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Work on narrative, story, and storytelling has been on the rise across the humanities and social sciences. Building on significant work on these themes from Indigenous, Black, and Feminist scholarship, and other varied traditions, this piece explores and elaborates the potential regarding the elicitation, sharing, and analysis of stories for nature-society studies. Specifically, the piece examines core contributions along these lines to date, as well as the methodological, analytical, political, and transformative potential of story and storytelling to enrich, broaden, and deepen work in nature-society, political ecology, and environmental justice. All told, focus on story and storytelling, offers a number of relevant and rich openings to understand and engage complex, unequal, and dynamic socio-natures. While these elements have been present in nature-society work from some traditions and lines of inquiry, the time is ripe to broaden and deepen these engagements to more fully imagine, and respond to, key nature-society challenges.

In this special issue, we set out to analyze the dynamics, discourses, identities and material conditions that evolve with increasing urbanization and associated transformations of rural–urban (dis...

Small drinking water systems (SDWS) are widely identified as presenting particular challenges for drinking water management and governance in industrialised nations because of their small customer base, geographic isolation, and limited human and financial capacity. Consequently, an increasing number and range of scholars have examined SDWS over the last 30 years. Much of this work has been technocentric in nature, focused on SDWS technologies and operations, with limited attention to how these systems are managed, governed, and situated within broader social and political–economic contexts. This review seeks to provide a comprehensive overview of the governance dimensions of SDWS by drawing together existing literature relating to SDWS governance and exploring its key themes, research foci, and emerging directions. This overview is intended to provide guidance to scholars and practitioners interested in specific aspects of SDWS governance and a baseline against which researchers can position future work. The review identified 117 academic articles published in English-language journals between 1990 and 2016 that referred to some aspect of drinking water governance in small, rural, and Indigenous communities in industrialised nations. The articles’ content and bibliographic information were analysed to identify the locations, methods, journals, and themes included in research on SDWS governance. Further analysis of SDWS’ governance dimensions is organised around four questions identified as central to SDWS research: what governance challenges are experienced by SDWS, and what are their causes, solutions, and effects? Overall, the review revealed that the SDWS governance literature is piecemeal and fragmented, with few attempts to theorise SDWS governance or to engage in interdisciplinary, cross-jurisdictional conversations. The majority of articles examine North American SDWS, retain a technocratic orientation to drinking water governance, and are published in technical or industry journals. Such research tends to focus on the governance challenges SDWS face and proposed solutions to systems’ performance, capacity, and regulatory challenges. A small but growing number of studies examine the causal factors underpinning these governance challenges and their socio-spatially differentiated impacts on communities. Looking forward, the review argues for a more holistic, integrative approach to research on SDWS governance, building on a water governance framework.

Drawing on an analysis of water access and supply in Cape Town (South Africa) and Accra (Ghana), we illustrate that neoliberal and human right to water-oriented transformations co-constitute each other discursively, practically, and in policy implementation. Focusing on the transfer of policies and experiences (particularly conjoined demand management-free basic water programs and related social contestation), we provide examples of how neoliberal logics and human right to water principles intersect in evolving hybrid regulatory landscapes, which are characterized by contradiction. The human right to water makes a difference by influencing the drafting and implementation of water-related policies that affect to the lives of poor and vulnerable populations. Yet this process unfolds unevenly, as human right to water principles and practices are contextually applied, often alongside neoliberalizing policy instruments within evolving regulatory landscapes. Our analysis reveals the uneven effects of policy experimentation, transfer, and adaptation. The analysis shows that the principle of the human right to water affects the transformation of policy options circulating in the water sector, but it does so in relation to the institutional histories and policy options associated with uneven patterns of variegated neoliberalization in the water sector.

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...

This article engages a critical feminist analysis of a community-based participatory video (PV) process focused on water and sanitation issues in underserved settlements of Accra, Ghana and Cape Town, South Africa. With focus on emotions and empathy, we highlight these concepts in relation to participant narratives and shifting subjectivities. In so doing, we consider how arts based engagement (in this case, through participatory video), might serve to foster new ways of relating to water resources and water infrastructures. The analysis highlights how the participants themselves reflect on PV as a vehicle for personal transformation, knowledge co-creation and a shifting sense of their own ‘watered’ subjectivity. We find that the PV process helps to uncover and identify knowledge and process gaps on by enabling individuals and communities—often unheard—to participate in civic and political debates around resource governance. While many positive elements were emphasized, we also suggest that there is a need for critical engagements that also address challenges associated with these methods, including limitations with respect to fostering fundamental long-term change in communities. In the conclusion, we broaden beyond our individual case studies to consider implications for community engagement and citizenship practices in the realm of natural resource governance.

Household water insecurity has serious implications for the health, livelihoods and wellbeing of people around the world. Existing methods to assess the state of household water insecurity focus largely on water quality, quantity or adequacy, source or reliability, and affordability. These methods have significant advantages in terms of their simplicity and comparability, but are widely recognized to oversimplify and underestimate the global burden of household water insecurity. In contrast, a broader definition of household water insecurity should include entitlements and human capabilities, socio-cultural dynamics, and political institutions and processes. This paper proposes a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods that can be widely adopted across cultural, geographic, and demographic contexts to assess hard-to-measure dimensions of household water insecurity. In doing so, it critically evaluates existing methods for assessing household water insecurity and suggests ways in which methodological innovations advance a broader definition of household water insecurity.

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...

Summary Agricultural livelihoods are resilient when capable of enduring and overcoming socio-environmental stressors. The “Sustainable Livelihoods Approach”, popularized in development programs, frequently targets farmer capacities to cope with and recover from loss and damage by (i) enhancing tangible capitals (e.g., ecological, financial) and/or by (ii) reducing socio-institutional constraints on entitlements and opportunities to access those capitals. While this two-pronged approach can reduce damage to production or expand the range of livelihood activities available to farmers, it often positions tangible capitals themselves as the central and objective means for building resilience. The recent “social turn” is a call to theorize resilience’s intangible and non-material dimensions (e.g., subjective, emotive, and relational forms) as emergent from specific local social-cultural-ecological contexts. Drawing on in-depth field research with rice-farmers in a region of the Philippines experiencing water-related risks, we analyzed several situated “intangible” narrations of resilience, with a focus on emotive and affective indicators. Farmers narrated their courage to get back up following loss and damage as well as their optimism, faith, and hope for brighter futures in farming and in life. These emotions flowed from their affective relationships with the cosmos (naturalizing life’s hardships as cyclical), themselves (strong belief in their own capabilities to persist in times of hardship), and the Divine (faith in God’s power to protect hard-working families). Our results contribute to the “social turn” in resilience literature in two ways. First, we highlight affect and emotion as indicators of farm livelihood resilience. Second, we suggest narrations of resilience are constituted through farmers’ particular “worldings”, or constructions of reality where knowledge, belief systems, and relations, are lived and enacted on an everyday basis. Situating oneself in local contexts can illuminate sources of intangible resilience otherwise hidden from top-down approaches, while engaging “worldings” can help render these intangible sources intelligible within their contexts.

Entitlements are generally defined as the commodities/resources (material and non-material), through which one can establish ownership or command access to resources. Applying this analytic to a case study of everyday water access in Accra, Ghana, we evaluate community water entitlements in two low-income communities with different locational and socio-cultural characteristics. We also evaluate how different entitlements to water map against variable dimensions of vulnerability. The study uses a mixed methods approach including a 200 household survey, focus groups with community members, and semi-structured interviews with local opinion leaders. Our results indicate that in both study communities, an entitlements approach provides a significantly richer portrait of water access beyond availability of piped water infrastructure. Among other factors that are important to everyday negotiations and entitlements related to water access, it is important to consider familial and kin networks, water storing options available to households and vendors, the distance and waiting time to fetch water, and local leaders' perceptions of water issues, particularly how these compare with broader citizen understandings. In this way, an entitlements approach broadens the perspective beyond infrastructural endowments (e.g. piped water), to include a range of other socioeconomic, socio-cultural and local institutional characteristics. Drawing on the empirical examples, as well as related conceptual debates, the study questions how water access is defined, and how water governance processes might benefit from a broader understanding of entitlements, as well as links to differentiated vulnerabilities, notably in times of water-related stress or scarcity.

Drawing from the proceedings of an expert workshop with academics, researchers, government and NGO participants working in diverse countries in southern Africa and beyond, this paper reviews the discourse on resilience, both conceptually and in practice. We highlight opportunities to develop and apply a more situated, equity-sensitive and context-relevant understanding of resilience, particularly in the water sector. To pursue more just and resilient water futures in highly unequal and water stressed regions, we propose that researchers and practitioners (1) place greater emphasis on the transformative potential of resilience, (2) broaden the social dimensions of resilience to account more fully for intangible and other social factors, (3) engage critically with the decision-making processes and practices of building resilience, (4) contribute to the development of indicators and guidelines for building just and resilient water futures, (5) strengthen the role of situated knowledges, (6) critically engage with scale and boundaries in complex adaptive systems, and (7) strengthen the policy–science–civil society interface.

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...

This Special Issue on water governance features a series of articles that highlight recent and emerging concepts, approaches, and case studies to re-center and re-theorize “the political” in relation to decision-making, use, and management—collectively, the governance of water. Key themes that emerged from the contributions include the politics of water infrastructure and insecurity; participatory politics and multi-scalar governance dynamics; politics related to emergent technologies of water (bottled or packaged water, and water desalination); and Indigenous water governance. Further reflected is a focus on diverse ontologies, epistemologies, meanings and values of water, related contestations concerning its use, and water’s importance for livelihoods, identity, and place-making. Taken together, the articles in this Special Issue challenge the ways that water governance remains too often depoliticized and evacuated of political content or meaning. By re-centering the political, and by developing analytics that enable and support this endeavor, the contributions throughout highlight the varied, contested, and important ways that water governance needs to be recalibrated and enlivened with keen attention to politics—broadly understood.

In 2007, for the first time in human history, the world’s population became more urban than rural – a trend that is expected to increase in the coming decades, reaching 66% by 2030. While being ‘po...

First Nations in British Columbia (BC), Canada, have historically been—and largely continue to be—excluded from colonial governments’ decision-making and management frameworks for fresh water. However, in light of recent legal and legislative changes, and also changes in water governance and policy, there is growing emphasis in scholarship and among legal, policy and advocacy communities on shifting water governance away from a centralized single authority towards an approach that is watershed-based, collaborative, and involves First Nations as central to decision-making processes. Drawing on community-based research, interviews with First Nations natural resource staff and community members, and document review, the paper analyzes the tensions in collaborative water governance, by identifying First Nations’ concerns within the current water governance system and exploring how a move towards collaborative watershed governance may serve to either address, or further entrench, these concerns. This paper concludes with recommendations for collaborative water governance frameworks which are specifically focused on British Columbia, but which have relevance to broader debates over Indigenous water governance.

Water insecurity massively undermines health, especially among impoverished and marginalized communities. Emerging evidence shows that household-to-household water sharing is a widespread coping strategy in vulnerable communities. Sharing can buffer households from the deleterious health effects that typically accompany seasonal shortages, interruptions of water services and natural disasters. Conversely, sharing may also increase exposure to pathogens and become burdensome and distressing in times of heightened need. These water sharing systems have been almost invisible within global health research but need to be explored, because they can both support and undermine global public health interventions, planning and policy.

We argue that a relational water security framework informed by the capabilities approach offers new ways to consider politics and cultures of water. Each dimension allows us to better contextualize water security beyond just an object (H2O) to be secured for a certain population. Instead, the relational perspective demands a fuller consideration of the political structures and processes through which water is secured, with emphasis on the social relations of access as opposed to simply the politics around water supply. We also attend to cultural dimensions, such as the meanings of water and customary practices that are not easily captured by standardized metrics. By including these dimensions, we necessarily broaden analytical space to evaluate water security as a relational and dynamic process tied to lived experience rather than as solely parameterized conditions in relation to access, quality, or availability of water. We first move to explain our broader conceptualization of water security as linked to human capabilities, then explore in more detail the specific engagements with politics and culture in the sections that follow.

This chapter reviews Canada’s approach to drinking water governance, focusing on the regulations, policies, practices and institutions related to the management and provision of drinking water. This review is significant given Canada’s highly decentralized approach to water governance. We critically evaluate the implications of decentralization for drinking water safety, examining both the uptake of voluntary national guidelines across Canadian jurisdictions, as well as application of day-to-day microbial risk assessment and management practices in various agencies in two provinces (Ontario and BC). Learning from these analyses, we identify a high degree of variability, specifically: (1) variation in the uptake of national Drinking Water Quality Guidelines across provinces and territories; and (2) considerable variability in microbial risk assessment and management practices across provinces and between agencies. We discuss the implications of these findings in light of ongoing harmonization and subsidiarity debates, as well as discussions as to whether compliance should be voluntary or legally binding. Our analysis indicates that the Canadian approach has contributed to data gaps and urban-rural disparities, and reduced capacity for integrated decision-making and effective oversight.