Global water resources are degraded through mismanagement and climate change. Complete mitigation is not possible and some of the damages are effectively irreversible, leading to an unavoidable increase of water scarcity, coining the term water bankruptcy. This calls for a change in water governance that addresses unavoidable damage instead of treating water scarcity as a short-term crisis [Madani, 2026].
The common framework to deal with water development ”Integrated Water Resource Management” tries to balance the three e’s: economy, ecological sustainability and equity. Processes like assessment of local needs through stakeholder participation are often used and recognized as fundamental, but implementations frequently struggle to achieve these goals or even worsen the situation [Popovici et al., 2021].
In reality, water management, integrated assessment, and development projects often fall back on cost recovery, cost-effectiveness, and framing problems in a technical, depoliticized way. This can lead to situations where water scarcity is (re)produced through management, and the agency of local actors decreases despite stakeholder participation [Nojiyeza, 2014], [Garcia de Gouveia et al., 2023].
To achieve an equitable transition, water management has to be viewed as a contested political process. A key focus of management, scientific assessment and stakeholder participation should therefore be their emancipatory relevance [Habermas, 1968], meaning their capacity to increase the agency and inclusion of marginalized communities.
Political ecology is a well-established field of study and a useful tool to assess the social structures that produce inequitable outcomes by including colonial legacies, power structures and political economy in its analysis. These factors should not be treated as obstacles to overcome, but as constitutive of the water scarcity problem [Prieto, 2021].
For my poster I want to look at methods and tools that could be used to increase the emancipatory relevance of stakeholder participation and management. Power mapping, the hydrosocial cycle [Linton and Budds, 2014] and analysing the historical development of water-scarcity using a political ecology lens could give insights why agency and equity are still lacking.
In a depoliticized framing of water scarcity, the transition towards bankruptcy management risks creating tension between equity and efficiency. Putting agency at the core of water management, stakeholder participation and scientific assessments and using tools like the ”hydrosocial cycle” and power mapping, informed by political ecology, could benefit the transition towards equity. This way, water management could shift from a technical, reductionist process to an agency-increasing, emancipatory process.
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[Biancardi Aleu et al., 2022] Biancardi Aleu, R., Kløcker Larsen, R., and Methner, N. (2022). Participation and marginalization in water governance: probing the agency of powerholders. Ecol. Soc., 27(4).
[Garcia de Gouveia et al., 2023] Garcia de Gouveia, A., Britto, A., and Formiga Johnsson, R. (2023). Hydrosocial cycles, territories, and scarcity: shaping inequalities and exclusion in water access – an integrative systematic review. Desenvolvimento e Meio Ambiente, 62:437–457.
[Habermas, 1968] Habermas, J. (1968). Erkenntnis und Interesse. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main.
[Linton and Budds, 2014] Linton, J. and Budds, J. (2014). The hydrosocial cycle: Defining and mo bilizing a relational-dialectical approach to water. Geoforum, 57:170–180.
[Madani, 2026] Madani, K. (2026). Global water bankruptcy: Living beyond our hydrological means in the post crisis era. Technical report, United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH).
[Nastar et al., 2018] Nastar, M., Abbas, S., Aponte Rivero, C., Jenkins, S., and Kooy, M. (2018). The emancipatory promise of participatory water governance for the urban poor: Reflections on the transition management approach in the cities of dodowa, ghana and arusha, tanzania. Afr. Stud., 77(4):504–525.
[Nojiyeza, 2014] Nojiyeza, I. S. (2014). Integrated water resources management and the manufactured scarcity of water in Africa. Doctor of philosophy (development studies), University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa. Full text (PDF) available from the University of KwaZulu-Natal ResearchSpace repository.
[Popovici et al., 2021] Popovici, R., Erwin, A., Ma, Z., Prokopy, L. S., Zanotti, L., Bocardo Delgado, E. F., Pinto C´aceres, J. P., Zeballos Zeballos, E., Salas O’Brien, E. P., Bowling, L. C., and Arce Larrea, G. R. (2021). Outsourcing governance in peru’s integrated water resources management. Land Use Policy, 101:105105.
[Prieto, 2021] Prieto, M. (2021). Equity vs. efficiency and the human right to water. Water (Basel), 13(3):278.