Water Governance of Aquatic Resources and Environments

Course manual 2020/2021

Course content

Water is crucial for human life on this planet. We rely strongly on water resources for daily needs such as drinking and bathing, as well as for growing the food that we eat. Water also plays an essential role for transportation of goods and for recreation. But when the sea turns stormy, or the rains make rivers swell, appreciation turns into fear. Climate change is influencing the availability and the function of water across the world. Sea level rise, storm surges, floods and droughts affect our future safety and our styles of life. Experts call for adaptation and develop far-reaching plans for higher dikes, a relocation of settlements, and the evacuation of islands. The governance challenges are immense.

This course deals with the governance of aquatic resources and environments. This course takes a global perspective with explicit attention to North-South relations. What can the Netherlands, for example, learn from Bangladesh when it comes to water governance? And vice versa? What happens if one’s perspective changes from the local, to the national and international level? And is the act of governing transboundary water resources fundamentally different from governing the provision of drinking water?

Governance refers to the process of making and implementing decisions with regard to societal objectives. It is undertaken by governments, but also by civil society actors such as NGOs and religious bodies, private parties such as business, and consumers. Governance takes place at multiple levels of the administrative scale varying from the international to the local. Such governance, by virtue of engaging multiple actors and levels, has to deal with competing interests and concerns. Promoting horizontal and vertical coherence in policy approaches is a very complex challenge. To some extent this can be addressed through the formulation of common goals and principles, but this is not easy. After all, those governing need to weigh priorities against one another: should environmental protection receive priority, or is social justice more important? Is economic efficiency a prime concern, or is employment the main goal? Establishing priorities is generally a matter for politics, and there is no single objective way to ascertain which issue should be a priority at what level of governance and in which context.  But what then is the role of scientists? Can science help in clarifying the hard choices and identifying pathways to addressing wicked problems? In this course we engage with these and other questions, aiming for students to acquire a basic understanding of the challenges and opportunities of water governance from a global perspective. 

Study materials

Literature

• Compulsury readings will be provided via weblinks on Canvas

Objectives

•  Explain and differentiate social processes that are relevant for the future of humankind (in particular with regard to water as part of the natural environment, a resource and the ecosystem services of water, namely i) The nature of water and the types of water governance challenges; ii) The key historical patterns of water governance world-wide; iii) The link between water and its ecosystem services; iv) The drivers and causes of water related problems at multiple levels of governance; and v) The diversity of principles, policies, instruments and (theoretical) approaches to deal with water at multiple levels of governance challenges.
•  Identify insights and critically engage with i) the role of society – and in particular ‘governance’ – in an interdisciplinary perspective on water; ii) the definition of governance and the role of policy, law, politics and society within that; iii) the diversity of tools for water governance for the diversity of actors working on water governance and iv) the politics of global water governance and in particular the SDGs.
•  Judge which disciplines are of core importance in addressing complex societal challenges, and to acquire capacities to combine various perspectives; a) Identify the different roles of different disciplines in finding solutions to water challenges; and b) Identify how multi-, inter and transdisciplinary methods can help to find solutions to water challenges.
•  Collaborate in finding, processing and combining information in a meaningful manner and thus to analyze and handle complex challenges in the field of water.
• Convey scientific information in a clear, concise, coherent and attractive way in a case study paper.

Teaching methods

• Lecture
• Seminar

The working groups will be used to discuss the paper assignment and corresponding literature. 

The lectures are to aquire (theoretical and practical) knowledge about water Governance and related concepts

Learning activities

Attendance

Programme's requirements concerning attendance (OER-B):

• Participation in fieldwork is compulsory and cannot be replaced by assignments or other courses.
• In case of practical sessions, the student is obliged to attend at least of 90% of the sessions and to prepare himself adequately, unless indicated otherwise in the course manual. In case the student attends less than 90%, the practical sessions should be redone entirely.
• In case of tutorials/seminars with assignments, the student is obliged to attend at least 7 out of 8 seminars and to prepare thoroughly for these meetings, unless indicated otherwise in the course manual. If the course has more than 8 seminars, the student can miss up to 1 extra meeting for every (part of) 8 tutorials/seminars. If the students attends less than the mandatory tutorials/seminars, the course cannot be completed.

Additional requirements for this course:

The student is obliged to attend at least of 90% of the sessions and to prepare himself/herself adequately. Students missing more than 1 compulsory working group will be excluded from further participation. Failing to submit a preparatory assignment equals missing 1 compulsory class.

Assessment

The individual exam will take place online. More instructions will follow during the course.  The group assignment requires active collaboration in groups of 2 or 3. Not meeting the deadline results in 1 point deduction per day except when extenuating circumstances apply and approval from the course coordinator or exam committee granted. 

Assessment diagram

Students that were enrolled in the course in previous years

According to the OER, course results are valid for a 1 year period. This implies that students who successfully passed part of the course last year, can keep his/her grade for this year, and only need to redo those components for which they failed. Please send an email to the course coordinator prior to the start of the course if this is the case. 

Assignments

Students will write a paper for this course together with 2 or 3 other students. The paper will focus on how water scarcity in combination with growing water demands and unequal power relations can this lead to a phenomenon called ‘water grabbing’? Water grabbing is a rather polemical concept used by both scholars and practitioners to problematize the reallocation of water access from one group to another group. Water grabbing typically involves unequal power relations, contested property systems, and sometimes violent dispossession, and operates at local through to global level. What kind of evidence is there of water grabbing and what role has governance played in facilitating or hampering this?  More information will be provided during the second week of the course. Students will be further guided in these questions by participating in a series of tutorials and preparatory assignments starting the second week of the course. 

NOTE: the preparatory assignments are instrumental to the course. While they are not graded, failure to submit a pre-assignment of sufficient quality equals missing one tutorial. Missing more than one tutorial leads to exclusion from the course. 

Fraud and plagiarism

The 'Regulations governing fraud and plagiarism for UvA students' applies to this course. This will be monitored carefully. Upon suspicion of fraud or plagiarism the Examinations Board of the programme will be informed. For the 'Regulations governing fraud and plagiarism for UvA students' see: www.student.uva.nl

Course structure

Timetable

The schedule for this course is published on DataNose.

Additional information

Attendance is compulsory. Unapproved absence may lead to exclusion of further participation of the course.

Last year's course evaluation

In order to provide students some insight how we use the feedback of student evaluations to enhance the quality of education, we decided to include the table below in all course guides.

Contact information

Coordinator

• dr. Joeri Scholtens