Kathryn Furlong

Geographic Opportunity and Neomalthusian Willingness: Boundaries, Shared Rivers, and Conflict

International conflict has been analyzed extensively through the framework of opportunity and willingness. Opportunity has mainly been operationalized as physical proximity. Willingness has been measured in a number of ways, and remains a somewhat more elusive concept. Several scholars have called for boundary length to represent opportunity. Heeding such calls, Harvey Starr has used GIS methods to generate boundary length for 1993 and has found it to be associated with increased propensity to conflict. A number of his measures of willingness were not. Using a new and much more extensive dataset on boundary length for the entire Correlates of War period, this article finds very different results. We study the relationship with shared rivers and water scarcity as measures of neomalthusian factors in willingness over a 110-year period. The results indicate that the neomalthusian factors are significant although not dramatic in their effects. Boundary length, while associated with conflict in a bivariate analysis, fades into insignificance when the neomalthusian willingness measures are introduced. Work on this article was supported by the Research Council of Norway and started when Kathryn Furlong was a research assistant at PRIO on an internship funded by the International Institute for Sustainable Development. We are grateful to several PRIO colleagues – Naima Mouhleb, Håvard Strand, and Lars Wilhelmsen in particular – for help at various stages of the process. A presentation of the new boundary data used in this article is found in Furlong and Gleditsch (2003), where we record our gratitude to all of those who helped in generating that dataset. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 44th Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, Portland, OR 25 February–1 March 2003 and at the Joint Sessions of Workshops, European Consortium for Political Research, Edinburgh, March 28–April 2, 2003. We are grateful to participants at both meetings for comments. The replication data to this article can be found on http://www.prio.no/cscw/datasets. We also acknowledge the very useful comments of Harvey Starr and an anonymous referee for this journal.

Harmonization Versus Subsidiarity in Water Governance: A Review of Water Governance and Legislation in the Canadian Provinces and Territories

Given the high degree of variation in water governance practices across Canada, and the rapid rate of water-related legislative change in some provinces over the past decade, the purpose of this paper is to provide a systematic review of water legislation and governance that examines all thirteen provinces and territories, focusing on formal legislation and policies governing drinking water, watershed management (including source water protection), water rights, and water exports. We analyze legislative variation using concepts of harmonization and subsidiarity as a means of assessing the rationale for differing degrees of and approaches to federal and provincial involvement in water policy. Our review suggests that while variation may be appropriate, fragmentation is not. On this basis, we argue that some water issues would benefit from greater harmonization (which in many instances will imply greater federal involvement). In the cases of drinking water, source water protection, and water exports, increased harmonization at the federal level may be warranted. In contrast, whereas improving the federal role remains critical in terms of transboundary water management and water rights, this relates to its traditional activities of coordination, research, dissemination and funding rather than regulatory harmonization per se.

Small technologies, big change: Rethinking infrastructure through STS and geography

Infrastructure tends to be conceived as stabilized and ‘black-boxed’ with little interaction from users. This fixity is in flux in ways not yet fully considered in either geography or science and technology studies (STS). Driven by environmental and economic concerns, water utilities are increasingly introducing efficiency technologies into infrastructure networks. These, I argue, serve as ‘mediating technologies’ shifting long-accepted socio-technical and environmental relationships in cities. The essay argues for a new approach to infrastructure that, by integrating insights from STS and geography, highlights its malleability and offers conceptual tools to consider how this malleability might be fostered.

The Boundary Dataset

Geographical factors in general and proximity in particular have a pervasive influence on negative as well as positive interaction between states. Traditionally, proximity has been measured by contiguity or by great-circle distance. We argue that it is important to distinguish between the different levels of interaction opportunities open to contiguous states and propose to operationalize this as the length of the shared land boundary. Data on boundary lengths can be used, e.g., in the study of the relationship between natural resources and conflict or in the study of the diffusion of conflict. To date, such datasets have only been available for the most recent years. We present a new dataset covering the entire Correlates of War period, explain the measurement procedures, and offer comparisons with other more limited datasets.

The Dialectics of Equity: Consumer Citizenship and the Extension of Water Supply in Medellín, Colombia

In light of neoliberal prescriptions for a business-like approach to public service provision, researchers and activists have voiced strong opposition to treating citizens as consumers. On one side of the debate, it is argued that a consumer model for public services will lead to more responsible consumption, better allocation of resources, and improved accountability. On the other, such a model is said to jeopardize both the equity and quality of essential services. Yet, both of these perspectives rest on a binary analysis of consumption and citizenship that is not sustained by empirical observation. This article draws on studies of consumption in sociology and geography as well as a case study of water services in Medellín, Colombia, to explore the potential for a dialectical consumer citizen approach to public services. I argue that, for water supply, such an approach—rather than one that prioritizes either end of an often unhelpful binary—offers opportunities for regulated solidarity and differential responsibility in the achievement of collective goals. This means recognizing the role of the state in consumption, the unevenness of citizenship, and the limits of “choice.”

Good Water Governance without Good Urban Governance? Regulation, Service Delivery Models, and Local Government

‘State failure’ came to prominence in the 1980s to explain a range of challenges facing water supplies. Given the apparent problem, water supply was said to require organizational reform which would reduce government involvement in and influence over service delivery. Service providers, it was argued, should be independent from government. Among the associated reforms privatization has drawn the most attention, but alternative service delivery (ASD) has also proven important. Concomitantly, the regulatory role of senior governments was initially ‘rolled back’. Since that time, regulatory oversight at higher scales has been reasserted in many cases, yet the perceived need to circumscribe the role of municipal governments through organizational reforms like ASD persists. Using a case study of water sector reform in Ontario, Canada, I argue that such views conflate organizations with governance, thus ignoring underlying municipal issues affecting water supply. This, in turn, can limit the effectiveness of regulatory improvements at higher scales. Given the increased focus on institutions to resolve water-supply challenges, these findings have implications for other contexts. In Canada a municipality is a local government whose powers and responsibilities are defined by the provinces under their respective municipal acts. While these powers are typically limited compared with other jurisdictions, in keeping with trends elsewhere municipal responsibilities have been increasing.

Governance and Sustainability at a Municipal Scale: The Challenge of Water Conservation

Les mesures d’économie et de conservation de l’eau adoptée par les municipalités sont de plus en plus considérées comme un élément clé du développement durable à l’échelle municipale. Pourtant, jusqu’à maintenant, les municipalités ont fait peu de progrès dans ce domaine. Dans cet article, nous analysons un aspect particulier de ce problème, celui des pouvoirs et de la gouvernance, et nous présentons des arguments qui soutiennent l’hypothèse selon laquelle les efforts que font les instances responsables des services publics de l’eau (et parfois les municipalités) sont souvent freinés par des facteurs hors de leurs compétences. Dans ce dessein, nous présentons une étude de cas qui nous permet ainsi d’indiquer des obstacles à la conservation et à l’économie de l’eau qui sont associés à la gouvernance, et nous analysons les liens qui existent entre ces obstacles et des questions plus larges qui résultent de la nature multi scalaire et morcelée de la gouvernance en matière d’environnement au Canada.

Unexpected narratives in conservation: Discourses of identity and place in Šumava National Park, Czech Republic

Abstract In Šumava National Park, dominant actors dispute appropriate conservation strategies habitually overlooking Šumavas residents and their socioeconomic concerns. Routinely disregarded, Šumavas residents invoke narratives of identity and place that undermine the conservation paradigm by constructing the local population ‘quality’ as insufficient to make conservation a success. This paper examines the circumstances in which such a discourse emerges, how it responds to the asperity of conservation in a post-socialist setting and gains credence for implausible conclusions by appealing to broadly recognised Czech and European narratives of identity and place. What emerges is a discursive fragmentation of the subject simultaneously lends the discourse credibility and frustrates the redistribution of power in the area.

Complicating neoliberalization and decentralization: the non-linear experience of Colombian water supply, 1909–2012

This article presents key elements in the evolution of water supply regulation in Colombia over the twentieth century. This is novel in that it contradicts widely accepted and seemingly universal trends in water supply development. By putting apparently recent phenomena into a longer historical trajectory, we are able to nuance the idea of a unidirectional transition from centralized to decentralized governance, as well as the evolution of policies associated with neoliberalization. We find that regulatory development began at the municipal scale in the 1920s, only to be centralized mid-century. By the same token, policies typically associated with neoliberalization – such as corporatization, full cost recovery, and volumetric metering – began in the 1910s and 1920s and not under neoliberalism in the 1980s. The work is based on a database compiled by the authors. The database comprises municipal, departmental and state regulatory interventions from 1909 to 2012.

Urban service provision: Insights from pragmatism and ethics

In their work and life, urban service providers are continually torn between policies and pressures from higher scales and the realities of the cities they inhabit. The ways in which they negotiate these tensions imply the complex adjudication of a range of normative issues, conditioned by the variety of socio-technical, political, and economic factors that are underscored in the literature. In this way, geographical debates on pragmatism and ethics have an important, yet largely overlooked, contribution to make to the study of urban services. These approaches can promote the careful consideration of how people engaged in service provision manage such complexity – including its normative dimensions – through their long-term embodied experience. Pragmatic and related ethical perspectives necessarily contextualize decision-making, taking us beyond ideology or institutional exigencies to debates about practical reason, everyday ethics and embodied practice.