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

Transnational Water Governance and Infrastructures of Recognition


The United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD16) to assess the state of water governance practices across nations. Nearly two hundred nation states committed to the water governance principles outlined in Chapter 18 of Agenda 21 (1992) and further formalized in Resolution 2 of the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation that was written during the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002. The international policy formation ‘Integrated Water Resources Management’ (IWRM) has emerged as a central anchoring device for the construction of the indicators that the UN will utilize to measure adherence to those commitments on a worldwide scale. “Integrated Water Resources Management’ is the formation that anchors the UN’s current assessment efforts, not only because it has come to be promoted by an increasingly growing network of IWRM culture brokers, but also because it is formalized in both Agenda 21 and the WSSD Plan of Implementation. Mentioned explicitly in paragraphs 26 and 66, WSSD’s Plan of Implementation cites IWRM as one of the key components for achieving sustainable development. The Global Water Partnership maintains that 193 countries agreed to this plan of implementation. An official list of attendees is included on pages 74-76 of the UN Report (WSSD, 2002. For a history of IWRM from an engineering perspective, see Mizanur and Varis 2005. For a treatment of IWRM in the context of international regime theory, see Conca, 2006. IWRM thus serves a standard of conduct to which nation states are held accountable.

In his recent book, Governing Water (MIT, 2006) Ken Conca has writes an extensive commentary on the character of IWRM as a transnational governance formation. Conca suggests that, “IWRM has become a far-reaching cognitive construct and rhetorical device, penetrating important water governance nodes such as the World Bank and creating its own home in settings such as the Global Water Partnership. Yet the water governance paradigm advanced by these developments has also proven brittle and easily fractured when it is confronted with highly contentious questions of valuation and participation. The tensions between water as a human right and water as a marketized good have refused to sit still for knowledge stabilization in the service of normative consensus. Efforts to operationalize or even define suitable participatory mechanisms for making IWRM real have met a similar fate. As a result, the most important institutional mechanisms for networking of experts – which include global water conferences, authoritative blueprint documents, and elite global commissions – have become, not the de facto elements of a techno-rational governance, but important battlegrounds in the continued airing of these controversies.” (Conca, 2006:376).

I agree with Conca’s reading of IWRM’s heterogeneity. Yet because IWRM is formally embedded in international guidelines, its heterogeneity urges us to raise questions about its future as a transnational water governance movement: will it be subject to a processes of knowledge stabilization and thus move into the direction of an emergent regime form?

It is from the standpoint of this question that it is worthwhile to consider those on-going social efforts which in fact seek to establish epistemological frames through which the existence of IWRM practices are recognized as such – frames through which knowledge of IWRM is stabilized in the face of its heterogeneities. Indeed, scholars of the socialities of science and technology teach us that precisely because knowledge stabilization is a contingent and active process of construction, the possibilities for knowledge stabilization are not a function of the degrees of heterogeneity on the part of those objects about which knowledge is being stabilized. The UN’s current CSD16 reporting process is an interesting site of such processes of construction, because they involve inscription practices which do some work toward holding the social still; toward stabilizing for the purposes of knowledge and comparison a wide range of its heterogeneities. Such inscription practices have been theorized by scholars such as Bruno Latour and Nick Rose as moments in the construction of ‘centers of calculation’, so crucial to the practices of governmentality; they are important sites of knowledge stabilization. In a series of subsequent blog entries, I will pursue a conversation that focuses on a consideration of these inscription practices that invite us to entertain the possibility that IWRM is an international regime under construction.