Turrini, Paolo --- "Virtual water: a global economic solution to a local environmental and political problem?" [2017] ELECD 324; in Chaisse, Julien (ed), "Charting the Water Regulatory Future" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2017) 55

Book Title: Charting the Water Regulatory Future

Editor(s): Chaisse, Julien

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781785366710

Section: Chapter 4

Section Title: Virtual water: a global economic solution to a local environmental and political problem?

Author(s): Turrini, Paolo

Number of pages: 21

Abstract/Description:

Studies on water as a resource shared between two or more countries have changed a lot in the last decades. In the eighties and nineties of the last century the debate was focused on what also became known to a larger and lay audience as ‘water wars’: at that time, many scholars firmly believed that the water scarcity affecting some world regions would lead, someday, to outbursts of real violence between states. The subsequent years swept this conviction away – at least in part: despite the previous forecasts, no war has apparently been waged in the last decades for causes primarily related to the control of water endowments. Thus, the scientific literature on the subject took different directions: some studies tried to explain why no regional armed conflict resulted from water scarcity;others capitalized on the lessons learned and, building on them, provided suggestions on how to best avoid international tensions due to the use and possession of water resources; still others shifted the focus away from pathological episodes and began to pay more attention to the everyday management of water security. As a consequence, a multi-headed hydra – rectius: a multi-headed hydro – rose from freshwater. A number of concepts were injected into the discourse on water security. The notion of hydro-politics emerged as an umbrella-term covering both conflicts and their antidote, i. e., co-operation, and more generally the issue of states ‘taking place in shared international river basins’. As in mythological tradition, cut one head off, two take its place. Hydro-politics can be split in hydro-governmentality on the one hand (that is, the way states regulate water-related matters, especially at the domestic level, as an expression of ordinary governmental powers)and, on the other hand, hydro-diplomacy (being the way international tensions are prevented by diplomatic means,which can sometimes lead to the conclusion of treaties). Germane to the latter is the head named hydro-solidarity: under this label, the management and negotiations around transboundary watercourses are looked at with an emphasis on dialogue and ethics, which are realized through the creation of collaborative institutions, the promotion of stakeholder participation and the integration of water within its wider environmental, economic and social context. Finally, hydro-hegemony reveals why political and legal arrangements among countries sharing a river basin, despite their being precious instruments to avoid open conflicts, sometimes merely crystallize the power relations existing in the group of riparians, and accord better treatment to the most influential of them.