Antje Bruns

A transdisciplinary account of water research

Water research is introduced from the combined perspectives of natural and social science and cases of citizen and stakeholder coproduction of knowledge. Using the overarching notion of transdisciplinarity, we examine how interdisciplinary and participatory water research has taken place and could be developed further. It becomes apparent that water knowledge is produced widely within society, across certified disciplinary experts and noncertified expert stakeholders and citizens. However, understanding and management interventions may remain partial, or even conflicting, as much research across and between traditional disciplines has failed to integrate disciplinary paradigms due to philosophical, methodological, and communication barriers. We argue for more agonistic relationships that challenge both certified and noncertified knowledge productively. These should include examination of how water research itself embeds and is embedded in social context and performs political work. While case studies of the cultural and political economy of water knowledge exist, we need more empirical evidence on how exactly culture, politics, and economics have shaped this knowledge and how and at what junctures this could have turned out differently. We may thus channel the coproductionist critique productively to bring perspectives, alternative knowledges, and implications into water politics where they were not previously considered; in an attempt to counter potential lock‐in to particular water policies and technologies that may be inequitable, unsustainable, or unacceptable. While engaging explicitly with politics, transdisciplinary water research should remain attentive to closing down moments in the research process, such as framings, path‐dependencies, vested interests, researchers’ positionalities, power, and scale. WIREs Water 2016, 3:369–389. doi: 10.1002/wat2.1132 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

Achieving Sustainable Development Goals from a Water Perspective

Efforts to meet human water needs only at local scales may cause negative environmental externality and stress on the water system at regional and global scales. Hence, assessing SDG targets requires a broad and in-depth knowledge of the global to local dynamics of water availability and use. Further, Interconnection and trade-offs between different SDG targets may lead to sub-optimal or even adverse outcome if the set of actions are not properly pre-designed considering such interlinkages. Thus scientific research and evidence have a role to play in facilitating the implementation of SDGs through assessments and policy engagement from global to local scales. The paper addresses some of these challenges related to implementation and monitoring the targets of the Sustainable Development Goals from a water perspective, based on the key findings of a conference organised in 2015 with the focus on three essential aspects of SDGs- indicators, interlinkages and implementation. The paper discusses that indicators should not be too simple but ultimately deliver sustainability measures. The paper finds that remote sensing and earth observation technologies can play a key role in supporting the monitoring of water targets. It also recognises that implementing SDGs is a societal process of development, and there is need to link how SDGs relate to public benefits and communicate this to the broader public.

Urban planning lock-in: implications for the realization of adaptive options towards climate change risks

Urban planning can play a potentially meaningful role in managing the risks of climate change. It is, however, unclear to what extent planning practice can be transformed in order to address these risks effectively in the global south. Using Johannesburg in South Africa as an illustrative case and the interrelated challenges of flood risks and informal growth as an example, it is demonstrated how the identification of a particular planning practice with historically informed values of justice substantially constrains the realization of adaptive planning options. Correspondingly, its implications for managing flood risks of climate change through planning under conditions of urban divide are outlined.

Land Use Competition: Ecological, Economic and Social Perspectives

This chapter introduces competition as a heuristic concept to analyse how specific land use practices establish themselves against possible alternatives. We briefly outline the global importance of land use practices as the material and symbolic basis for people’s livelihoods, particularly the provision of food security and well-being. We chart the development over time from research on land cover towards research on drivers of land use practices as part of an integrated land systems science. The increasingly spatially, temporally and functionally distributed nature of these drivers poses multiple challenges to research on land use practices. We propose the notion of ‘competition’ to respond to some of these challenges and to better understand how alternative land use practices are negotiated. We conceive of competition as a relational concept. Competition asks about agents in relation to each other, about the mode or the logic in which these relations are produced and about the material environments, practices and societal institutions through which they are mediated. While this has centrally to do with markets and prices, we deliberately open the concept to embrace more than economic perspectives. As such competition complements a broadening of analytical attention from the ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘when’ to include prominently the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of particular land use practices and the question to whom this matters and ought to matter. We suggest that competition is an analytically productive concept, because it does not commit the analyst to a particular epistemological stance. It addresses reflexivity and feed-back, emergence and downward causation, history and response rates—concepts that all carry very different conceptual and analytical connotations in different disciplines. We propose to make these differences productive by putting them alongside each other through the notion of competition. Last not least, the heuristic lens of competition affords the combination of empirical and normative aspects, thus addressing land use practices in material, social and ethical terms.

Land Use Competition

This chapter introduces competition as a heuristic concept to analyse how specific land use practices establish themselves against possible alternatives. We briefly outline the global importance of land use practices as the material and symbolic basis for people’s livelihoods, particularly the provision of food security and well-being. We chart the development over time from research on land cover towards research on drivers of land use practices as part of an integrated land systems science. The increasingly spatially, temporally and functionally distributed nature of these drivers poses multiple challenges to research on land use practices. We propose the notion of ‘competition’ to respond to some of these challenges and to better understand how alternative land use practices are negotiated. We conceive of competition as a relational concept. Competition asks about agents in relation to each other, about the mode or the logic in which these relations are produced and about the material environments, practices and societal institutions through which they are mediated. While this has centrally to do with markets and prices, we deliberately open the concept to embrace more than economic perspectives. As such competition complements a broadening of analytical attention from the ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘when’ to include prominently the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of particular land use practices and the question to whom this matters and ought to matter. We suggest that competition is an analytically productive concept, because it does not commit the analyst to a particular epistemological stance. It addresses reflexivity and feed-back, emergence and downward causation, history and response rates—concepts that all carry very different conceptual and analytical connotations in different disciplines. We propose to make these differences productive by putting them alongside each other through the notion of competition. Last not least, the heuristic lens of competition affords the combination of empirical and normative aspects, thus addressing land use practices in material, social and ethical terms.

Disparities in the implementation gap: adaptation to flood risk in the Densu Delta, Accra, Ghana

ABSTRACT While the need for adaptation in response to the effects of global environmental change impacts in cities has been widely recognised, implementation of appropriate strategies and measures to curb them remains a challenge. In the Densu Delta, west of Accra, multiple phenomena of global environmental change interact together, making adaptation a key strategy for dealing with the increased risk of urban flooding. Implementation of existing policies, however, is scarce. Here we analyse policy arguments concerning strategies to reduce and adapt to urban flooding in key policy documents and contrast them with practitioners’ experiences of implementation in the Densu Delta. Two general mismatches in argumentation are identified that reflect the implementation gap in adaptation to flooding in the Densu Delta. These are a disconnected presentation of the causes, consequences and strategies in policy arguments, and the concealing of undisclosed premises. Undisclosed premises are shown not to speak to the conditions of implementation practice. Consequences for overcoming the implementation gaps are sketched out. The paper contributes to understanding of the implementation gap in adaptation to urban flood risk by applying a lens of argument to environmental policy analysis in an African context.

A Water Perspective on Land Competition

This chapter reflects on land competition from a water perspective. Conceptual thoughts are enriched with evidence drawn from case studies as well as other published studies about both land and water. At the same time, it lays down an analytical framework for these case studies. Starting with a discussion of the inherent relationship between land and water, we explore recent disconnects in land and water studies that make it difficult to collate empirical evidence and comprehensive understanding of how competition between water and land are inherently linked. For us the term competition refers to gaining access to or control over—either land or water—and thus simultaneously captures social and material dimensions. To address these linkages, we employ the concept of waterscapes. One way of seeing waterscapes is through the lens of the competition that occurs at specific places, in various positions and on/across various scales, thereby capturing a combined view of land and water. The notion of waterscapes is mainly used by scholars from the fields of political ecology and critical geography thinking to explore how power is wielded, and in determining when and where who or what gets how much water/land. We briefly review the different notions of competition in disconnected literature concerning land and water in order to instil a further analytical dimension: whilst the term “competition” is increasingly used in land change science to refer to the global rush for land, water scholars refer rather to the various means of water governance.

The Notion of the Global Water Crisis and Urban Water Realities

The global water crisis is often alluded to in scientific papers and geo-political discourse. However, the lack of a proper definition of what the term ‘water crisis’ means has been routinely overlooked, as much as are the reasons why it is assumed to be truly global in nature. Such generalisations and simplifications in both science and policy alike may lead to governance responses that are not fully applicable. In the following chapter we examine the relation between initially framing a problem (water crisis), and introducing policies and management principles that reflect such a situation. We will start by exploring the emergence of global water crisis in the 1990s. We then contrast these findings by examining how the urban water crisis in Accra, Ghana has worsened over time, although there is enough water to go round. We conclude with a plea that crucial socio-political perspectives within hydrology be reinforced, since these are the very factors—occurring within different spatio-temporal scales—that are often overlooked in research into water-related global change.

Interactions between freshwater ecosystem services and land cover changes in southern Bangladesh: A perspective from short-term (seasonal) and long-term (1973–2014) scale

We aimed to assess the long-term (1973-2014) and short-term (pre- and post-monsoon) quantities, values and changes of freshwater ecosystem services (FES) in the wetland areas of Southern Bangladesh using land cover change as a proxy indicator. Bangladesh is a sub-tropical country that receives >80% of its annual rainfall during the monsoon and post-monsoon periods, between the months of June and November. Therefore, it could be hypothesized that the monsoon and post-monsoon rainfalls significantly contribute to altering the local land cover, and consequently change the FES. Our multi-stage methodology, among others, included; (i) participatory FES identification (ii) long-term and seasonal land cover analysis using Remote Sensing and GIS, and (iii) assessing FES quantities and values using an expert-developed FES Matrix. The results identified 14 major FES; seven provisioning, six regulating and one cultural service. The results showed that over the last 40 years, significant land cover transformations occurred in the study area e.g. increase of agricultural land, rural vegetation with settlement (RVS) in exchange of wetlands, along with significant seasonal variations include increase of wetland in the post-monsoon seasons and agricultural land in the pre-monsoon seasons. Such changes contributed to the decrease of total long-term FES quantities and economic values including a significant reduction of regulating and provisioning services. Post-monsoon seasons experienced increased quantities of regulating services (e.g. soil fertility, water purification and biodiversity), mainly as a result of additional rainfall, although its overall quantities considerably decreased over the long-term. The results of the study highlighted the importance of prudent land management policies at rural scales for better ecosystem services and conservation.

Hydro-social arrangements and paradigmatic change in water governance: an analysis of the sustainable development goals (SDGs)

SDG 6 presents a global water agenda and an important opportunity to steer development trajectories towards a water-secure world. Based on semi-structured interviews and a political ecology perspective, this study takes water and SDG 6 as a focal point to analyze the shift from MDGs to SDGs in terms of underlying governance paradigms and policy change dynamics. Results indicate that the water-related SDG constitutes an important shift of UN policies in the realms of development cooperation and sustainable development policies by merging these two strands. While the MDGs were largely framed in line with conventional governance and management approaches, SDG 6 portrays a more holistic and inclusive agenda, which is also reflected in actor arrangement changing within the international water community. Nevertheless, ‘state-hydraulic paradigm’ approaches are still prevalent within Goal 6 and current implementation. To stimulate a more fundamental paradigm change towards a socio-hydrological perspective, the analysis suggests to acknowledge the wider political environment of water challenges.