Legal Geographies of Water: The Spaces, Places and Narratives of Human-Water Relations

This book deepens our understanding of humanity’s diverse relationships with water and the law, providing a critical assessment of this relationship, as well as charting the course towards a more sustainable and just water future.

By using legal geography, the book pays particular attention to the place-based inter-relationships between water, people, and law, both formal and informal, and to the ways that law both creates and is created by the relationship between people and place. Starting in the 1980s, Chapters 2 and 3 investigate the early commodification of water through the liberalisation of rural water markets in Chile and the urban water and sanitation systems of England and Wales, before examining its global expansion in the 1990s, starting with donor driven water governance reforms in the global south. Chapters 4 and 5 document both the grassroots response to these neoliberal water reforms and the inherent tensions in attempts during the early 2000s to reconcile the recognition of a human right to water with the ongoing roll out of market mechanisms, both in the domestic context of South Africa and within the United Nations human rights system. Moving forward again, Chapter 6 examines the recent intensification of neoliberal water governance through financialisation, and considers its specific impacts in Detroit and Flint, Michigan. Chapter 7 then considers the renewed global emphasis on living waters and Indigenous ontologies of water by examining the new legislative arrangements for the Whanganui River in Aotearoa/New Zealand. In the face of a growing global water crisis, which is being exacerbated by climate change, humanity must confront the fundamental nature of our relationship with living water and the immerse damage that has been wrought through extractivist approaches. The book concludes in Chapter 8 by highlighting the stories of hope that can be found in many of the case studies explored in the book and in emerging examples from around the world.

This book is essential reading for students and scholars interested in water law, security, and justice from across a wide range of disciplines, including environmental studies, law, geography, human rights, and political ecology.