State Restructuring and the Scale Politics of Rural Water Governance in Bolivia

2005 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Perreault
Keyword(s):  
Water Management ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Environmental Governance ◽  
Water Governance ◽  
Rural Livelihoods ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Neoliberal Reforms ◽  
Rural Water ◽  
Constitutional Reforms ◽  
Traditional Resource Rights

Recent attempts to grant private concessions to water in Bolivia raise questions regarding the effects of the state's neoliberal restructuring on environmental governance. Like other Latin American states, Bolivia has enacted sweeping neoliberal reforms during the past two decades, including privatization of public sector industries, reduction of state services, and administrative decentralization. These reforms have been accompanied by constitutional reforms that recognized certain resource and political rights on the part of Bolivia's indigenous and campesino peoples. This paper examines the reregulation and rescaling of rural water management in Bolivia, and associated processes of mobilization on the part of peasant irrigators aimed at countering state reforms. Although traditional resource rights of peasant irrigators are strengthened by cultural aspects of constitutional reforms, rural livelihoods are undermined by economic liberalization. The paper examines the implications and contradictions of neoliberal reforms for rural water management in highland Bolivia. These processes are illustrated through a brief analysis of current organizational efforts on the part of peasant irrigators.

scholarly journals Mapping Environmental/Sustainable Governance Research in Chile: A Bibliometric and Network Analysis

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (11) ◽  
pp. 6484
Author(s):  
Julien Vanhulst ◽  
Adrián E. Beling
Keyword(s):  
Network Analysis ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Environmental Governance ◽  
Water Governance ◽  
Cultural Dynamics ◽  
Environmental Conflicts ◽  
Effective Governance ◽  
Environmental Institutions ◽  
Sustainability Governance ◽  
Sustainability Challenges

In light of increasing concerns about the efficacy of environmental governance (EG) to address the global sustainability challenges of the Anthropocene era, more integrative, transversal, and far-reaching approaches, referred to here as sustainability governance (SG), are gaining ground both in governance praxis and in research. Empirical and methodological challenges emerge from this conceptual analytical cleavage between EG and SG. Through a combination of bibliometric and network analysis, the objective of this article is to explore the structure and trends in the field of EG/SG research in Chile, internationally regarded as the posterchild of Latin-American EG/SG, and derive empirical insights to feed the analytical distinction between EG and SG that informs global debates about ways forward towards an effective governance in the Anthropocene. Our results show that scientific research on EG/SG has experienced a significant increase since the 1990s. We find that while the topical range of the field is broad, including water governance, biodiversity conservation, environmental institutions, climate change and energy issues, and environmental conflicts and justice, key cross-cutting socio-economic and cultural dynamics underpinning the prevalent, yet fundamentally unsustainable, ways of life and economic model are virtually absent from the field, against their growing presence in diagnoses of “sustained unsustainability”.

Water Governance and Management in Indus Basin - Challenges & Threats

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marium Sara Minhas Bandeali
Keyword(s):  
Water Management ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Water Resources ◽  
Water Policy ◽  
Water Governance ◽  
Sustainable Use ◽  
Water Security ◽  
Sampling Technique ◽  
The State ◽  
Indus Basin

Water governance and management are important challenges for the River Indus Basin in Pakistan. Water governance refers to social, political and economic factors that influence water management. The water scarcity and water security are a major concern for the state to control its water resources. The study aims to give Sindh water policy by exploring the challenges to Indus Basin in managing water resources and to identify opportunities Indus Basin can look to improve water management. Interviews were conducted from water experts and analysts having 5 years’ experience or more in the water sector of Pakistan through a semi-structured self-developed questionnaire using purposive sampling technique and transcripts were analyzed using thematic content analysis. The findings show that increasing population, climatic change and rising demand of water are major challenges Indus is facing and Indus with time is getting water-scarce therefore need strong institutions, civil society and legislatures to ensure equitable distribution of water and maintain the ecosystem. The study emphasizes that water governance and management are necessary for sustainable use of water. Pakistan, the water stress country needs to address ‘governance’ at a wider scale to solve problems in the Indus Basin for the livelihood of people. The research will benefit the state, water experts, institutions as well as civil society to promote efficient use of water in Indus Basin.

Normal Rights, Just New: Understanding the Judicial Enforcement of Socioeconomic Rights

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Fowkes
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Inherent Property ◽  
Socioeconomic Rights ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States ◽  
Existing Structure

Abstract A common skeptical view holds that socioeconomic rights are a different kind of right than civil-political rights. Even those who support justiciable socioeconomic rights often see them as a different kind of right with special challenges. I argue that this view is wrong. What all these observers are reacting to is not an inherent property of socioeconomic rights: it is a contingent property of a situation in which judges are asked to enforce a rights claim without a pre-existing set of familiar public understandings of the right’s content and/or an existing structure of officials and procedures to give effect to that content. It is because the rights claim is new, and this is something that can be, and often is, true of rights across the spectrum. Any rights claim is problematic to enforce to the degree that it is new, but these obstacles can and do disappear if society changes and the claim becomes less new. In the first part of the Article, I seek to establish the accuracy of this argument, drawing on examples of rights distinctions from the nineteenth-century United States and rights across the spectrum displaying newness in contemporary South Africa and India. I then show how controlling for newness can help us to understand standard features of the socioeconomic rights debate: the ubiquitous, but misleading, negative–positive distinction; arguments about resources; Fuller’s endlessly cited polycentricity argument; and current controversial cases, such as the budget-shifting judicial enforcement of Latin American healthcare entitlements. These topics are central to our widespread intuition that socioeconomic rights are different; newness can help us to see that this intuition is misleading us, and by recalibrating the debate can filter out some distractions that have long dogged it.

scholarly journals Strengths and Weaknesses of the Dutch Implementation of the Water Framework Directive

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 269-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorenzo Squintani ◽  
Ernst Plambeck ◽  
Marleen van Rijswick
Keyword(s):  
Water Management ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Water Governance ◽  
Functional Approach ◽  
Governance System ◽  
Member States ◽  
Potential Source ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dutch Experience ◽  
Regional Water

The Netherlands has a long and fascinating history of water management. The main features of the Dutch water governance system for the implementation of the wfd are its regional water authorities based on hydrological scales and powers to regulate, decide and raise taxes for their water tasks. Their functional approach and the decentralised character make the regional water authorities very efficient and effective. It is therefore understandable that eu institutions and other Member States consider the Dutch system an interesting potential source of inspiration for other jurisdictions. Yet, it is not all gold what shines. This paper highlights the strength and weakness elements of the Dutch water governance system under the wfd. It exposes several points of concern. When considering using the Dutch experience as a source of inspiration in other Member States, these concerns should be taken in due account.

scholarly journals Conceptualizing environmental governance on the GBM basin

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marufa Akter
Keyword(s):  
River Water ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Environmental Governance ◽  
Water Governance ◽  
Ecological Integrity ◽  
Regional Governance ◽  
Epistemic Community ◽  
Resource Governance ◽  
Lower Stream ◽  
Gbm Basin

River water sharing is an issue that is dealt by the South Asian neighboring countries for the last four decades. Water management of Ganges–Brahmaputra Meghna (GBM) basin is a controversial issue, which is not yet developed as a regional cooperative mechanism. The GBM river basin countries also represent the projection of relative power differences among its upper stream and lower stream countries. Considering the geopolitical context and hydro-politics of the region, the study examines potential scopes for effective regional governance to GBM’s ecological integrity and to share common river water among China, Bhutan, Nepal, India and Bangladesh. The study uses Rittberger et al. (2006) explanatory model (that explains three conditions—Problem, Cognitive and Hegemonic conditions) in the development of multilateral organizations in GBM region. The study deals with the question—what conditions facilitate GBM based water governance among five main riparian countries (upstream and downstream) in resolving the water scarcity challenges in the region. The paper argues that realization of shortage of water and environmental degradation as an interdependent problem, influence of an inclusive epistemic community (cognitive condition) and a hegemonic leadership (power is willing to accept the relative gain of others states for the absolute gain of itself)—are required to foster water resource governance of the GBM for sustainable development of the region.

scholarly journals Elections and local government performance in Brazil

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (83) ◽  
pp. 580-599
Author(s):  
Pedro Luiz Costa Cavalcante
Keyword(s):  
Local Government ◽  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Electoral Competition ◽  
Institutional Arrangement ◽  
Policy Outcomes ◽  
Government Performance ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
National Analysis

Abstract The 1988 federal Constitution introduced a complex and innovative institutional arrangement that not only reestablished political rights and democratic procedures, but also reinforced decentralization as a fundamental guideline for policy implementation in Brazil. As a result, municipalities have become pivotal actors in the policymaking process. Scholars of Latin American politics have given much emphasis to the causes and determinants of decentralization, but not much has been done toward a more general understanding of how this increased decentralization has affected policymaker behavior and policy outcomes. This paper aims to do exactly that. Specifically, it investigates how institutional arrangements and electoral competition affect local government performance. The theoretical basis is the electoral democratic theory that broadly highlights elections as instruments of citizen control in retrospective and prospective voting approaches. The research employs a large-N cross sub-national analysis based on a dataset of electoral, partisan, socioeconomic and public financial information collected from over 5500 municipalities. Local governments’ performance, our dependent variables, are synthetic indicators formulated from 2009 nationwide surveys on public education, health, housing and welfare services. The OLS regression results confirm the hypothesis that politics variables do matter in how politicians make decisions and implement policy under the new Brazilian democratic Era. The empirical evidences suggest that electoral competition does not present a direct effect on government performance, however, ideology and citizen participation do. Therefore, this paper helps to expand our understanding of a political system’s impact on public policy outputs, which is extremely important not only for academic purpose but also to support policymakers’ decisions.

scholarly journals Hybrid Hydraulics: Colonialism and the Archaeology of Water Management in the Maghreb

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-56
Author(s):  
Lena Johansson de Château
Keyword(s):  
Water Management ◽  
Indigenous People ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Strong Relationship ◽  
Roman Period ◽  
Archaeological Practice ◽  
Classical Archaeology ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
Rural Water ◽  
The Relationship

In this paper, colonialism is used as a key concept for a discussion on the relationship between classical archaeology and archaeological practice in the Maghreb region. Archaeological studies of rural water management in Algeria, Tunisia and Libya are reviewed, focussing on the representation of the Romans and the indigenous people. Drawing on postcolonial theory, an alternative approach to water management in the Maghreb during the Roman period is suggested. A strong relationship between modern colonialism and the representation of ancient colonialism in archaeological writings is evident from my analysis. It is suggested that postcolonial approaches may contribute to a revaluation of the Maghreb as an archaeological region.

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