New water books available: Water Rights, Politics and Identity, Social Participation in Water Governance, Wastewater Irrigation and Health, Adaptive Water Resource Management

Earthscan are pleased to announce the publication of these new water books. If you are a course leader and would like an inspection copy of any of these books, please fill in the form here.  If you are a book review editor and would like a press copy, please email me at Alice.Haworth-Booth@earthscan.co.uk with the details of your publication.

Out of the Mainstream: Water Rights, Politics and Identity

Edited By Rutgerd Boelens, David Getches and Armando Guevara Gil

Water is not only a source of life and culture. It is also a source of power, conflicting interests and identity battles. Rights to materially access, culturally organize and politically control water resources are poorly understood by mainstream scientific approaches and hardly addressed by current normative frameworks. These issues become even more challenging when law and policy-makers and dominant power groups try to grasp, contain and handle them in multicultural societies. The struggles over the uses, meanings and appropriation of water are especially well-illustrated in Andean communities and local water systems of Peru, Chile, Ecuador, and Bolivia, as well as in Native American communities in south-western USA. The problem is that throughout history, these nation-states have attempted to 'civilize' and bring into the mainstream the different cultures and peoples within their borders instead of understanding 'context' and harnessing the strengths and potentials of diversity. This book examines the multi-scale struggles for cultural justice and socio-economic re-distribution that arise as Latin American communities and user federations seek access to water resources and decision-making power regarding their control and management. It is set in the dynamic context of unequal, globalizing power relations, politics of scale and identity, environmental encroachment and the increasing presence of extractive industries that are creating additional pressures on local livelihoods.

Social Participation in Water Governance and Management: Critical and Global Perspectives

Edited By Kate A. Berry and Eric Mollard

Social participation in water management and governance recently became a reality in many economies and societies. Yet the dimensions in which power regulation, social equity and democracy-building are connected with participation have been only tangentially analyzed for the water sector. Understanding the growing interest in social participation involves appreciating the specificity of the contemporary period within its historic and geographic contexts as well as uncovering larger political, economic and cultural trends of recent decades which frame participatory actions.

Within a wide variety of cases presented from around the world, the reader will find critical analyses of participation and an array of political ecological processes that influence water governance. The chapters examine water rights definition, hydropower dam construction, urban river renewal, irrigation organizations, water development NGOs, river basin management, water policy implementation and judicial decision-making in water conflicts. The book's five sections highlight key dimensions of contemporary water management that influence, and in turn are influenced by, social participation. These sections are: participation and indigenous water governance; participation and the dynamics of gender in water management; participation and river basin governance; participation and implementation of water management and participation and the politics of water governance.

Wastewater Irrigation and Health: Assessing and Mitigating Risk in Low-income Countries

Edited By Pay Drechsel, Christopher A. Scott, Liqa Raschid-Sally, Mark Redwood and Akiça Bahri

In most developing countries wastewater treatment systems are hardly functioning or have a very low coverage, resulting in large scale water pollution and the use of very poor quality water for crop irrigation especially in the vicinity of urban centres. This can create significant risks to public health, particularly where crops are eaten raw.

This book approaches this serious problem from a practical and realistic perspective, addressing the issues of health risk assessment and reduction in developing country settings, and moving the debate forward by covering also the common reality of untreated wastewater, greywater and excreta use. It presents the state-of-the-art on quantitative risk assessment and low-cost options for health risk reduction, from treatment to on-farm and off-farm measures, in support of the multiple barrier approach of the 2006 guidelines for safe wastewater irrigation published by the World Health Organization. The 38 authors and co-authors are international key experts in the field of wastewater irrigation representing a mix of agronomists, engineers, social scientists and public health experts from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and Australia.

The Adaptive Water Resource Management Handbook

Edited By Jaroslav Mysiak, Hans Jørgen Henrikson, Caroline Sullivan, John Bromley and Claudia Pahl-Wostl

The complexity of current water resource management poses many challenges. Water managers need to solve a range of interrelated water dilemmas, such as balancing water quantity and quality, flooding, drought, maintaining biodiversity and ecological functions and services, in a context where human beliefs, actions and values play a central role. Furthermore, the growing uncertainties of global climate change and the long term implications of management actions make the problems even more difficult.

This book explains the benefits, outcomes and lessons learned from adaptive water management (AWM). In essence AWM is a way of responding to uncertainty by designing policy measures which are provisional and incremental, subject to subsequent modification in response to environmental change and other variables. Included are illustrative case studies from seven river basins from across Europe, West Asia and Africa: the Elbe, Rhine, Guadiana, Tisza, Orange, Nile and Amudarya. These exemplify the key challenges of adaptive water management, especially when rivers cross national boundaries, creating additional problems of governance.