Transnational Water Governance and Infrastructures of Recognition: the UN IWRM Assessment

Hi Folks,

Following on my previous comments about the UN IWRM assessment efforts, today I want to mention briefly an aspect of the political rationality of IWRM as a particular transnational water governance model that anchors the UN’s current assessment efforts. Thereafter I will move to a consideration of the UNs assessment framework and techniques. I consider ‘political rationality’, in the sense used by Nicolas Rose, as “a kind of intellectual machinery or apparatus for rendering reality thinkable in such a way that it is amenable to political programming” (Rose, 1996:42; Rose and Miller, 1992; Miller and Rose, 1990.)

IWRM is likewise a bundle of ‘principles’ that should inform conduct in such a way as to ameliorate the world’s water crisis. The 1st World Water Development Report (WWDR1) (UN and WWAP, 2003) in fact concluded that “governance issues form the central obstruction to sound and equitable water sharing and management worldwide” (see UN and WWAP, 2006:12), and since then more and more attention has been given to ‘governance’ – and IWRM in particular. Within the UN’s current assessment efforts, ‘water ‘governance’ is continues to be configured within a constellation of other variables that the UN has come to regard as relevant to the world’s water crisis. Although IWRM has not attained the status of International treaty, it nevertheless remains a normative force that is used to exert pressure on governments. It is formalized in national commitments to reach the MDG’s, it is endorsed among others by the UN and the World Bank, and it thus informs donor conditionality and the generalized legitimacy of nations states in the eyes of the mysterious ‘international community’. In these senses, IWRM is perhaps best understood as a ‘program and set of green guidelines’, which exerts international pressure on governments, even as they are resisted and modified (Gupta 1998: 295).

Constituent to IWRM are the ‘Dublin Principles’ , which were developed in at the International Conference on Water and the Environment (ICWE, 1992), and ultimately embodied in Chapter 18 of Agenda 21 (1992). Readers familiar with contemporary ‘water wars’ may have come across references to IWRM through the figure of the Global Water Partnership, which has been interpreted as a “big business lobby organization” that promotes “the privatization and export of water resources and services through close links with global water corporations and financial institutions” (Barlow and Clarke, 2002: 157).

As a way of getting closer to IWRM as a particular political rationality, I want to point out two of its interlocking features– its globalism and what I will call its ‘postcolonial axiom’. I want to suggest that the IWRM policy movement has actually engaged and synthesized the two in the formation of a distinctive political rationality. On one hand, it has been situated as a global ambition in the sense that it has become associated with efforts to bring about particular forms of conduct across the planet. That the IWRM movement is globalist in this sense is evidenced in the visibility and urgency that it has come to have in multiple international networks and fora, and in the position that it has come to have as a line item in formal transnational agreements such as the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation. That the forms of conduct which the IWRM movement has sought to globalize would be particular forms of conduct (and not just any old form of conduct) is evidenced in the way in which IWRM has been framed as an alternative to existing (‘conventional’, ‘traditional’, ‘top-down’) forms of conduct in the water management sector, which are presumed to be prevalent and which are sought to be overcome or corrected. A series of properties drawn from the vernaculars of ‘governance’ (decentralization, empowerment, participation, and so on) is often invoked to identify IWRM as a constellation of properties that can be meaningfully differentiated from the administrative conventions that are deemed problematic. And the idea that IWRM represents some kind of change, that it names some shift to an alternative form of conduct, underpins its very presence as a goal to which signatories to international agreements should aspire. Whatever this shift entails, it should be sought across nations.

The IWRM movement has oriented to the world’s water crisis as an exercise in ‘scaling up’ a set of principles such that they come to inform conduct situated in the infinite ‘locals’ that constitute the globe. In its globalist aspect the IWRM movement seeks not only to give rise to forms of conduct, but also to reproduce particular forms of conduct across territories. Such an orientation undergirds the very idea that ‘local’ IWRM implementations could be assessed, and informs the meta-normative presumption that local instances of can be represented as instances of IWRM in the aggregate. As we will see, however, its globalism creates knowledge dilemmas for the IWRM movement, because in keeping with its anti-’traditional’ character, the IWRM movement has also entailed what we might call a ‘postcolonial axiom’ – an apriori recognition that difference or heterogeneity would necessarily attend any instantiation, or ‘implementation’ of IWRM ‘on the ground’. Although any instance of IWRM implementation would entail some aspect of a series of properties drawn from the vernaculars of ‘governance’ (decentralization, empowerment, participation, and so on), heterogeneity is expected and encouraged with respect to which of those properties is reproduced, and indeed what form any such properties would take were they found to be reproduced.

Nevertheless, ostensibly meaningful societal practices – not least those associated with the paradigm of ‘governance’ itself - have attended the centrist and globalist strategies that the IWRM movement has already exhibited, and here I have in mind the formalization of commitments through international agreements to implement IWRM. So, if the UN does not look to see if IWRM practices are actually being sought or brought about by its signatories, the very process of UN treaties and conventions runs the risk of losing all legitimacy. In the shadow of that possibility, and in the face of its stated commitment to diversity, the UN must initiate practices of standardization and accounting that, however dilemmatic, must be carried through. This creates knowledge dilemmas for the UN, because it begs the question of which properties of ‘local’ IWRM practices can indeed be recognized through the kind of coarse-grained classifications that are required by assessment in the aggregative mode. The situation invites us to consider in detail the precise techniques by which the status of IWRM progress is being inscribed under the rubric of the current UN efforts, the discussion to which I turn in the next section.

It is fortuitous for this analysis that the 2nd World Water Development Report (UN and WWAP, 2006) provided a prospective description of the indicators scheme that the UN would use for CSD16 reporting, because it presents the broad ‘indicator scheme’ in which ‘governance’ is put into relations with other indicators of the world water crisis. WWDR2 is the primary data source for this section. The two figures below show the indicators scheme that is provided in the WWDR2: It is a canvass upon which the UN draws the variables of the current water crisis, relates them as interacting phenomena, and classifies them as objects about which data can be generated.

The assessment framework is organized by a series of ‘challenge areas’, each of which is related in its own way to ‘water’. Among the challenge areas are ‘settlements’, ‘resources’, ‘health’, and so on (see far left column of Figures 1 and 2. Each challenge area is characterized as having some set of ‘indicators’ (see column two). Indicators associated with ‘settlements’, for example, are ‘index of performance of water utilities’, ‘urban water and sanitation governance index’, and ‘slum profile in human settlements’. ‘Governance’ appears as a specific ‘challenge area’, and is associated with two indicators: ‘access to information, participation and justice’ and ‘progress toward implementing IWRM’.

From the standpoint of Conca’s discussion of the meta-normative orientation of ‘knowledge stabilization’, here I want to point out that each indicator is characterized as having what is called a ‘DPSIR Aspect’ and a ‘Status’. The ‘D-P-S-I-R Framework of Analysis’ was originally developed by the European Environmental Agency. It characterizes indicators in terms of where their corresponding variables fall in a chain of cause-effect relationships. The elements of the causal chain (D, P, S, I, and R) are defined respectively as follows.

Driving forces – Basic sectoral trends, the underlying factors, root causes affecting the development of society, the economy and environmental conditions.

Pressure – Human activities directly influencing water resources supply, quantity or quality, or water use; the immediate stress agents or proximate causes.

State – Current conditions and trends; situation or status of the resource or the sector vis-à-vis water at the present time.

Impact – the effects of a changed water-related conditions on human and natural systems; physical and economic losses due to deteriorating water conditions; the effective consequence of the altered state of the resource or its use.

Response – the reaction, or efforts of society—all levels—to change undesirable conditions, to solve the problems that have developed or to counter the stress and impacts imposed on human systems; coping mechanisms as reflected in changes in policies and institutions, production practices or human behaviour. (Source: UN and WWAP, 2006: 35-36)

In addition to their definitions, the DPSIR elements are conceived as a circular chain: inputs (d) converted into outputs (P), converted into inputs (S), and so on. In this way the DPSIR framework of Analysis classifies indicators and provides guiding principles for configuring functional-causal relations between the variables that are differently captured by them. It suggests the seeds of a meta-normative presumption of knowledge stabilization.

One naturally wonders, how the challenge area ‘governance’ fits within this functional-causal configuration of relationships? That question will structure our discussion next time.

Hej hej!