Water Security: A Genealogy of Emerging Discourses

Abstract

Over the last decade the concept of “water security” has emerged from the policy literature linked to international security and hydropolitics, rapidly becoming discursively hegemonic. Indeed, in some quarters it seems even to be supplanting the hegemonic position hitherto occupied by the concept of “sustainable water.” Analytical reviews of the literature suggest that water security emerged in the first decade of the twenty-first century to articulate both long-standing concerns with the geopolitical implications of water’s variable geography, emergent concerns with the global environmental crisis, and the realization that water is implicated in many of life’s most basic requirements. Yet the use of the term “security,” rather than some alternative such as “supply,” “resources,” or “balance,” implies a paradigmatic shift in thinking, in some quarters at least, about how adequate water supply is to be realized and maintained. The emergence of water security as a hegemonic paradigm bears all the hallmarks of a new form of environmental governmentality. For the water security concept to help achieve maximum benefit for all citizens of the world, including the non-human ones, it must be seen to be linked to new forms of civil organization and democratic action and not merely to the machinations of state or parastatal organizations.