Routledge Handbook Of Urban Water Governance

This handbook provides a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of urban water governance. Of the many growing challenges presented by rapid urbanization, water governance is a critical one and while urban water governance is now regarded as a critical field of research, the literature is fragmented. For the first time, this handbook brings together urban water governance research, containing interdisciplinary contributions from established and emerging scholars, practitioners, and policymakers. It addresses the key questions of how urban water governance works, how is it shaped, and what the impacts are. The handbook's structure offers a progressive entry into the complexity of urban water governance. Starting with technical dimensions, the handbook addresses supply and demand, wastewater, and sanitation. It then considers regulation and economic factors, examining water utilities and services. Political processes, and the actors involved, are addressed and the handbook finishes with a part focusing on governance and sustainability, where chapters address critically important topics such as access to water, water safety, and water security. This handbook is essential reading for students, scholars, and professionals interested in urban water governance, urban studies, and water resource management and sustainability more broadly.

Water is essential for human life and at the centre of political, economic, and socio-cultural development. This Routledge Handbook of Water and Development offers a systematic, wide-ranging, and state-of-the-art guide to the diverse links between water and development across the globe. It is organized into four parts: Part I explores the most significant theories and approaches to the relationship between water and development. Part II consists of carefully selected in-depth case studies, revealing how water utilization and management are deeply intertwined with historical development paths and economic and socio-cultural structures. Part III analyses the role of governance in the management of water and development. Part IV covers the most urgent themes and issues pertaining to water and development in the contemporary world, ranging from climate change and water stress to agriculture and migration. The 32 chapters by leading experts are meant to stimulate researchers and students in a wide range of disciplines in the social and natural sciences, including Geography, Environmental Studies, Development Studies, and Political Science. The Handbook will also be of great value to policymakers and practitioners.

Water plays a key role in addressing the most pressing global challenges of our time, including climate change adaptation, food and energy security, environmental sustainability and the promotion of peace and stability. This comprehensive handbook explores the pivotal place of law and policy in efforts to ensure that water enables positive responses to these challenges and provides a basis for sound governance. The book reveals that significant progress has been made in recent decades to strengthen the governance of water resource management at different scales, including helping to address international and sub-national conflicts over transboundary water resources. It demonstrates that 'effective' laws and policies are fundamental drivers for the safe, equitable and sustainable utilization of water. However, it is also shown that what might constitute an effective law or policy related to water resources management is still hotly debated. As such, the handbook provides an important and definitive reference text for all studying water governance and management.

"Water is essential for human life and at the centre of political, economic and socio-cultural development. This Routledge Handbook on Water and Development offers a systematic, wide-ranging and state-of-the-art guide to the diverse links between water and development across the globe. It is organized into four parts: Part I explores the most significant theories and approaches to the relationship between water and development. Part II consists of carefully selected in-depth case-studies, revealing how water utilization and management are deeply intertwined with historical development paths and economic and socio-cultural structures. Part III analyses the role of governance in the management of water and development. Part IV covers the most urgent themes and issues pertaining to water and development in the contemporary world, ranging from climate change and water stress to agriculture and migration. The 32 chapters by leading experts are meant to stimulate researchers and students in a wide range of disciplines in the social and natural sciences, including Geography, Environmental Studies, Development Studies and Political Science. The Handbook will also be of great value to policymakers and practitioners"--

Scholarship on the right to water has proliferated in interesting and unexpected ways in recent years. This book broadens existing discussions on the right to water in order to shed critical light on the pathways, pitfalls, prospects, and constraints that exist in achieving global goals, as well as advancing debates around water governance and water justice. The book shows how both discourses and struggles around the right to water have opened new perspectives, and possibilities in water governance, fostering new collective and moral claims for water justice, while effecting changes in laws and policies around the world. In light of the 2010 UN ratification on the human right to water and sanitation, shifts have taken place in policy, legal frameworks, local implementation, as well as in national dialogues. Chapters in the book illustrate the novel ways in which the right to water has been taken up in locations drawn globally, highlighting the material politics that are enabled and negotiated through this framework in order to address ongoing water insecurities. This book reflects the urgent need to take stock of debates in light of new concerns around post-neoliberal political developments, the challenges of the Anthropocene and climate change, the transition from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as well as the mobilizations around the right to water in the global North. This book is essential reading for scholars and students of water governance, environmental policy, politics, geography, and law. It will be of great interest to policymakers and practitioners working in water governance, as well as the human right to water and sanitation.

This volume provides a comprehensive discussion and overview of urban resilience, including socio-ecological and economic hazard and disaster resilience. It provides a summary of state of the art thinking on resilience, the different approaches, tools and methodologies for understanding the subject in urban contexts, and brings together related reflections and initiatives. Throughout the different chapters, the handbook critically examines and reviews the resilience concept from various disciplinary and professional perspectives. It also discusses major urban crises, past and recent, and the generic lessons they provide for resilience. In this context, the authors provide case studies from different places and times, including historical material and contemporary examples, and studies that offer concrete guidance on how to approach urban resilience. Other chapters focus on how current understanding of urban systems – such as shrinking cities, green infrastructure, disaster volunteerism, and urban energy systems – are affecting the capacity of urban citizens, settlements and nation-states to respond to different forms and levels of stressors and shocks. The handbook concludes with a synthesis of the state of the art knowledge on resilience and points the way forward in refining the conceptualization and application of urban resilience. The book is intended for scholars and graduate students in urban studies, environmental and sustainability studies, geography, planning, architecture, urban design, political science and sociology, for whom it will provide an invaluable and up-to-date guide to current approaches across these disciplines that converge in the study of urban resilience. The book also provides important direction to practitioners and civic leaders who are engaged in supporting cities and regions to position themselves for resilience in the face of climate change, unpredictable socioenvironmental shocks and incremental risk accumulation.

Growing scarcity of freshwater worldwide brings to light the need for sound water resource modeling and policy analysis. While a solid foundation has been established for many specific water management problems, combining those methods and principles in a unified framework remains an ongoing challenge. This Handbook aims to expand the scope of efficient water use to include allocation of sources and quantities across uses and time, as well as integrating demand-management with supply-side substitutes. Socially efficient water use does not generally coincide with private decisions in the real world, however. Examples of mechanisms designed to incentivize efficient behavior are drawn from agricultural water use, municipal water regulation, and externalities linked to water resources. Water management is further complicated when information is costly and/or imperfect. Standard optimization frameworks are extended to allow for coordination costs, games and cooperation, and risk allocation. When operating efficiently, water markets are often viewed as a desirable means of allocation because a market price incentivizes users to move resources from low to high value activities. However, early attempts at water trading have run into many obstacles. Case studies from the United States, Australia, Europe, and Canada highlight the successes and remaining challenges of establishing efficient water markets.

The "commons" has come to mean many things to many people, and the term is often used inconsistently. The study of the commons has expanded dramatically since Garrett Hardin’s The Tragedy of the Commons (1968) popularized the dilemma faced by users of common pool resources. This comprehensive Handbook serves as a unique synthesis and resource for understanding how analytical frameworks developed within the literature assist in understanding the nature and management of commons resources. Such frameworks include those related to Institutional Analysis and Development, Social-Ecological Systems, and Polycentricity, among others. The book aggregates and analyses these frameworks to lay a foundation for exploring how they apply according to scholars across a wide range of disciplines. It includes an exploration of the unique problems arising in different disciplines of commons study, including natural resources (forests, oceans, water, energy, ecosystems, etc), economics, law, governance, the humanities, and intellectual property. It shows how the analytical frameworks discussed early in the book facilitate interdisciplinarity within commons scholarship. This interdisciplinary approach within the context of analytical frameworks helps facilitate a more complete understanding of the similarities and differences faced by commons resource users and managers, the usefulness of the commons lens as an analytical tool for studying resource management problems, and the best mechanisms by which to formulate policies aimed at addressing such problems.