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This paper investigates how different dimensions of water – water as a public health concern, as an essential prerequisite for producing livelihoods, and as a cultural heritage or an element of spiritual practice – are taken up in international guidelines and certification schemes for the extractive sector. As a notoriously water-intensive economic activity, mining frequently infringes on other forms of water use. Simultaneously, the legal articulations and governance implications of the hydrological aspects of mining are complex, as commercial interactions associated with mining span the globe, governance efforts occur primarily at the national level and negative externalities manifest locally. Increasingly, transnational initiatives play a role in setting rules and norms for ‘responsible’ or ‘sustainable’ mining. We assess to what extent these rules and norms take into account the hydrological implications of mining, looking at eight guideline documents and ten certification schemes for mineral extraction that originate from international organizations, corporate groups, or multi-stakeholder initiatives. We then illustrate the influence of transnational institutions in two cases, one in Mongolia and one in South Africa. Our results show that water as a public health concern receives the most attention while water as a cultural heritage is reflected the least. However, all institutions in our sample that were devised over the last two years refer to the different dimensions of water use comprehensively.

Smallholder agriculturalists employ a range of strategies to adapt to climate variability. These adaptive strategies include decisions to plant different seed varieties, changes to the array of cultivated crops, and shifts in planting dates. Smallholder access to irrigation water is crucial to the adoption of such strategies, and uncertainty of water availability may prove to be a stimulating force in a smallholder’s decision to adjust their on-farm practices. Within smallholder irrigation systems, attributes at multiple levels influence water availability and collective action, and in the process play a role in adaptation: community-level governance institutions may influence trust in others and the ability to overcome appropriation and provisioning dilemmas, and, at the household-level, the availability of irrigation water and socioeconomic and demographic factors may influence farmer willingness to take on the risk of altering their on-farm practices. In this study we investigate smallholder adaptation in Kenya from multiple levels. Specifically, we identify the role of household- and community-level characteristics in shaping smallholder experimentation with different seed varieties. Standard ordinary least squares and logistic regressions are constructed to assess the influence of these interactions on smallholder adaptation. We further discuss the ability of smallholders to respond to poor water provisioning. Among the study’s findings is evidence that smallholders are more willing to employ adaptive measures if they have a limited capacity to irrigate.

©2018. The Authors. Water availability is a major factor constraining humanity's ability to meet the future food and energy needs of a growing and increasingly affluent human population. Water plays an important role in the production of energy, including renewable energy sources and the extraction of unconventional fossil fuels that are expected to become important players in future energy security. The emergent competition for water between the food and energy systems is increasingly recognized in the concept of the “food-energy-water nexus.” The nexus between food and water is made even more complex by the globalization of agriculture and rapid growth in food trade, which results in a massive virtual transfer of water among regions and plays an important role in the food and water security of some regions. This review explores multiple components of the food-energy-water nexus and highlights possible approaches that could be used to meet food and energy security with the limited renewable water resources of the planet. Despite clear tensions inherent in meeting the growing and changing demand for food and energy in the 21st century, the inherent linkages among food, water, and energy systems can offer an opportunity for synergistic strategies aimed at resilient food, water, and energy security, such as the circular economy.

Waterscapes with mining activities are often sites of water resource degradation and contestation. To prevent this, policy-makers deploy an increasing number of measures that purportedly align the interests of different water users. In Mongolia, mining-related protests led to the prohibition of mining in and close to rivers. However, implementation of these regulations has been slow. In this paper, we investigate why that is the case, drawing on an extended elaboration of the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework to disentangle the web of formal and informal rules, incentive structures, discourses, and other elements that characterize Mongolian miningscapes. We find that i) a combination of insufficient resources for lower-level actors, large areas to cover and high mobility of extractive operations, ii) a lack of information among implementing entities, combined with time pressure on decision-making and a lack of involvement of local actors, and iii) cultural norms and political context conditions that privilege the pursuit of private interests are key obstacles. Irrespective of these challenges, the prohibition of mining in riverbeds entrenches a social imaginary in the Mongolian governance framework that prioritizes water resources protection over resource extraction, offering a counterweight to dominant discourses that cast mining as a necessary requirement for social and economic development. Our analysis illustrates the usefulness of looking at implementation processes through the lens of mining- and waterscapes to identify how social power is embedded in social-political artifacts and impacts hydro-social outcomes. Strong discrepancies between the formal description of governance processes and interactions on the ground support the need to look at how processes play out in practice in order to understand implementation obstacles.

Unidad de excelencia María de Maeztu CEX2019-000940-M The recent phenomenon of large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) is associated with what has been described as a global agrarian transition. New forms of land exploitation and concentration have led to profound socio-environmental transformations of rural production systems in Latin America, South-East Asia and Sub Saharan Africa. Scholars have pointed out that the expansion of transnational land investments is often associated with detrimental social outcomes, has negative environmental impacts and can represent a potential impediment to the achievement of many SDGs. In this paper, our primary concern is on the mounting evidence that LSLAs preferentially target the commons, in the process altering long-standing customary resource governance systems. While it has been shown that in many instances of commons grabbing associated with LSLAs, different types of social conflict emerge, it is less clear what forms of social mobilization and organized collective re-actions are taking place to defend the commons and contest such processes of dispossession and enclosure. The main aim of this contribution is to fill this gap by synthesizing and describing the different typologies of social mobilization and collective re-actions that emerge as a result of commons grabbing associated with the transnational expansion of the agribusiness frontier. In order to do this our research synthesizes information from the Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas) shedding light on some of the key characteristics associated with the different forms and dynamics of social mobilization that are organized in reaction to agribusiness-related commons grabbing.

Beginning in 2002, Kenyan water governance transitioned from a monocentric, top-down system to one exhibiting traits of polycentricity. In this paper, we investigate the changes made to water policy following the 2002 reform, outcomes produced in a collection of community- and catchment-level user groups in the Mount Kenya region, and the conformance of these changes and outcomes with principles of polycentricity. A new framework is used to capture the complex institutional arrangements and interactions existing before and after the polycentric transformation. Unlike many previous polycentricity studies, the present research focuses primarily on the outcomes of the polycentric shift and determines if these correspond to predictions from polycentricity theory. We utilize survey data collected in 2013 from water managers, as well as archival research to interrogate congruence with principles of polycentricity. This study contributes to the broader discussion on polycentricity in two fundamental ways: (i) It documents the functioning of a water management system following a top-down imposed polycentric reform, and (ii) It empirically inspects whether these polycentric reforms have produced benefits predicted by polycentricity theorists, such as experimentation by local water users, increased collective action, and improved coordination between levels of management.

Kenyan river basin governance underwent a pioneering reform in the Water Act of 2002, which established new community water-management institutions. This article focuses on community water projects in the Likii Water Resource Users Association in the Upper Ewaso Ng’iro River basin on Mount Kenya, and the extent to which their features are consistent with Ostrom’s design principles of natural resource management. Although the projects have developed solid institutional structures, pressures such as hydroclimatic change, population growth, and water inequality challenge their ability to manage their water resources. Institutional homogeneity across the different water projects and congruence with the design principles is not necessarily a positive factor. Strong differences in household water flows within and among the projects point to the disconnection between apparently successful institutions and their objectives, such as fair and equitable water allocation.

The complex and interdisciplinary nature of socio-environmental (SE) problems has led to numerous efforts to develop organizing frameworks to capture the structural and functional elements of SE systems. We evaluate six leading SE frameworks, i.e., human ecosystem framework, resilience, integrated assessment of ecosystem services, vulnerability framework, coupled human-natural systems, and social-ecological systems framework, with the dual goals of (1) investigating the theoretical core of SE systems research emerging across diverse frameworks and (2) highlighting the gaps and research frontiers brought to the fore by a comparative evaluation. The discussion of the emergent theoretical core is centered on four shared structuring elements of SE systems: components, connections, scale, and context. Cross-cutting research frontiers include: moving beyond singular case studies and small-n studies to meta-analytic comparative work on outcomes in related SE systems; combining descriptive and data-driven modeling approaches to SE systems analysis; and promoting the evolution and refinement of frameworks through empirical application and testing, and interframework learning.

Small‐scale irrigation systems are important for agricultural productivity in dryland agroecosystems, particularly in areas where there is significant intra‐ and interannual changes in rainfall patterns. Institutional analysis of common‐pool resources has demonstrated the principles that tend to result in sustained water governance systems. However, previous work did not fully articulate the nested nature of institutions and how polycentric arrangements can play a role in both the formation and the ongoing maintenance of these governance systems. To better understand collective action across water user groups and decision‐makers at multiple governance levels, we undertake a multilevel analysis of Kenya's polycentric approach to water governance, in place since reforms were initiated in 2002. Survey and interview data indicate that in the postreform period, water users in Kenya's Upper Ewaso Ng'iro basin engaged in behaviors associated with collective action, including reduced water use by upstream users to address downstream users' needs. We examine the factors that promote collective action in the region, asking whether features associated with polycentric governance have helped to promote collective action. We find that the presence of multiple decision centers with overlapping authority over water governance functions creates necessary—but not sufficient—conditions for collective action to occur. Regulations and formal conflict resolution mechanisms provide incentives for water users to cooperate, while shared membership in regional Water Resource Users Associations facilitates informal opportunities for users to share information and build trust over time.

Concerns over rapid widespread changes in social-ecological systems and their consequences for biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, food security, and human livelihoods are driving demands for globally comprehensive knowledge to support decision-making and policy development. Claims of regional or global knowledge about the patterns, causes, and significance of changes in social-ecological systems, or ‘generalized knowledge claims’ (GKCs), are generally produced by synthesis of evidence compiled from local and regional case study observations. GKCs now constitute a wide and varied body of research, yet they are also increasingly contested based on disagreements about their geographic, temporal, and/or thematic validity. There are no accepted guidelines for detecting biases or logical gaps between GKC’s and the evidence used to produce them. Here, we propose a typology of GKCs based on their evidence base and the process by which they are produced. The typology is structured by three dimensions: i) the prior state of knowledge about the phenomenon of interest; ii) the logic of generalization underlying the claim; and iii) the methodology for generalization. From this typology, we propose a standardized approach to assess the quality and commensurability of these dimensions for any given GKC, and their ability to produce robust and transparent knowledge based on constituent evidence. We then apply this approach to evaluate two contested GKCs – addressing global biodiversity and large-scale land acquisitions – and in doing so demonstrate a coherent approach to assessing and evaluating the scope and validity of GKCs. With this approach, GKCs can be produced and applied with greater transparency and accuracy, advancing the goal of actionable science on social-ecological systems.

Large-scale acquisitions of agricultural land in developing countries have been rapidly increasing in the last 10 years, contributing to a major agrarian transition from subsistence or small scale farming to large-scale com- mercial agriculture by agribusiness transnational corporations. Likely driven by recent food crises, new bioenergy policies, and financial speculations, this phenomenon has been often investigated from the economic develop- ment, human right, land tenure and food security perspectives, while its hydrologic implications have remained understudied. It has been suggested that a major driver of large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) is the quest for water resources that can be used (locally) to sustain agricultural production in the acquired land. The appropri- ation of water resources associated with LSLAs has often been termed ‘water grabbing’, though to date a formal definition of such a normative and inherently pejorative term is missing. The intrinsic assumption is that the ac- quisition of water undergoes the same dynamics of unbalanced power relationships that underlie many LSLAs. Here we invoke hydrological theories of “green” and “blue” water flows to stress the extent to which water ap- propriations are inherently coupled to land acquisitions and specifically focus on blue water. We then propose a formal definition of blue water grabbing based both on biophysical conditions (water scarcity) and ethical impli- cations (human right to food). Blue water grabs are appropriations of irrigation (i.e., blue) water in regions affect- ed by undernourishment and where agricultural production is constrained by blue water availability. We use this framework to provide a global assessment of the likelihood that LSLAs entail blue water grabbing.

In Kenya, as in many developing countries, centralized control over water resources was implemented to improve agricultural productivity. By the 1980s, however, Kenya's postindependence policies of bureaucratic control were in disarray, and conflicts over water use were common. More recently, Kenya has embarked on a series of reforms that create a polycentric approach to water governance, in which decision making about water resources is shared among multiple, overlapping local, regional, and national authorities. Drawing on archival and field research, we examine these reforms in their historic context and argue that whereas centralized control was poorly adapted to the Kenyan context, polycentric governance is better suited to Kenya's variable social and ecological conditions and the available resources of its administrative agencies.

© 2017 IOP Publishing Ltd. Ensuring food security requires food production and distribution systems function throughout disruptions. Understanding the factors that contribute to the global food system's ability to respond and adapt to such disruptions (i.e. resilience) is critical for understanding the long-term sustainability of human populations. Variable impacts of production shocks on food supply between countries indicate a need for national-scale resilience indicators that can provide global comparisons. However, methods for tracking changes in resilience have had limited application to food systems. We developed an indicator-based analysis of food systems resilience for the years 1992-2011. Our approach is based on three dimensions of resilience: socio-economic access to food in terms of income of the poorest quintile relative to food prices, biophysical capacity to intensify or extensify food production, and the magnitude and diversity of current domestic food production. The socio-economic indicator has a large variability, but with low values concentrated in Africa and Asia. The biophysical capacity indicator is highest in Africa and Eastern Europe, in part because of a high potential for extensification of cropland and for yield gap closure in cultivated areas. However, the biophysical capacity indicator has declined globally in recent years. The production diversity indicator has increased slightly, with a relatively even geographic distribution. Few countries had exclusively high or low values for all indicators. Collectively, these results are the basis for global comparisons of resilience between countries, and provide necessary context for developing generalizations about resilience in the global food system.

Prior work has demonstrated the ability of common property systems to sustain institutional arrangements governing natural resources over long periods of time. Much of this work has focused on irrigation systems where upstream users agree to management arrangements that distribute water resources across both upstream and downstream users. A series of design principles have been identified that tend to lead to long-term sustained water management in these types of irrigation systems. However, this prior work has focused on the aggregate outcomes of the water system, and there has been little work evaluating the heterogeneity of water delivery within irrigation systems in developing countries. Heterogeneity of water resources within these systems has implications for livelihood outcomes because it can be indicative of a social, technological, and/or biophysical element facilitating or detracting from water delivery. We present a multilevel analysis of households nested within 25 smallholder irrigation systems in Kenya. Specifically, we examine household-level water outcomes (i.e., average flow rate and reliability of water provisioning) and the community-level and household-level drivers that affect household water outcomes. These drivers include physical infrastructure, institutional infrastructure, and biophysical variables. Much of the common-pool resource literature addresses the rule clusters responsible for natural resource outcomes, but by considering an array of both institutional and physical features and the water delivery outcomes produced at the household level, we offer new explanations for water disparities within smallholder-operated irrigation systems. We further discuss the ability of user-group members to reshape their water delivery outcomes through information exchange.

The increasing global demand for farmland products is placing unprecedented pressure on the global agricultural system and its water resources. Many regions of the world, that are affected by a chronic water scarcity relative to their population, strongly depend on the import of agricultural commodities and associated embodied (or virtual) water. The globalization of water through virtual water trade (VWT) is leading to a displacement of water use and a disconnection between human populations and the water resources they rely on. Despite the recognized importance of these phenomena in reshaping the patterns of water dependence through teleconnections between consumers and producers, their effect on global and regional water resources has just started to be quantified. This review investigates the global spatiotemporal dynamics, drivers, and impacts of VWT through an integrated analysis of surface water, groundwater, and root-zone soil moisture consumption for agricultural production; it evaluates how virtual water flows compare to the major ‘physical water fluxes’ in the Earth System; and provides a new reconceptualization of the hydrologic cycle to account also for the role of water redistribution by the hidden ‘virtual water cycle’.

While a growing proportion of global food consumption is obtained through international trade, there is an ongoing debate on whether this increased reliance on trade benefits or hinders food security, and specifically, the ability of global food systems to absorb shocks due to local or regional losses of production. This paper introduces a model that simulates the short-term response to a food supply shock originating in a single country, which is partly absorbed through decreases in domestic reserves and consumption, and partly transmitted through the adjustment of trade flows. By applying the model to publicly-available data for the cereals commodity group over a 17 year period, we find that differential outcomes of supply shocks simulated through this time period are driven not only by the intensification of trade, but as importantly by changes in the distribution of reserves. Our analysis also identifies countries where trade dependency may accentuate the risk of food shortages from foreign production shocks; such risk could be reduced by increasing domestic reserves or importing food from a diversity of suppliers that possess their own reserves. This simulation-based model provides a framework to study the short-term, nonlinear and out-of-equilibrium response of trade networks to supply shocks, and could be applied to specific scenarios of environmental or economic perturbations.

International audience; Spatially diverse trends in population growth, climate change, industrialization, urbanization and economic development are expected to change future food supply and demand. These changes may affect the suitability of land for food production, implying elevated risks especially for resource-constrained, food-importing countries. Wepresent the evolution of biophysical redundancy for agricultural production at country level, from 1992 to 2012. Biophysical redundancy, defined as unused biotic and abiotic environmental resources, is represented by the potential food production of `spare land', available water resources (i.e., not already used for human activities), as well as production increases through yield gap closure on cultivated areas and potential agricultural areas. In 2012, the biophysical redundancy of 75 (48) countries, mainly in North Africa, Western Europe, the Middle East and Asia, was insufficient to produce the caloric nutritional needs for at least 50% (25%) of their population during a year. Biophysical redundancy has decreased in the last two decades in 102 out of 155 countries, 11 of these went from high to limited redundancy, and nine of these from limited to very low redundancy. Although the variability of the drivers of change across different countries is high, improvements in yield and population growth have a clear impact on the decreases of redundancy towards the very low redundancy category. We took a more detailed look at countries classified as `Low Income Economies (LIEs)' since they are particularly vulnerable to domestic or external food supply changes, due to their limited capacity to offset for food supply decreases with higher purchasing power on the international market. Currently, nine LIEs have limited or very low biophysical redundancy. Many of these showed a decrease in redundancy over the last two decades, which is not always linked with improvements in per capita food availability.