Rights-Based Freshwater Governance for the Twenty-First Century: Beyond an Exclusionary Focus on Domestic Water Uses

Abstract

The UN recognition of a human right to water for drinking, personal and other domestic uses and sanitation in 2010 was a political breakthrough in states' commitments to adopt a human rights framework in carrying out part of their mandate. This chapter explores other domains of freshwater governance in which human rights frameworks provide a robust and widely accepted set of normative values to such governance. The basis is General Comment No. 15 of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in 2002, which states that water is needed to realise a range of indivisible human rights to non-starvation, food, health, work and an adequate standard of living and also procedural rights to participation and information in water interventions. On that basis, the chapter explores concrete implications of the Comment for states' broader infrastructure-based water services

Inclusive participation, self-governance, and sustainability: Current challenges and opportunities for women in leadership of communal irrigation systems

“…For this to happen, the broadly recognized need of formal access to land tenure of irrigable land for women both for subsistence and for livelihoods is of urgent resolution (Van Koppen, 2017). It is also essential in order to achieve the human right-based approach to agricultural water for smallholders and vulnerable farmers, including many rural women (Mehta and Langmeier, 2020;Van Koppen et al, 2017). Second, there is a need to improve the capacity of women to manage water and to lead effectively by acknowledging their existing knowledge (Buechler, 2005) and by providing appropriate capacity development.…”

The Environment in Global Sustainability Governance

“…It is subjected to contests rooted in relations of power in both the discursive and the material realms (Mehta, 2005;Wilson and Inkster, 2018). Because of the fluid nature of water and its linkages with land, water rights are usually competing and overlapping, and entail a mixture of formal and informal arrangements (van Koppen and Schreiner, 2014). Customary law and practices, kinship networks, gender, caste and patronage tend to dominate in practice despite the existence of formal institutional arrangements (van Koppen and Schreiner, 2014).…”

“…Because of the fluid nature of water and its linkages with land, water rights are usually competing and overlapping, and entail a mixture of formal and informal arrangements (van Koppen and Schreiner, 2014). Customary law and practices, kinship networks, gender, caste and patronage tend to dominate in practice despite the existence of formal institutional arrangements (van Koppen and Schreiner, 2014). Dominant modes of water management have conventionally been characterized by sectoral approaches that separate water and sanitation from water for food, energy, domestic supply, irrigation and floodwater management (Mehta et al, 2020).…”

A hybrid approach to decolonize formal water law in Africa

“…Constitutional rights to water, health and food provide the main yardstick for such prioritization, as also promoted in national 5 and international debates (Hellum et al 2015;HLPE 2015;van Koppen et al 2017b). These binding commitments highlight an absolute priority for access to sufficient water for domestic uses and also for food production, where people are dependent on growing at least a portion, if not the entirety, of their food for consumption or growing sufficient crops for sale which will provide an income to buy food.…”