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Political ecologists (PEs) have powerfully illuminated dynamics responsible for the uneven distribution of resources and risk in society. However, localized PE approaches have been criticized as in...

Claims abound regarding the empowering possibilities of community-based natural resources management (CBNRM). Social capital is seen as a key element towards that end, yet there is a paucity of cri...

Many cities are experiencing increasing water resource stress. In Cape Town, South Africa, surface water supplies are at a record low due to a multi-year drought crisis which began in 2015. This pa...

We analyze the relationship between perceptions of domestic water access, and quality, in relation community engagement. While others have suggested linkages between material conditions of water ac...

Coupling a hydrosocial perspective with institutional bricolage, this research considers possibilities for participatory water governance in Ashaiman, a peri-urban settlement of Accra, Ghana. We ex...

Public consultation has become an increasingly common form of democratic engagement. While critics have challenged the potential for public consultation to democratize policy-making due to existing...

A large and growing body of literature suggests that women and men often have differentiated relationships to water access, uses, knowledges, governance, and experiences. From a feminist political ecology perspective, these relationships can be mediated by gendered labour practices (within the household, at the community level, or within the workplace), socio-cultural expectations (e.g. related to notions of masculinity and femininity), as well as intersectional differences (e.g. race, income, and so forth). While these relationships are complex, multiple, and vary by context, it is frequently argued that due to responsibility for domestic provision or other pathways, women may be particularly affected if water quality or access is compromised. This paper reports on a statistical evaluation of a 478 household survey conducted in underserved areas of Accra, Ghana and Cape Town, South Africa in early 2012. Interrogating our survey results in the light of the ideas of gender differentiated access, us...

In this essay we investigate the discourses around the Human Right to Water (HRW) and the growing acceptance of the importance of this right in environmental justice (EJ) agendas. We argue that there is a need to constructively engage in conversations about what the HRW should mean and how it should be realized. We see significant promise in the aspirational value of the HRW as well as the potential discursive and conceptual possibilities it opens up. The HRW has the potential to directly question conditions of water access and governance and thus to also highlight key social and EJ concerns. The HRW debate also enables new legal bases of redress across scales, in addition to shifting discourses and aspirations that have the potential to reframe the terms of debate even when there seem to be “no alternatives.” For all of these reasons, we believe that there is value in further debates around the HRW with the goal of imagining more socially just and environmentally sustainable water futures for all.

Analyzing everyday environmental imaginaries from contemporary Turkey through the lenses of postcolonial, emotional-affective, and nature-society geographies, this article offers insights into shifting nature-society relations and possibilities. Based on a series of interviews and focus groups conducted in four sites (Istanbul, Ankara, Diyarbakir, and Sanliurfa), the concept of imaginative geographies of green is offered to highlight social and spatial difference as central to the articulation of green visions and movements. The research foregrounds several social and spatial gradients specific to the Turkish context, including East-West divides both within and beyond Turkey (i.e., Kurdish- Turkish and Eastern-Western Turkey, as well as notions of Turkishness and Europeanness ). The work also suggests that environmental imaginaries have deeply emotional, ambivalent, and power-laden associations. Apart from the implications of the work for enriched understandings of emergent environmental possibilities in this context, the conclusion also touches on ramifications for EU accession debates as well as new directions for work on environmental citizenship and movements in the global South.

The aim of this article is to critically interrogate articulations of environmental citizenship in contemporary Turkey. Specifically, I analyse articulations of environmental citizenship through citizen and activist narratives taken from interviews and focus group discussions. I argue that first, scalar focus on local spaces and individuated responsibility for action that emerge from the narratives are crucial to understand future environmental politics and possibilities in this context. Invoking recent discussions related to the politics and performativities of scale, in particular, allows consideration of the politics of visibility and other consequences of these scalar foci. Second, themes from narrative analysis show key convergences with Europeanization- and neoliberalization-related discourses and shifts. The resonance and overlap between these discourses and practices is significant, particularly as it shows citizen receptivity towards broader ideas related to increased citizen responsibility. As s...

This article contends that there is a need to more fully assess convergences and divergences between local environmental narratives in studies of environmental change and evaluations of sustainability. While much work has established the importance of being attentive to local knowledges, the possibility of evaluating points of overlap and dissonance between diverse narratives of change offers a particularly fruitful path for future work. Drawing on survey data and interviews related to irrigation-related changes in southeastern Turkey, narratives of environmental change offered by different actors are analysed to highlight key points of overlap and tension. Specifically, there is general agreement that degradation is occurring, even as actors disagree on the causal explanations for these changes. More revealing, narratives also share a tendency to validate techno-scientific approaches and continued state intervention, thus revealing crucial insights related to future agro-ecological possibilities in this ...

This article provides a critical reading of some of the gendered dimensions of emergent water governance regimes, specifically those related to the privatization, marketization and devolution of water resources management. After first providing an overview of recent nature–society contributions related to neoliberalization processes, the article comparatively evaluates insights with respect to the gender dimensions of recent shifts in water governance. I make several arguments at the intersection of relevant literatures. First, there is a need for gender theorists interested in water resources and nature–society debates to engage more with issues, theories and processes associated with neoliberalization. Second, there is a need for more attention to gender, feminist theory and approaches to inequality and socio-spatial difference in discussions of neoliberalized natures. Third, reading these literatures together reveals that there is a need to be self-reflexive and critical of elements of the gender and w...

What connects governance shifts in timber production in New Mexico with land politics in Brazil? In a word, neoliberalism. Increasingly, neoliberal ideas and policies have come to dominate the mana...

Adequate interpretations of the complex social processes that contribute to the transformation of aquatic ecosystems and subsequent conflicts over water demand an interdisciplinary perspective. In this special issue, we focus on the multiple causes of conflicts over water, sensitive to the complex interrelations between and within social and ecological phenomena that result in transformed and contested environments. The cases presented here--representing research carried out in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Thailand, Turkey, and the United States--emphasize three interrelated themes: the need to account for multiple spatial and temporal scales in analyzing conflicts over water and water-related resources; the complex character of environmental (or ecological) conflict; and questions of sustainability. Ultimately, more incisive understandings of the multiple causes of conflicts over water and aquatic resources are contingent on the integration of multiple disciplinary perspectives. This understanding will in turn ...

While many accounts of water and conflict focus on the possibility of future interstate conflict resulting from changing quantities and qualities of freshwater, a multiscalar approach helps to demonstrate the manifold, complex, and reciprocal relations between uses of water and social/political conflicts. Using Turkey's Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP) as a demonstration of the complex interrelations between water uses and social conflicts, this article illustrates the multiple temporalities, spatialities, and modalities of water and conflict geographies. Explicit attention to the historical and geographical dimensions of water and conflict in specific settings helps to complicate our understanding of these relationships, points to the importance of intrastate and local scales as potential sites of conflict (including the role of nonstate actors), and enriches discussions related to "sustainability" of water resource uses over time.