Gendering the Human Right to Water in the Context of Sustainable Development

Abstract

The 2010 United Nations resolution on the human right to water urged the global community to accept and implement equitable access to safe clean water for all. In addition, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the development targets for the global community between 2016 and 2030, articulated the importance of two interconnected and important SGDs: the connections between gender equity (SDG5) and access to water (SDG6). Given these global policy imperatives, countries face normative goals of achieving difficult and complex sets of rights and justices regarding water and gender equity. As a result, how policy prescriptions and ambitions are materialized on the ground require closer attention to the ways that gender–water relations are co-constitutive of broader issues of development and social justice in any given context. More significant action is thus needed to address the socioecological issues that affect access to, control over, and rights to water, which have intersectional gendered implications and impact the lived realities of water justice and injustice on the ground. The chapter investigates the comparative politics around the human right to water and the increasing commodification of water through a gendered lens to interrogate broader sustainable development goals. The author argues that implementing the human right to water can help achieve broader issues of gender equity and gender justice when carried out with better intersectional understanding of gender.