(2016) Reductionist and integrative research approaches to complex water security policy challenges. Global Environmental Change, 39 . pp. 143-154. ISSN 0959-3780 DOI: 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2016 Reuse of this item is permitted through licensing under the Creative Commons: AbstractThis article reviews and contrasts two approaches that water security researchers employ to advance understanding of the complexity of water-society policy challenges. A prevailing reductionist approach seeks to represent uncertainty through calculable risk, links national GDP tightly to hydro-climatological causes, and underplays diversity and politics in society. When adopted uncritically, this approach limits policy-makers to interventions that may reproduce inequalities, and that are too rigid to deal with future changes in society and climate. A second, more integrative, approach is found to address a range of uncertainties, explicitly recognise diversity in society and the environment, incorporate water resources that are less-easily controlled, and consider adaptive approaches to move beyond conventional supply-side prescriptions. The resultant policy recommendations are diverse, inclusive, and more likely to reach the marginalised in society, though they often encounter policy-uptake obstacles. The article concludes by defining a route towards more effective water security research and policy, which stresses analysis that matches the state of knowledge possessed, an expanded research agenda, and explicitly addresses inequities.Complex Water Security

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Community based natural resource management (CBNRM) programs presently proliferate across the Global South. In Southern Africa, CBNRM overwhelmingly focuses on wildlife conservation in areas adjacent to national parks and game reserves. The objects of these development activities are remote communities that exhibit the highest levels of poverty in the region, the consequences of which are sometimes resource degradation. CBNRM seeks to empower and enrich the lives of these communities through the active co-management of their natural resource base. Almost without exception, however, CBNRM projects have had disappointing results. Common explanations lay blame at the feet of local people who are seen to lack capacity and will, among other things. This paper contests this explanation by subjecting the particular case of Botswana to a deeper, critical political ecology analysis. Drawing on insights from Homer-Dixon regarding resource capture and ecological marginalization, and from Acharya regarding the localization of global norms, the paper argues that CBNRM is better understood as a discursive site wherein diverse actors bring unequal power/knowledge to bear in the pursuit of particular interests. In Botswana this manifests at a local level as an on-going struggle over access to land and related resources. However, given that CBNRM is supported by a wide array of international actors, forming perhaps the thin edge of a wider wedge in support of democratization, good governance and biodiversity preservation, locally empowered actors are forced to adapt their interests to the strictures of emergent structures of global governance. The outcome is a complex interplay of activities whereby CBNRM is realized but not in a form anticipated by its primary supporters.

UN Secretary–General Kofi Annan has identified water and sanitation as a principle area of focus for the forthcoming World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD). It is fitting that this meeting is being held in Johannesburg, as water resources management issues are of primary importance to the southern African region. There is a new water architecture being developed in the region, one that hopes to correct abiding structural inequalities of access between and among states, communities and peoples. Part of this new water architecture includes an enhanced role for the private sector and ‘the market’ in the provision and management of this crucial resource. This is a role that many feel will exacerbate rather than alleviate historically derived problems of underdevelopment. It is a role, therefore, that may undermine many of the positive developments that have taken place in the region over time. If regional leaders are interested in sustainable and equitable water resources management, they must be prepared openly to debate this issue with all interested parties not only at the WSSD, but also in the region and beyond.