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Article Excerpt
Ken Conca, Governing Water: Contentious Transnational Politics and Global Institution Building (MIT Press, 2005).
Transparency International, Global Corruption Report 2008: Corruption in the Water Sector (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Transparency International, "Building Integrity to Ensure Effective Water Governance," Policy Position, 2008.
UN Development Programme (UNDP), "Water Governance for Poverty Reduction: Key Issues and the UNDP Response to Millennium Development Goals, 2004."
Peter Rogers and Alan W. Hall, "Effective Water Governance," Global Water Partnership Technical Committee (TEC) Background Papers No. 7, 2003.
This article reviews Ken Conca's book Governing Water and considers briefly the recent literature on governance in the water sector. With the current emerging water crisis, it is important that scholars and practitioners reflect on the complex problems that arise in this arena. The global water sector domain has a number of actors and analysts, very welcome contributors to the "water for all" discourse.
Governing Water, part of the MIT Press series "Global Environmental Accord: Strategies for Sustainability and Institutional Innovation," consolidates and builds on earlier publications and research work by the author and some of his collaborators. The publication comprises ten chapters, including two that focus on case studies from Brazil and South Africa. The overall aim of the book is to examine regimes "as the grand strategy of global environmental governance" (p. 9) through the world water discourse and practice: "The political dynamics surrounding water make it ... a promising place to look for the emergences of alternative institutional forms of transnational, international, or even global-scale institution building" (p. 70). In Chapter 1, Conca examines the limits of the regime approach, "founded on highly stylized notions about territory, authority and knowledge" (p. 21) and sets the stage for his later analytical framework. The author asserts that "not all of the social struggles that swirl around environmental problems can be resolved by cramming the problem into the institutional mold offered by the regime approach" (p. 21) and argues that "the bordered, statist, and functional-rational features of the regime form prevent it from confronting the problem of protecting the planet's places" (p. 25).
Chapter 2, "Toward a Social Theory of International Institutions," develops the conceptual framework for the study, grounded in "a metanormative box of statist authority, stabilized knowledge, and territiorialized nature" (p. 71). These three elements (authority, knowledge, and territoriality) are the analytical filter Conca uses to examine the "political sociology of international institutions" or institution building, considered in the broad sense, through the global water experience as meta-case study. Chapter 3 provides a background look at the "causes and consequences of transformation of the world's rivers, lakes, floodplains, estuaries, and wetlands" (p. 31), painting a rather grim assessment of the current state of the world's water. Chapters 4-7 examine the "politics of specific processes by which four distinct sets of protonorms about water have been assembled." The goal here is to map the process of institution building and examine where institutionalization occurs, using the four sets of so-called protonorms--international law, water-expert networks, the antidams struggle, and water marketization controversies (p. 32). Chapters 8 and 9 use Brazil and South Africa as case studies to explore the "reach of transnational institution-building processes into domestic law, policy and practice" through a four-step approach. This provides a systematic comparative framework for the analysis and deployment of the national case studies in line with the central hypothesis of the book. The justification for selection of these two case studies is explained in Chapter 1: each is central to the global water debate, each has transboundary waters, and each has experienced "turbulent change," which gave greater space for the policy shifts in water within the legal, political, and policymaking processes (p. 33). Chapter 10 draws out the lessons learned from the study and "seeks to find a broader message in the specific story of transnational water politics" (p. 33).
The work collects and examines through the prism of the devised analytical framework a significant selection of the global water story from the overview of how the rivers of the world have been "pushed around" (dammed, diverted, and drained to the point of severe water stress in some parts of the globe, with resulting adverse impacts on humans, freshwater biodiversity, and ecosystems), to the role of international law and expert networks, the ecology of human rights, and the particular national experiences in Brazil and South Africa. Several of the tables are very useful and provide interesting and informative overviews of the evolution of the global water discourse; for example, table 5.1, which presents the chronology of important network-building events related to the evolution of the concept of Integrated Water Resources Management (TWRM) (pp. 134-139); table 5.2, which shows the IWRM policy discussions evolution (pp. 148-150);...
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