- Enseignant-e: Christian Brethaut
The governance of water resources entails dealing with highly complex challenges, with high stakes at play and vivid tensions across a wide spectrum of stakeholders. On the earth’s surface, only 2.5% of global water is freshwater. Within this fraction, 69% of freshwater is stocked as snow and glaciers, 30.7% is stored in the underground and 0.3% flows in lakes and rivers. As a result, less that 1% of total freshwater is available for human and ecosystem needs. In such context, focusing on water governance and policy is critical to provide arbitration between different uses and to ensure sustainability of the resource system.
In practice, a few key concepts contribute to structure the water governance and policy agendas at the international level. These concepts strongly shape on-going discourses and practices related to water resources management. From the normative standpoint, they influence how policy and financial guidelines are defined. Scientifically, they constitute a great source of interest and critical research. These different trends of the sector are the result of spheres of influence that include different types actors trying to promote (sometimes to impose) their viewpoints on which concept will contribute to addressing today’s challenges.
This course provides key concepts and frameworks for understanding contemporary water governance and policy. For the water sector and beyond, the teaching aims to enable students to better navigate, analyze and critique material they come across in their studies and beyond.
The course will focus on water governance and policy challenges through 4 main modules: Integration, Water-Energy-Food (WEF) Nexus, Water Justice and Water Security. For these modules, students will have video presentations to watch before class, and will use class time to present and debate the issues. External speakers will shed light on the practice and implementation of these concepts. There will also be theoretical input on Nirvana Concepts, Discourses and Storylines, Decolonizing Water Governance Models, and a Research Methods Workshop.
Objectives
The « Water Governance & Policy » course has three main objectives:
1. Students grasp the nature of water governance through the analysis of key concepts
2. Students critically assess water governance concepts through presentation and debate
3. Students mobilize water governance concepts to analyze a specific water governance challenge through individual written work