Out of Water: From Abundance to Scarcity and How to Solve the World’s Water Problems

Chapter Eight: Water Governance for People and the Environment

”Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over.”

attributed to Mark Twain

Water governance is about effectively implementing a socially acceptable regulation and allocation framework for water and is thus an intensely political process.¹ Governance is a more inclusive concept than government, per se; it embraces the relationship between a society and its government and generally involves mediating behavior via values, norms, and often through laws. This complex series of interacting principles and behaviors clearly demonstrates that dealing with water issues is not simply an engineering or science-based process.

Consider the following example: Imagine the task of building ...