Jeremy J. Schmidt

Property and the Right to Water Toward a Non-Liberal Commons

This paper examines the turn to considerations of property in arguments regarding the commons and the human right to water. It identifies commitments to liberalism in political economy approaches to property and human rights and develops a matrix for identifying non-liberal conceptions of the commons. The latter holds potential for an agonistic politics in which human rights are compatible with ecological sensibilities regarding the dynamics of conflict and cooperation in complex systems.

Ethics in the Anthropocene: A research agenda

The quantitative evidence of human impacts on the Earth System has produced new calls for planetary stewardship. At the same time, numerous scholars reject modern social sciences by claiming that the Anthropocene fundamentally changes the human condition. However, we cannot simply dismiss all previous forms of cultural learning or transmission. Instead, this paper examines ethics in the Anthropocene, and specifically what it implies for: (1) reassessing our normative systems in view of human impacts on the Earth System; (2) identifying novel ethical problems in the Anthropocene; and (3) repositioning traditional issues concerning fairness and environmental ethics. It concludes by situating ethics within the challenge of connecting multiple social worlds to a shared view of human and Earth histories and calls for renewed engagement with ethics.

Water management and the procedural turn : norms and transitions in Alberta.

Water management reforms promoting deliberative, decentralized decision making are often accompanied by procedures designed to accommodate a range of stakeholder perspectives. This paper considers the role of political and ethical norms affecting this ‘procedural turn’ in order to understand the management of transitions in complex socio-technical systems. It examines the discourse and practice of water reforms in Alberta, Canada in order to identify how new procedures were designed alongside changes to management institutions. It finds that the existing social and cultural context is an uneasy fit with procedural norms theorized in deliberative models of democracy. Using examples from the Alberta case, it draws out implications for understanding the procedural turn in water management and the role of norms affecting transitions toward sustainability.

False promises : the contours, contexts, and contestation of good water governance in Lao PDR and Alberta, Canada.

‘Good water governance’ in Lao PDR and Alberta, Canada emerged in different political contexts of, respectively, communism and democracy. Yet both espouse similar principles of participation, transparency and accountability. Drawing on multiple methods, this paper examines how contests over governance affect the adoption of, and mechanisms for, ‘good water governance.’ It gives particular emphasis to how both scale and context influence, and at times curtail, the promises of good water governance. In both Lao PDR and Alberta, we examine how governance mechanisms have been wielded by what we call closed communities. These communities are part of the dark side of water governance. They espouse good governance principles yet retain political power apart from them. We suggest good water governance is far from guaranteed by particular political systems, new institutions or even legislation. Keywords: Water Governance, water resources, Laos, Alberta, politics, scale.

Integrating Water Management in the Anthropocene

Integrated water resources management (IWRM) has been the dominant discursive frame for global water governance since the 1992 Rio Declaration. Yet it is increasingly criticized as inadequately incorporating ethical or political contexts in governance coordination. This policy review considers the two main iterations of IWRM: rational planning and economic decentralization. It recasts the claimed “failings” of IWRM with respect to each by arguing that governance programs need to internalize the notion that we live in the Anthropocene, wherein humans are understood as major drivers of planetary systems. This requires keeping both technical and ethical-political contexts at the fore of water governance.

Social learning in the Anthropocene : novel challenges, shadow networks, and ethical practices.

The Anthropocene presents novel challenges for environmental management. This paper considers the challenges that the Anthropocene poses for social learning techniques in adaptive management. It situates these challenges with respect to how anthropogenic forcing on the Earth system affects the conditions required for: (1) The cooperative exercises of social learning; (2) The techniques used for assessing the fit of institutions to social-ecological systems; and, (3) The strategies employed for identifying management targets that are transformed by human action. In view of these challenges, the paper then examines how the practices of shadow networks may provide paths for incorporating a broader, more robust suite of social learning practices in the Anthropocene. The paper emphasizes how novel challenges in the Anthropocene demand increased attention to ethical practices, particularly those that establish center-periphery relationships between social learning communities and shadow networks.

Bureaucratic territory : First Nations, private property, and “turn-key” colonialism in Canada.

Since 2006, successive Canadian governments have worked to create private property regimes on lands reserved for First Nations. This article examines how the state framed the theory and history of Aboriginal property rights to achieve this goal. It then shows how, under the pretense of restoration, bureaucrats developed legislation that would create novel political spaces where, once converted to private property, reserved lands would function as a new kind of federal municipality in Canada. These changes took place in two ways: First, bureaucrats situated Aboriginal property within the state apparatus and reconfigured Indigenous territorial rights into a series of “regulatory gaps” regarding voting thresholds, certainty of title, and the historical misrepresentation of First Nations economies. Second, the government crafted legislation under what is known as the First Nations Property Ownership Initiative that, by closing regulatory gaps, would produce private property regimes analogous to municipal arrangements elsewhere in Canada. These bureaucratic practices realigned internal state mechanisms to produce novel external boundaries among the state, Indigenous lands, and the economy. By tracking how bureaucratic practices adapted to Indigenous refusals of state agendas, the article shows how the bureaucratic production of territory gave form to a new iteration of settler-colonialism in Canada.

Global Water Governance: An Overview

This chapter distinguishes water management from water governance. It provides an overview of international water management from the UN Conference on Water in Mar del Plata to projects of global water governance that began in earnest in 2000. It emphasizes the important role that programs of integrated water resources management (IWRM) played during the 1990s, the problems and potential of which significantly shaped the challenges taken up by global water governance. Through this historical overview, the chapter defines and explains the specific attention that water governance gives to the social and political structures of decision making. As the result of the significant role of IWRM, existing structures of international water management connected water governance to programs of sustainability that aim to maximize outcomes across the triple-bottom line of environmental, economic, and social well-being. The chapter identifies the liberal compromise of sustainable development and the ways in which liberal notions of political and social order have both compelled and constrained notions of sustainable development.

Global Challenges in Water Governance

After a century of massive human interventions into the hydrological cycle, governing water is a critical global concern in the new millennium. Growing evidence that human impacts on the planet are shaping global and local hydrology is challenging long-held assumptions regarding resource management, development, and sustainability. Global Challenges in Water Governance introduces and examines physical, social, and ethical factors that affect how relationships to water amongst humans, social institutions, other species, and Earth systems are governed. Each volume in the series tackles issues of critical importance to water governance— from relationships of science to policy, to water politics and human rights, to ecological concerns—in order to clarify what is at stake and to organize the complex contexts in which decisions are made. Broadly interdisciplinary, the series provides fresh, accessible insights across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities from established academics and talented young scholars. Individual books are ideal for educators, as policy primers for governmental and non-governmental sectors, and for researchers whose work is directly or incidentally connected to water issues.

Living in the Anthropocene: Business as Usual, or Compassionate Retreat?

Human activity is changing the earth at a global scale. Atmospheric carbon dioxide reached 400 parts per million (ppm) in 2013, and there are no policies in place to prevent it from passing 450 ppm. This makes it highly unlikely that the 2009 Copenhagen agreement to limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius will be achieved, and there are many reasons to believe that this goal itself is too high to be safe. Projected sea-level rise will encroach on many of the world’s urban centers and agricultural lands, while shifts in regional weather patterns are leading to additional concerns about food, water, political insecurity, and massive migrations of climate refugees. All of this occurs in a world where already-high rates of species extinctions are set to rise dramatically due to climate change.1