Race, Ethnicity, and the Case for Intersectional Water Security

Abstract

This Forum article reports on a meta-review of more than 19,000 published works on water security, of which less than 1 percent explicitly focus on race or ethnicity. This is deeply concerning, because it indicates that race and ethnicity—crucial factors that affect the provision of safe, reliable water—continue to be ignored in academic and policy literatures. In response to this finding the Forum calls for building intersectional water security frameworks that recognize how empirical drivers of social and environmental inequality vary both within and across groups. Intersectional frameworks of water security can retain policy focus on the key material concerns regarding access, safety, and the distribution of water-related risks. They can also explicitly incorporate issues of race and ethnicity alongside other vectors of inequality to address key, overlooked concerns of water security.

Local perspectives on marine ecotourism development in a water-insecure island region: the case of Bocas del Toro, Panama

“…While drawing a causal relationship between race and water insecurity is not within the scope of this research, the 2020 UN World Water Report does explicitly relate water insecurity and intersectionality, especially regarding race and class ( UN Water, 2020). Peer-reviewed studies on this issue, however, overwhelmingly exist in the North American context (e.g., Deitz and Meehan, 2019;Dickin and Gabrielsson, 2023;Harrington et al, 2023;Meńdez-Barrientos et al, 2023;Workman and Shah, 2023). For example, a spatial analysis of water insecurity across the United States by Deitz and Meehan (2019) found that deficiencies in household water infrastructure are concentrated in regions typically inhabited by racialized groups.…”