Putting Water Security to Work: Addressing Global Sustainable Development Challenges

Over the last decade, water security has replaced sustainability as the key optic for thinking about how we manage water. This reframing has offered benefits (including clear recognition of the link between humans, the environment and the right to water) and also posed challenges (the tendency in some quarters to interpret “security” solely in terms of geopolitical or economic “securitisation”).

In this collection, the authors offer a radical repositioning of these debates updated to reflect the concerns of our post-pandemic world. The chapters in this volume examine several different themes including how water security articulates with locality and culture, how it operates across spatial scales and its moral/ethical resonances.

The chapters in this book were originally published in the journals Water International and International Journal of Water Resources Development.

Chad Staddon is a Professor of Resource Economics and Policy at the University of the West of England. His research focusses on the social, political and economic issues related to water services, particularly drinking water. Current projects include the historical geography of urban water systems around the world, water-energy trade offs in unconventional oil and gas operations and appropriate socio-technologies for achieving universal access to safe water (SDG6). He received his PhD in Geography from the University of Kentucky in 1996 for research on the political economy of water (mis)management in post-communist Bulgaria.

Christopher A. Scott is the Director of the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy and Professor of Geography, Development & Environment at the University of Arizona. Scott is an interdisciplinary scholar focusing on water, energy and food policy. His research and engagement address the policy dimensions of global change (climate change and urban growth) with particular emphasis on water and energy security, climate adaptation, urban wastewater and water reuse, agricultural-urban water transfers and transboundary water resources. He has lived and worked in South Asia and Latin America. Scott received PhD and MS degrees from Cornell University.