Water Crises and Governance ― Reinventing Collaborative Institutions in an Era of Uncertainty

Water Crises and Governance critically examines the relationship between water crises and governance in the face of challenges to provide water for growing human demand and environmental needs. Water crises threaten the assumptions and accepted management practices of water users, managers and policymakers. In developed and developing world contexts from North America and Australasia, to Latin America, Africa and China, existing institutions and governance arrangements have unintentionally provoked water crises while shaping diverse, often innovative responses to management dilemmas. This volume brings together original field-based studies by social scientists investigating water crises and their implications for governance.

Contributors to this collection find that water crises degrade environments, place untenable burdens on stakeholders, and produce or exacerbate social conflict, undermining ecological and social conditions that sustain effective collaboration. At the same time, water crises can promote institutional change that "resets" governance, promoting unusual and creative responses appropriate for local contexts. The studies in this volume provide evidence that, while water crises pose serious threats to environments and societies, they also provide opportunities to learn from experience and recraft water governance with coherent visions of more ecologically and socially sustainable futures. This volume was originally published as a special issue of Society & Natural Resources.

Peter Leigh Taylor is Professor and Chair of Sociology at Colorado State University, USA, and co-Editor-in-Chief of Society & Natural Resources. He has done extensive research and applied work on community-based forest management in Latin America. His current research focuses on environmental flows and agricultural water governance on the Colorado River.

David A. Sonnenfeld is Professor of Sociology and Environmental Policy at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, and co-Editor-in-Chief of Society & Natural Resources. Recent books include the Routledge International Handbook of Social and Environmental Change; Food, Globalization and Sustainability; and The Ecological Modernisation Reader.