Water Policy and Governance in Canada


Book Description

This book provides an insightful and critical assessment of the state of Canadian water governance and policy. It adopts a multidisciplinary variety of perspectives and considers local, basin, provincial and national scales. Canada’s leading authorities from the social sciences, life and natural sciences address pressing water issues in a non-technical language, making them accessible to a wide audience. Even though Canada is seen as a water-rich country, with 7% of the world’s reliable flow of freshwater and many of the world’s largest rivers, the country nevertheless faces a number of significant water-related challenges, stemming in part from supply-demand imbalances but also a range of water quality issues. Against the backdrop of a water policy landscape that has changed significantly in recent years, this book therefore seeks to examine water-related issues that are not only important for the future of Canadian water management but also provide insights into transboundary management, non-market valuation of water, decentralized governance methods, the growing importance of the role of First Nations peoples, and other topics in water management that are vital to many jurisdictions globally. The book also presents forward-looking approaches such as resilience theory and geomatics to shed light on emerging water issues. Researchers, students and those directly involved in the management of Canadian waters will find this book a valuable source of insight. In addition, this book will appeal to policy analysts, people concerned about Canadian water resources specifically as well as global water issues.




Indigenous Research


Book Description

Indigenous research is an important and burgeoning field of study. With the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s call for the Indigenization of higher education and growing interest within academic institutions, scholars are exploring research methodologies that are centred in or emerge from Indigenous worldviews, epistemologies, and ontology. This new edited collection moves beyond asking what Indigenous research is and examines how Indigenous approaches to research are carried out in practice. Contributors share their personal experiences of conducting Indigenous research within the academy in collaboration with their communities and with guidance from Elders and other traditional knowledge keepers. Their stories are linked to current discussions and debates, and their unique journeys reflect the diversity of Indigenous languages, knowledges, and approaches to inquiry. Indigenous Research: Theories, Practices, and Relationships is essential reading for students in Indigenous studies programs, as well as for those studying research methodology in education, health sociology, anthropology, and history. It offers vital and timely guidance on the use of Indigenous research methods as a movement toward reconciliation.




Water Governance: Retheorizing Politics


Book Description

This republished Special Issue highlights recent and emergent concepts and approaches to water governance that re-centers the political in relation to water-related decision making, use, and management. To do so at once is to focus on diverse ontologies, meanings and values of water, and related contestations regarding its use, or its importance for livelihoods, identity, or place-making. Building on insights from science and technology studies, feminist, and postcolonial approaches, we engage broadly with the ways that water-related decision making is often depoliticized and evacuated of political content or meaning—and to what effect. Key themes that emerged from the contributions include the politics of water infrastructure and insecurity; participatory politics and multi-scalar governance dynamics; politics related to emergent technologies of water (bottled or packaged water, and water desalination); and Indigenous water governance.




Eau Canada


Book Description

As the sustainability of our natural resources is increasingly questioned, Canadians remain stubbornly convinced of the unassailability of our water. Mounting evidence suggests, however, that Canadian water is under threat. Eau Canada assembles the country's top water experts to discuss our most pressing water issues. Perspectives from a broad range of thinkers - geographers, environmental lawyers, former government officials, aquatic and political scientists, and economists - reflect the diversity of concerns in water management. Arguing that weak governance is at the heart of Canada's water problems, this timely book identifies our key failings, explores debates over jurisdiction, transboundary waters, exports, and privatization, and maps out solutions for protecting our most important resource.




Governing Transboundary Waters


Book Description

Winner of the Political Geography Specialty Group's 2015 Julian Minghi Distinguished Book Award! With almost the entire world's water basins crossing political borders of some kind, understanding how to cooperate with one's neighbor is of global relevance. For Indigenous communities, whose traditional homelands may predate and challenge the current borders, and whose relationship to water sources are linked to the protection of traditional lifeways (or 'ways of life'), transboundary water governance is deeply political. This book explores the nuances of transboundary water governance through an in-depth examination of the Canada-US border, with an emphasis on the leadership of Indigenous actors (First Nations and Native Americans). The inclusion of this "third sovereign" in the discussion of Canada-U.S. relations provides an important avenue to challenge borders as fixed, both in terms of natural resource governance and citizenship, and highlights the role of non-state actors in charting new territory in water governance. The volume widens the conversation to provide a rich analysis of the cultural politics of transboundary water governance. In this context, the book explores the issue of what makes a good up-stream neighbor and analyzes the rescaling of transboundary water governance. Through narrative, the book explores how these governance mechanisms are linked to wider issues of environmental justice, decolonization, and self-determination. To highlight the changing patterns of water governance, it focuses on six case studies that grapple with transboundary water issues at different scales and with different constructions of border politics, from the Pacific coastline to the Great Lakes.




Negotiating Water Governance


Book Description

Those who control water, hold power. Complicating matters, water is a flow resource; constantly changing states between liquid, solid, and gas, being incorporated into living and non-living things and crossing boundaries of all kinds. As a result, water governance has much to do with the question of boundaries and scale: who is in and who is out of decision-making structures? Which of the many boundaries that water crosses should be used for decision-making related to its governance? Recently, efforts to understand the relationship between water and political boundaries have come to the fore of water governance debates: how and why does water governance fragment across sectors and governmental departments? How can we govern shared waters more effectively? How do politics and power play out in water governance? This book brings together and connects the work of scholars to engage with such questions. The introduction of scalar debates into water governance discussions is a significant advancement of both governance studies and scalar theory: decision-making with respect to water is often, implicitly, a decision about scale and its related politics. When water managers or scholars explore municipal water service delivery systems, argue that integrated approaches to salmon stewardship are critical to their survival, query the damming of a river to provide power to another region and investigate access to potable water - they are deliberating the politics of scale. Accessible, engaging, and informative, the volume offers an overview and advancement of both scalar and governance studies while examining practical solutions to the challenges of water governance.







Global Water Ethics


Book Description

Scholarly interest in water ethics is increasing, motivated by the urgency of climate change, water scarcity, privatization and conflicts over water resources. Water ethics can provide both conceptual perspectives and practical methodologies for identifying outcomes which are environmentally sustainable and socially just. This book assesses the implications of ongoing research in framing a new discipline of water ethics in practice. Contributions consider the difficult ethical and epistemological questions of water ethics in a global context, as well as offering local, empirical perspectives. Case study chapters focus on a range of countries including Canada, China, Germany, India, South Africa and the USA. The respective insights are brought together in the final section concerning the practical project of a universal water ethics charter, alongside theoretical questions about the legitimacy of a global water ethics. Overall the book provides a stimulating examination of water ethics in theory and practice, relevant to academics and professionals in the fields of water resource management and governance, environmental ethics, geography, law and political science.




Water Governance as Connective Capacity


Book Description

Water is becoming one of the world's most crucial concerns. A third of the world's population has severe water shortage, while three quarters of the global population lives in deltas which run the risk of severe flooding. In addition, many more face problems of poor water quality. While it is apparent that drastic action should be taken, in reality, water problems are complex and not at all easy to resolve. There are many stakeholders involved - industries, local municipalities, farmers, the recreational sector, environmental organisations, and others - who all approach the problems and possible solutions differently. This requires delicate ways of governing multi-actor processes. This book approaches the concept of 'water management' from an interdisciplinary and non-technical, but governance orientation. It departs from the fragmented nature of water management, showing how these lack cooperation, joint responsibility and integration and instead argues that the capacity to connect to other domains, levels, scales, organizations and actors is of utmost importance. Connective capacity revolves around connecting arrangements (such as institutions), actors (for instance individuals) and approaches (such as instruments). These three carriers of connectedness can be applied to different focal points (the objects of fragmentation and integration in water management). The book distinguishes five different focal points: (1) government layers and levels; (2) sectors and domains; (3) time orientation of the long and the short term; (4) perceptions and actor frames; (5) public and private spheres. Each contributor pays attention to a specific combination of one focal point and one connective carrier. Bringing together case studies from countries including The Netherlands, United Kingdom, Romania, Sweden, Finland, Italy, India, Canada and the United States, the book focuses on the question of how to deal with the various sources of fragmentation in water governance by organizing meaningful connections and developing 'connective capacity'. In doing so, it provides useful scientific and practical insights into how 'connective capacity' in water governance can be enhanced.




Environmental Policy


Book Description

"Global environmental challenges have caused a range of policy solutions, approaches, and models to emerge. As these challenges are expected to intensify in the near future, environmental policy and its instruments are increasingly becoming a topic of discussion, action, and disagreement in academic, professional, and mass media outlets. This fixation on the topic of policy is well-justified considering the consequences policy can have on all levels of society - global, national, sectoral, organizational, and even personal. Policy has a vital role in reducing environmental damage, incentivizing positive environmental behavior, and guiding practice toward a more sustainable future. While most policies have economic repercussions, environmental policies, and specifically new environmental policy instruments, have exhibited a special and complex relation to the economy. The environment can thus be considered an envelope encompassing and sustaining the economic system - much more than just a factor of production"--