The Right to Water in a Global Context: Challenges and Transformations in Water Politics

Abstract

The scholarship on the right to water has proliferated in interesting and unexpected ways. Through highly productive sets of conversations, both discourses and struggles around the right to water have: opened new perspectives and possibilities in water governance; fostered new collective and moral claims for water justice; and effected changes in laws, policies, and institutions around the world. In light of the 2010 UN ratification on the human right to water and sanitation, changes have taken place in policy, legal frameworks, local implementation, as well as in national dialogues within the majority of countries globally. The novel ways in which the right to water has been taken up in Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia point to the enduring appeal and material politics that are enabled and negotiated through this framework in order to address water crises and water insecurities. There is, thus, an 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 new mobilizations around the right to water in the global North. This book, therefore, broadens existing scholarship on the right to water globally in order to critically shed light on the pathways, pitfalls, prospects, and constraints that exist in achieving lofty global goals, as well as advancing debates around water governance and water justice.