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Groundwater as a Source of Drinking Water in Southeast Asia and the Pacific: A Multi-Country Review of Current Reliance and Resource Concerns
Groundwater is widely acknowledged to be an important source of drinking water in low-income regions, and it, therefore, plays a critical role in the realization of the human right to water. However, the proportion of households using groundwater compared with other sources is rarely quantified, with national and global datasets more focused on facilities—rather than resources—used. This is a significant gap in knowledge, particularly in light of efforts to expand water services in line with the inclusive and integrated agenda of the Sustainable Development Goals. Understanding the prevalence of groundwater reliance for drinking is critical for those involved in water services planning and management, so they can better monitor and advocate for management of water resources that supports sustainable services for households. This paper contributes data that can be used to strengthen the integration of resource considerations within water service delivery and inform the work of development partners supporting this area. We approach this issue from two perspectives. Firstly, we collate data on the proportion of households using groundwater as their primary drinking water source for 10 Southeast Asian and Pacific nations, finding an average of 66% (range of 17–93% for individual countries) of households in urban areas and 60% (range of 22–95%) of households in rural areas rely on groundwater for drinking. Together, these constitute 79% of the total population across the case study countries. Secondly, we review current and emerging groundwater resource concerns within each country, using a systems thinking approach to assess how groundwater resource issues influence household water services. Findings support the case for governments and development agencies to strengthen engagement with groundwater resource management as foundational for achieving sustainable water services for all.
Journal Article
Evolving institutions of sustainability: A dynamic model of historical water governance transformations in Central Asia
This article introduces evolutionary game theory as an approach to stylised long-term analysis of water governance transformations in Central Asia. This world region has been strongly affected by natural hazards, political disruptions and historically diverse attempts to establish effective water management principles. Drawing on historical and contemporary evidence, we establish a game theoretical baseline model of a user community in which irrigation is efficiently governed by group sanctions. By allowing for drift in the evolutionary equilibrium, we model how a loss of traditional authorities over water management can erode established group norms. We then analyse a hypothetical scenario of privatised water rights, inspired by historical and current policy debates in Central Asia. Under the assumption that such rights can be technically implemented, we show that they can restore an efficient water use equilibrium of owners that is egalitarian and evolutionary stable. We discuss how future climate change scenarios or conflicts over transboundary water allocation may affect the model results, focusing on the effects of increased uncertainty and of decreasing water productivity on system resilience. Productivity shocks may make low-performing equilibria unsustainable and thus lead to disruptive change or extinction of certain equilibria. Policy should focus on local interaction as an arena of institutional change. We suggest empirical research questions emerging from our analysis and highlight the benefits of uncontested property rights as an institutional solution to water governance.
Journal Article
Multi-model coupled climate-land use-runoff feedback mechanism: analysis and prediction of spatial and temporal heterogeneity in the transboundary watershed of the Tumen River
The repercussions of climate change and land use change on water resources are becoming increasingly evident, particularly in the context of transboundary water resources research. This field necessitates the integration of various factors into research methodologies to achieve sustainable development objectives. The Tumen River Basin, a paradigmatic transboundary basin in Northeast Asia, has been confronted with the challenge of stabilizing water resources in view of the increased frequency of hydrological disasters in recent years. Therefore, in this study, a coupled model (M-S-C) combining the Mixed Cell Cellular Automata (MCCA), Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT), and Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 6 (CMIP6) meteorological data was utilized to predict the annual runoff intervals from 2025 to 2070. Furthermore, the study sought to analyze the impacts of different factors on runoff in different countries, and to propose the concept of Contribution of Transboundary River Volume (CTRV). The findings indicate that the impact of climate is significantly more substantial than that of land use change within the study area. Forest land and cultivated land emerge as the predominant land types exerting influence on runoff. Geodetector q-statistics reveal interpretation rates of 58.21% and 48.85%, respectively. The runoff volume is estimated to range from 83.062 billion to 149.696 billion m
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, with a decrease on the Chinese side and an increase on the North Korean side, as indicated by the CTRV slopes of − 0.023 and 0.005, respectively. The M-S-C coupled model and the CTRV concept offer novel insights for the monitoring of water resources in transboundary basins and the adaptive regulation of water-ecological coupling systems. These models provide significant guidance for the sustainable development of water resources in transboundary basins.
Journal Article
\The Whole World Is Watching\: Intimate Geopolitics of Forced Eviction and Women's Activism in Cambodia
Through fourteen in-depth interviews
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conducted in February 2013 with women from Boeung Kak Lake-a high-profile community under threat in Phnom Penh-this article argues that the occurrence of, and activism against, forced eviction is an embodiment of \"intimate geopolitics.\" The article demonstrates the manifold relationship that forced eviction reflects and ferments between homes, bodies, the nation-state, and the geopolitical transformation of Southeast Asia. Forced eviction is framed as a geopolitical issue, one that leads to innermost incursions into everyday life, one that has spurred on active citizenship and collective action evidencing the injustices of dispossession to diverse audiences, and one that has rendered female activists' intimate relationships further vulnerable. In doing so, it charts how Boeung Kak Lake women have rewritten the political script in Cambodia by publicly contesting the inevitability accorded to human rights abuses in the post-genocide country.
Journal Article
The Decentered Construction of Global Rights: Lessons from the Human Rights to Water and Sanitation
Families in Flint, Michigan, protesting lead in their water, indigenous groups in the Amazon asserting control over their rivers, slum dwellers in India worried about disconnection or demanding cities bring potable water to their neighborhoods, an entire city in South Africa worried about the day when they will run out of water altogether—all these and many more have claimed the human right to water as the vehicle to express their demands. Where does this right come from, and how is its meaning constructed? In this article, we show that, in sociolegal terms, the global right to water, as are many others, is constructed out of the myriad struggles and claims of people who feel the lack of something that is essential to a dignified existence, and who cannot obtain an adequate response from their immediate political and legal environment. They do so in loose conversation with, but relatively unconstrained by, the meanings that are being constructed by the international and domestic legal experts who work on formal legal texts. We draw on research carried out around the world by a team of scholars whose articles are included in this Special Issue of the journal to illustrate the decentered construction of the right to water.
Journal Article
Combining Approaches for Systemic Behaviour Change in Groundwater Governance
Over-extraction of groundwater is a prominent challenge in India, with profound implication for food security, livelihoods, and economic development. As groundwater is an ‘invisible’ and mobile common pool resource, sustaible governce of groundwater is complex, multifaceted, requiring coordition among various stakeholders at different scales. It remains an open question as to what can be done to strengthen the governce of groundwater, particularly on the scale necessary to address widespread depletion of resources. The growing competition over groundwater resources calls for systemic changes towards sustaible water magement. These require understanding the behaviours of actors in the system network, as well as the institutions that shape the direction in which the system moves. In this paper, we offer a behavioural perspective to system transformation and apply it to the example of an Indian NGO working on sustaible tural resource governce. The organisation, Foundation for Ecological Security (FES), has been co-designing and using various institutiol tools for groundwater governce with the collaboration of other NGOs and government partners, academic and research organisations towards strengthening governce of water. At the local level, these include groundwater monitoring and crop water budgeting, combined with experiential learning tools such as games for demand magement, and supply side interventions to support water harvesting and recharge. These tools are combined with efforts to strengthen multi-actor platforms, building coalitions and capacity of government, civil society and private sector actors to support groundwater governce at scale. By combining local and systemic approaches, the aim is to influence water governce on a larger scale and contribute to the sustaible magement of water resources in India. Our reflections illustrate how conceptual thinking can inform multi-methods approaches which consider that sustaibly improving groundwater magement at large scale requires inter-linked behavioural changes of diverse actors. Our approach constitutes critical reflection and conceptualization, based on situated knowledge which contributes to designing better adapted and more powerful intervention strategies through informed argument.
Journal Article
Can Transverse Eco-compensation Mechanism Correct Resource Misallocation in Watershed Environmental Governance? A Cost-benefit Analysis of the Pilot Project of Xin’an River in China
Correcting resource misallocation that creates productivity and welfare losses is the key to correcting transboundary basin pollution. China has proposed a transverse eco-compensation mechanism (TECM) based on the traditional Coase scheme to solve the pollution of transboundary watersheds. But whether it can correct the misallocation of resources that cause productivity and welfare losses has been ignored in existing literature. This paper first conducts a theoretical analysis of the TECM’s resource allocation effect and operation mechanism. And on this basis, we use the cost–benefit analysis (CBA) method to show how TECM produced actions in relevant upstream regions towards correcting excessive pollution, and how TECM provided economic incentives for these regions to undertake these actions. The CBA analysis results are consistent with the theoretical analysis. The TECM project will benefit the upstream region with a discount rate of 3%, and the present value of the net income is 96.4 million yuan. The conclusion still holds in the case of different discount rates. The above results show that the TECM can correct the resource misallocation that creates productivity and welfare losses in cross-basin environmental governance, and provide economic incentives for upstream areas to correct environmental resource misallocation (excessive pollution). Finally, the TECM model has important policy implications for solving the problem of cross-basin pollution in other similar countries.
Journal Article