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Global Challenges in Water Governance

Part of the book series: Global Challenges in Water Governance ((GCWG))

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Abstract

This chapter examines how human economies have been understood in and through the practices informing global water governance, with a focus on the notion of economic value that shaped late twentieth-century sustainable development. It emphasizes the overlapping, partial, and abandoned economic techniques that have shaped global water governance and which subsequently complicate attempts at uniform or universal solutions to global challenges. It considers the progression of prominent economic ideas that have shaped global water governance: cost-benefit analysis, development economics and the Washington Consensus, water markets, common-pool resources, and ecosystem services valuation. It concludes by considering how the problems with securing water to a uniform economic system are increasingly being addressed by seeking nonuniform ways to secure water to the global economy through financial instruments that govern the supply chains of the water–energy–food–climate nexus.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Durham University, Durham, UK

    Jeremy J. Schmidt

  2. Senior Visiting Fellow, King’s College London, London, UK

    Nathanial Matthews

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  1. Jeremy J. Schmidt
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Schmidt, J.J., Matthews, N. (2017). Economies. In: Global Challenges in Water Governance. Global Challenges in Water Governance . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61503-5_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61503-5_3

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