Abstract
Water has become a material business risk. Using this fact as a springboard to leap into a discussion around corporate water engagement, this introductory chapter sets out the basic ideas around Corporate Water Stewardship: A term embodying a range of different actions taken by corporate water users to mitigate water risks and enhance collective water security. The chapter places these activities in the broader context of a global water governance regime and suggests that despite a rapid proliferation of corporate interest in water issues, corporate water stewardship has received limited scholarly attention. As a result, the effects of corporate activities and decisions are, as yet, insufficiently understood. This chapter sets out the objective of the book to address this gap by providing an in-depth empirical and conceptual analysis of why companies engage with water issues, how they engage, and the effect their actions have on the norms and practices promoted by the global water governance system. Using these three questions to structure the book in its three parts – Incorporation, Involvement, and Influence – the final part of this introductory chapter provides an overview of the book’s methodological approach, and the subsequent chapters.
Ten years ago, the private sector was not in the game. Now there is a whole new world of corporate water governance out there.
Interview 5, 2015 unpublished
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Notes
- 1.
The treaty of Westphalia, signed in 1648, put an end to the Thirty Years War. The war began in the former Holy Roman Empire, but it eventually spread to involve all the (at the time) major powers of Europe, with Sweden, France, Spain, and Austria all waging campaigns, primarily on German soil. The treaty in 1648 set up the system of sovereign nation states, and has long dominated the perception of how international politics operates, by placing states as the prime actors and the principle of sovereignty above all else. However, it should be noted that not all scholars take for granted the alleged stability and universality of the Westphalian state. For example, Osiander (2001: 284) characterises it as “a figment of the nineteenth-century imagination, stylized still further, and reified, by the discipline of IR [International Relations] itself in the twentieth century.”
- 2.
In earlier work, Hajer (2003) defined this as the ‘institutional void.’
- 3.
These resolutions formally place water under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), one of the legally binding covenants to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). However, due to the weak nature of the ICESCR in terms of enforcing implementation, it remains unclear to what extent the right to water is legally enforceable.
- 4.
The Convention did not come into force until 2014 when Vietnam became the 35th state to ratify it.
- 5.
SMEs are enterprises which employ fewer than 250 persons and which have an annual turnover not exceeding 50 million euro, and/or an annual balance sheet total not exceeding 43 million euro (European Commission 2019).
- 6.
The term ‘non-private’ will be used throughout the book to denote a range of non-corporate actors, including public bodies and NGOs.
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Rudebeck, T. (2019). Introducing Corporate Water Stewardship in the Context of Global Water Governance. In: Corporations as Custodians of the Public Good?. Water Governance - Concepts, Methods, and Practice. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13225-5_1
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