to superfcial inspections and permis-
sive enforcement (Vos and Boelens, 2016).
Retailers and the food industry have the power to set norms and reshape local and global
food production (Roth and Warner, 2008), so ideas and norms regarding “good” agriculture
change, increasingly externalizing water communities’ knowledge, production and govern-
ance rationalities (Boelens and Zwarteveen, 2005; Van der Ploeg, 2008). This way, water
certifcation regimes become gauges to detect and “correct” deviations from the universal
norms (Moore, 1989; Venot and Clement, 2013).

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Introduction 19

1.5 Water Governmentalities

As the previous sections have shown, producing water knowledge, rules, policies and tech-
nology concentrates increasingly on aligning people, their mind-sets, identities and resources
with the interests of dominant water-sector groups. Modernist water development projects
deploy forms of governmentality through water. They re-pattern water space and territory,
which reshapes rules and authority; redirects labor and production; induces new norms
and values; and rearranges people in new, externally driven techno-political constellations.
Many designs underlying these water-development projects, far beyond just installing a new
hydraulic technology, introduce new management hierarchies, commoditized (or privatized)
water services, new legal frameworks, often resulting in a new socio-nature hostile to the
autonomy or even survival of existing water cultures and user collectives. New hydraulic
power grids, commonly linked to nation-state authority, markets and companies, de-pattern
and re-pattern local water control systems. So, natural resource governance efforts are based
on truth regimes that aim to (re)produce socio-natural order and acceptance via the particular
positioning of and control over natural resources, infrastructure, investments, knowledge, and
ultimately, whole population groups (e.g. Harris, 2012; Scott, 1990; Swyngedouw, 2009).
As Foucault (1991) argued when examining these “government-mentalities” (i.e. the
rationality and strategies of dominant groups to conduct subjects’ conduct), rulers increas-
ingly deploy governance tactics to economically manage and direct society instead of legal-
bureaucratic regimes based on sovereign power (cf. Dean, 1999). Thus, aside from the direct
rule of law, two forms of governmentality are prominent in water governance: disciplinary
and neoliberal governmentality. Disciplinary governmentality works through normalizing
power (Foucault, 1975). Deviant thinking and acting is oppressed, where possible through
self-correction based on internalized norms. Disciplinary power “produces” a model water
user: effcient, responsible and modern.
Neoliberal governmentality works by directing people’s thinking and acting accord-
ing to “rational” economic principles. People are approached as rational actors who stra-
tegically pursue their personal interests, based on calculated costs and benefts (Boelens
et al., 2015; Fletcher, 2010). Neoliberal principles such as private water rights, decen-
tralized decision-making and volumetric water pricing are based on the assumption that
maximum welfare will be reached if all citizens behave as proft-maximizers seeking
the right incentives. In water governance, the assumption is that neoliberal incentives
will automatically yield maximum investments and effcient, productive water use. In
neoliberal logic, the state’s role is to install market rationalities in all spheres of society
(Foucault, 2008; cf. Harvey, 2003; Hayek, 1960). Indeed, neoliberal water governance,
far from laissez-faire, builds on aggressive state vigilance and intrusion. Or as Bourdieu
(1998: 86) stated, “what is portrayed as an economic system governed by iron laws of a
social nature is actually a political system that can be set up only with offcial political
powers’ active or passive complicity.”
Currently practiced combined modes of disciplinary and neoliberal governmen-
talities present political choices (e.g. distributive and representational questions) as

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20 Boelens, Vos, Perreault

technical-managerial options. Denying any connections between power and knowledge,

and assuming new-institutionalist rationality (viewing humans as rational individuals pur-
suing only self-interested goals), have pervaded mainstream water-policy discourses: wide-
ranging redistributions of water and authority seem natural, inevitable and scientifcally
rational (Espeland, 1998; McCarthy and Prudham, 2004).

1.6 Water Conficts and Water Justice Struggles: Entwining Different

Layers, Scales and Actors
1.6.1 Conficts over Resources, Rights, Authority and Discourses
Water control conficts are everywhere. Disputes and struggles may occur over how
water is to be used, distributed, managed, treated or talked about (e.g. Donahue and
Johnston, 1998; Dimitrov, 2002). What follows from the previous section is that they
cannot always easily be witnessed. Water conficts may be open and visible, but often
also happen in subtler, less directly visible ways. Moreover, as Frances Cleaver explains
in Chapter 13, marginalized user groups appear to accept the large-scale environmental
injustices inficted upon them. In those cases, they avoid opposition and instead accom-
modate unequal water-based relationships, trying to give them meaning in local histori-
cal, cultural and political constellations. Such accommodation of water injustices may
be based on mechanisms of control over grassroots groups (e.g. resulting from oppres-
sion by political, economic and military powers, or from disciplining through symbolic
violence and discursive powers), or on grassroots groups’ strategies of how to deal with
the asymmetrical interdependencies and power relationships they experience vis-à-vis
dominant private and state actors.
In overt and covert water conflicts and struggles for water justice, there is more at
stake than just water distribution. We distinguish four interrelated echelons (“Echelons
of Rights Analysis,” Boelens, 2015b; Boelens and Zwarteveen 2005; Zwarteveen
et al., 2005). At a basic level, there is the dispute concerning access to and use of
water-related resources: which users and use sectors have access to water, hydrau-
lic infrastructure, and the material and financial means to use and manage water
resources. At the next level, there is contestation over the contents of rules and rights:
formulation and substance of water rights, management rules and laws that determine
water distribution and allocation. And at a third echelon, we see the struggle over
the authority and legitimacy to make and enforce those water rights and rules: who
has decision-making power about questions of water use, allocation and governance.
And fourth, there is the conflict among discourses: the power-knowledge regimes that
articulate water problems and solutions, and that defend or impose particular water
policies and water hierarchies. As we have argued above, water policy and scientific
discourses make fixed linkages and standard logical relations among concepts, actors,
objects, defining their identity, position and hierarchies, and forcefully defining prob-
lems and their solutions.

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Introduction 21

These four echelons are intrinsically related; confict and outcomes at one echelon defne
the contents and contestations at the next echelon. The struggle over discourses, the fourth
echelon, is about inducing a coherent regime of representation that strategically links the
previous echelons together and makes their contents and linkages appear natural, as the
morally or scientifcally best “order of things.” For example, a particular discourse will also
defend the decision-making arrangements and authorities it considers convenient, who in
turn will formulate and enforce the rules; according to which the resources are to be dis-
tributed. Therefore, contestations range from opposing current distributive inequalities and
undemocratic forms of representation to challenging the very politics of truth themselves,
including the identities that are imposed upon marginalized water cultures and user groups
by state and market-based governmentalities.

1.6.2 Water Justice Interlinking Multiple Dimensions, Knowledge,

Scales and Actors
Attention to water rights’ cultural embeddedness, plurality and complexity requires a shift
of focus, away from exclusive attention to formal structures and regulations towards an
interest in how and by whom water rights and governance forms are produced, reproduced
and transformed in particular ecological and cultural settings. It examines how people
experience law in the context of their own local society and use it as a crucial resource
in their day-to-day aspirations and struggles (Benda-Beckmann et al., 1998; Roth et al.,
2005, 2015). Therefore, local water societies often see water rights framed as instruments
to arrange their systems and as weapons to defend themselves. Far from egalitarian micro-
societies, they are an effort, a process and a capacity to merge collectivity with diversity
and to exercise mutual dependence on nature and on each other (Boelens et al., 2014).
In their struggles, these water cultures continually reinvent rules and identities and tradi-
tions. Water user collectives and federations know that their existence depends on defend-
ing their water rights and rule-making spaces and will continue to create “non-conformity”
and “complexities,” while at the same time trying to conquer representation and achieve
changes in the policy institutes, intervention projects, and the state institutional network.
Most water-user communities integrate with national and international policies, mar-
kets and partnerships, embedding local in global and global in local. Conficts over water
governmentality involve community-state contradictions and conficts among local small-
holders and new water lords, as well as the transnational extractive industries and glo-
balized policy-making that operates across spatial scales (cf. McCarthy, 2005; Perreault,
2015). These processes and relationships comprise patterns of multiple actors, scales, and
trans-local networks arising in many places – “the continuous reorganization of spatial
scales is an integral part of social strategies to combat and defend control over limited
sources and/or a struggle for empowerment” (Swyngedouw and Heynen, 2003: 912–13).
In many regions, grassroots organizations build multi-actor federations to contest the neo-
liberalization of water, the negative effects of dams, water pollution, separation of water
rights and decision-making powers from local livelihoods, and policies and actions that

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22 Boelens, Vos, Perreault

attack rights pluralism, polycentrism and the integrity of their territories (e.g. Bebbington
et al., 2010; Hoogesteger and Verzijl, 2015; Romano, 2017). Such networks also show
that state, scientifc, and policy-making communities are not monolithic, but refect the
track records of their social conquests. Many state employees, professionals and scientists
struggle “from within,” forming alliances with water-user groups to capture cross-scale
opportunities. Social movements also need to frame their demands in ways that align
with values and ideas of national political parties and/or the general public (Benford and
Snow, 2000).
Therefore, fundamentally, struggles over water are contests over resources and
legitimacy, the right to exist as water-control communities, and the ability to define
the nature of water problems and solutions. By connecting material with cultural-
political struggles, they demand both the right to be equal and the right to be different.
Increasingly, affected water user communities combine their struggle against highly
unequal resource distribution with their demands for greater autonomy and sharing
in water authority. The intimate connection among people, water, space, and identity
fuses their struggles for material access and control of water-use systems (distribu-
tive justice) and ecological defense of neighborhoods and territories (socio-ecological
integrity) with their battle over the right to culturally define and politically organize
these socio-natural systems (cultural and representational justice) (cf. Fraser, 2000;
Martínez-Alier, 2002; Schlosberg, 2004; Young, 1990). Therefore, to understand
“water justice,” as we did when starting this chapter, we move from universalist,
descriptive theories that prescribe what water justice “should be,” to focus on under-
standing how people on-the-ground experience and define water justice. In the formal
water policy and governance world, liberal, socialist, or neoliberal models of “equal-
ity” have generally tended to reflect the dominant water society’s elitist, capitalist
or scientific-expert mirror – ignoring peasant, indigenous and women’s interests and
views. Beyond abstract, de-humanized models, but also beyond localized romanti-
cism, we urge a systematic exploration of the sources of water injustice, local views
on fairness, and the impacts of formal laws and justice policies on human beings
and ecosystems. Indeed, understanding water justice calls for a contextual, grounded,
relational approach (Joy et al., 2014; Perreault, 2014; Roth et al., 2005; Zwarteveen
and Boelens, 2014).
As the following chapters demonstrate, appeals for greater water justice call for com-
bining grassroots, academic, activist, and policy action: engagement across differences
(Schlosberg, 2004). Accordingly, we may understand “water justice” as:

the interactive societal and academic endeavor to critically explore water knowledge production,
allocation and governance and to combine struggles against water-based forms of material dispos-
session, cultural discrimination, political exclusion and ecological destruction, as rooted in particular
contexts.
(Boelens, 2015a: 34)

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Introduction 23

Water justice research and action, therefore, engages diverse water actors, to see multiple
water truths and world views and to co-create transdisciplinary knowledge about under-
standing, transforming and distributing nature. It explores connections among the diverse
ways of struggling for water justice. Water justice research involves critical engagement
with water movements, dispossessed water societies, and interactive design of alternative
hydrosocial orders. These alternatives cannot be engineered by scientists or policy-makers;
they result from interweaving cross-cultural water knowledge and cross-societal pressures
from the bottom up.

1.7 The Book’s Contents

The following 18 chapters aim to provide a detailed understanding of the questions, com-
plexities and opportunities for research and action regarding the issue of “water justice.”
Four sections address a broad variety of themes, approaches, geographical regions, and
research, policy and action strategies. Even though most authors take a political ecol-
ogy perspective, the book does not advocate one overall perspective on water justice.
Nor does it suggest the opposite, the relativist trap that gives equal value to all particu-
lar views on social justice. As we have argued above, the book’s chapters and authors
take seriously the idea of “engagement across notions of justice – something crucial to
notions of justice as recognition and political process” (Schlosberg, 2004: 532). Water-
justice theories, scholars and movements bring together a critical plurality of contexts,
experiences, views, tools and strategies. What is common to all our authors is that they
expressly engage and identify with those groups in society that have the least rights and
power over water access and decision-making. They all aim to support their water secu-
rity struggles.
The book is divided into four sections, which examine different water justice themes
and their associated social and political struggles. Each section begins with an introductory
essay to introduce and contextualize key themes in the section’s chapters.
The chapters in Part I deal with the theme of “Repoliticizing water allocation”: they
provide insight into the multi-layered contents and everyday working rationality of on-
the-ground water rights and governance systems, and unfair water distribution and water-
grabbing. These chapters highlight water injustices in common rural or urban water
management frameworks and cultural realities that are often omitted from scientifc water
studies, legal frameworks, and policy proposals. Other chapters tell about the overt and
covert ways in which intervening agents and elites take over water resources.
The chapters in Part II examine dominant policies and intervention projects fostering
“Hydrosocial de-patterning and re-composition,” and struggles to build alternative socio-
natural and techno-political confgurations. State, market, and expert networks use water
interventions to reshape existing water societies according to their imageries or ideolo-
gies, often favoring specifc interests and promoting specifc developmental pathways.
These chapters explain how these changes or clashes may provoke more or less open water

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24

24 Boelens, Vos, Perreault

conficts, and unravels how such conficts evolve in contexts of highly differentiated power
relationships.
Part III chapters scrutinize cases and theories regarding “Exclusion and struggles for
co-decision.” The authors identify exclusion mechanisms and possible responses to and
solutions for water-injustice problems, inspired by the ways in which local user collectives,
sometimes through multi-level alliances with others (water citizen groups, professionals,
rights coalitions, tribunals, scholars and policy-makers), strategize to defend, reclaim and
re-embed their water rights, knowledge systems and governance forms.
Finally, Part IV chapters focus on theories and empirical cases that delve more deeply
into notions of “Governmentality, discourses and struggles over imaginaries and water
knowledge.” Clashes between discourses and imaginaries constitute an important dimen-
sion of water justice conficts. These struggles to protect and secure water resources as well
as water communities, identities, territories and cultures provide the creative, pragmatic
ingredients of strategies towards a more water-just world.
In short, the book does not promise easy one-size-fts-all analyses or silver-bullet solu-
tions, but instead explicitly engages with the complex linkages between ecosystems and
societies that characterize questions of what is fair, equitable and sustainable in water. By
identifying with those who stand to lose or remain marginal in contemporary water devel-
opment and policy reform processes, the book provides ingredients for new ways of think-
ing about and acting on water that make visible the many entanglements among culture,
power and knowledge.

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33

Part I
Re-Politicizing Water Allocation

Mural painting in Cochabamba, Bolivia.

Photo by Tom Perreault.

33

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34

Introduction: Re-Politicizing Water Allocation

Tom Perreault, Rutgerd Boelens, and Jeroen Vos

Flint
Who poisoned Flint? This question, easy to ask but harder to answer, draws attention to the
complex of political and economic institutions, processes, social relations and hydraulic
infrastructures involved in urban water governance. Flint, Michigan, a city of 100,000 peo-
ple northwest of Detroit, is a city in decline. Like other cities and towns in the US “rust belt,”
Flint’s landscape is marked by abandoned, decaying factories, brownfelds (urban spaces too
polluted for redevelopment) and crumbling infrastructure. Flint was the founding place of
General Motors, which still operates a plant there. Industry downsizing sacked thousands
of workers in the 1980s, driving the city’s poverty rate up sharply. De-industrialization and
population loss have left the city with a diminished tax base, which barely covers operat-
ing costs for basic city services, much less for environmental cleanup and infrastructure
upgrades. Some 40 percent of the city’s population lives below the federal poverty line, and
city residents, some 52 percent of whom are African-American, had experienced more than
their share of problems when, in 2014, they were confronted with another: poisoned water.
Prior to that year, Flint received its drinking water from Detroit’s water system, which in
turn drew from Lake Huron, part of North America’s Great Lakes system. Flint had plans
to connect to a new water pipeline, to be completed in 2016 or 2017, which would provide
Lake Huron water directly, at lower cost. As a further cost-saving measure, in April 2014,
Flint’s governor-appointed Emergency Manager decided that the city should no longer
draw water from Detroit’s system, and should instead begin drawing water from the Flint
River, which fows through the city. Like many waterways in and around rust belt cities,
the Flint River is acutely contaminated by decades of industrial waste and lax regulation,
as well as municipal waste seepage from aging sewer systems (cf. Perreault et al., 2012).
As early as August 2014, drinking water tests showed elevated levels of fecal coliform bac-
teria. Residents were instructed to boil water and the city began treating the water system
with chlorine. Between June 2014 and November 2015, Flint also experienced an outbreak
of legionnaires’ disease, which eventually claimed the lives of ten people.
Bacterial contamination was not even the gravest danger. In what proved to be cata-
strophic neglect of standard protocol, the city’s water managers failed to add anti-corrosion
agent to the water system, a failure with dramatic consequences for the city’s out-of-date
water infrastructure (Davidson, 2016). In the absence of anti-corrosion agent, the large
amounts of chlorine they added to the water system damaged its pipes, which in turn
released heavy metals into the water system. By October 2015, corrosion had become so
bad that the local General Motors plant announced plans to disconnect from the city water

34

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35

Part I Introduction 35

mains and build its own water system, because the water was damaging its machinery. For
the city’s population, and particularly its 9,000 children under age six (two-thirds of whom
are African-American), the greatest threat came from lead contamination (Grevatt, 2016;
Welburn and Seamster, 2016). Lead poisoning is most dangerous for the very young and
the very old. It can cause miscarriages or delay the growth of newborns. In young children,
lead can slow brain development and cause permanent cognitive impairment and develop-
mental disabilities. In older adults, lead poisoning is associated with memory loss, circula-
tory problems and a host of other ailments (Davidson, 2016).
Local outrage was met with institutional indifference. Offcials at Michigan’s Department of
Environmental Quality (DEQ) sought to downplay, denigrate and dismiss residents’ concerns
and even studies conducted by non-aligned scientists (Osnos, 2016; Welburn and Seamster,
2016). Efforts by state and city agencies to test lead levels were marked by incompetence or
gross negligence. The Detroit Free Press reported that DEQ offcials pressured city testers to
fnd and test samples with low lead levels, which they managed to do only by concentrating
25 percent of the samples in a single neighborhood that had updated water lines, and by exclud-
ing one sample that was extremely high (though it was later found to be accurate; Egan, 2015).
By August 2015, researchers at Virginia Tech University reported that over one-third of the
water samples they analyzed had elevated lead levels – including samples that contained lead
levels 16 times higher than permissible limits (Davidson, 2016; Welburn and Seamster, 2016).
In January 2016, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, under pressure to resign, fnally
offered an apology to the people of Flint. A legal settlement in March 2017 has forced
Michigan to spend US$87 million to upgrade water infrastructure throughout the city
(Bosman, 2017). While surely a welcome investment, this money comes fully three years
after the decision to disconnect from Detroit’s water system, and too late for the thousands
of children exposed to lead. An entire generation of children in Flint will grow up with the
fear of lead-related disabilities. This is no minor concern. In addition to the direct and indi-
rect health effects of lead poisoning, the long-term social implications of lead poisoning
(and related cognitive disabilities) can be devastating.
Snyder, an accountant by training, was elected governor in 2010 on a platform of fscal
austerity and pragmatic governance. He pursued his conservative economic program in
part through Michigan’s Emergency Manager Law, an explicitly undemocratic measure
that allows the governor to appoint city managers with broad decision-making powers
and the authority to override local governments. Perhaps not surprisingly, Michigan’s
Emergency Manager Law has had especially pernicious effects on African-Americans.
Approximately half the state’s African-American population now lives in a municipality
under Emergency Manager control (compared with only 2 percent of whites). Flint, a
majority African-American city, has had six different Emergency Managers in the past
13 years. Emergency Managers are accountable to the governor but not to the residents of
the city they manage, and they are primarily concerned with imposing fscal discipline.
Given their mandate for cost recovery and economic effciency, emergency managers look
to save money by increasing user fees, cutting costs and reducing operation and mainte-
nance services, including for drinking water. Throughout Michigan, Emergency Managers

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36

36 Perreault, Boelens, Vos

have treated municipal water systems as a source of revenue, raising water fees, reducing
service, privatizing systems, and cutting off service to those behind in their bills (Warikoo,
2017; Welburn and Seamster, 2016). For example, in Detroit, one of the poorest major
cities in the US, residents pay roughly twice the national average for their water service
(US$75/month for a family of four), and fees continue to rise. In reaction, some residents
choose not to pay their water bills, which has led to a sharp rise in service cutoffs (Clark,
2014). Similarly, Flint residents were already paying the highest water service rates in
the state when the lead crisis began in 2014. As in Detroit, some residents stopped paying
their water bills altogether, either because they could no longer afford the fees or because
they refused to pay for water that they could not drink. And in another echo of Detroit’s
management style, in 2016 Flint offcials announced they would begin shutting off water
service to some 1,800 residents who were behind on their water payments (Grevatt, 2016).
For cities like Flint and Detroit, the global fnancial crisis of 2008 compounded the long-
term economic decline associated with de-industrialization. These cities and their residents
have experienced capital fight and population loss (Detroit’s population declined from nearly
2 million in 1950 to under 680,000 in 2015). The US’s peculiar brand of neoliberalism has
meant that cities are largely left to succeed or fail on their own, with only minimal fnancial
support from states or the federal government. Environmental quality and basic services such
as drinking water and sanitation are among the sectors most impacted by fscal austerity. In a
city such as Flint, the cold logic of neoliberal urban governance, which systematically disad-
vantages low-income communities of color, is yet another form of structural racism, layered
on top of histories and geographies of uneven capitalist development, de-industrialization,
urban abandonment, white fight and racial segregation (Pulido, 2000, 2015).

Hidden Politics of Water Allocation: Justice, Equity and Rights

“Thirsty for justice” – so read one sign at a protest rally in Flint. But how do we understand
water justice in the context of Flint’s ongoing crisis? How do we make sense of the obvi-
ous inequities at play? As a feld of social action and academic inquiry, the “environmental
justice” concept fnds its roots in North America and struggles by African-American and
Latino communities, disproportionately burdened by pollution, or by industrial or other
undesirable land-uses, or by a lack of access to environmental amenities, such as green
spaces, clean air or water (e.g. Bullard, 1990; Holifeld, 2015; see also Pulido, 2000, 2015).
Understandings of environmental justice have traditionally been rooted in three comple-
mentary concepts of justice: socio-economic justice (“distribution”), representational jus-
tice (“participation”), and cultural justice (“recognition”) (see Fraser, 2000; Schlosberg,
2004). Distributive or socio-economic justice refers to the fair, equitable distribution of
environmental “goods” and “bads” in society. Procedural and representational justice refers
to equal access to and treatment by the formal institutions of law and state, or by local and
customary law systems. Are claimants given due process? Are they treated fairly by “the
system?” Surely these are necessary conditions, but far from suffcient for achieving social
justice, and other forms of justice are therefore necessary. Justice as “recognition,” or the

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