Water as a narrative for resilience indicators
This essay is from AGWA’s March issue of the AGWA Guide Newsletter.
Three glasses of drinking water help to progress my thinking on indicators for water resilience. The first glass is filled with tap water, the second glass with locally bottled drinking water, and the third glass is filled with bottled water from a multinational brand. In terms of color, quality, smell, and function, the water is very basic, but in terms of resilience, the water in these three glasses is very different. To understand this difference, a close look at the different systems that feed into the glasses is required. But how to best capture this difference at a level where it concerns overall water resilience?
This takes me back to the mid-1990s, doing fieldwork for my study in water and irrigation engineering. At the time, the concept of water control helped me understand that any water flowing in an irrigation system has three dimensions of water control embedded: technical control, organizational control, and socio-economic and political control. The concept was taught at university by Peter Mollinga, who developed it to research the complexities of water politics in the Indian irrigation sector.
By acknowledging that the three dimensions are embedded in water, regardless of when or where it is encountered, a narrative can be built for different purposes, such as targeting the irrigation practices of different users, proposing different crops, while also introducing different sets of negotiations on water distribution. And then, just like the three glasses of drinking water, any water encountered in the same irrigation canal at one time, might have a completely different narrative than water in the same canal at any other time.
Now, with a focus on water resilience and uncertainty under climate change; it might be helpful to use the narrative as a starting point for defining indicators of resilience. The resilience question here is how to shape the narrative under changing conditions, regardless of what the exact conditions will be in the future, or regardless of the level deviation from the current situation, since under climate change, uncertainty is a given.
As a narrative, the indicators of water resilience can therefore neither be singular nor purely sectoral. For example:
A single survey list on water resilience indicators would be too static to capture water systems under change, no matter how well-defined the questions are.
Any assessment on water resilience focused on a single sector (e.g. on irrigation or on WASH) should include linkages to all other water uses as dynamic multi-dimensional entities, since uncertainty may also shape sectoral negotiations over water.
A hydrologic model on its own would help to show and predict where water flows in a system, but does not make the organizational, socio-economical, and political dimensions embedded in the water explicit, regardless of the model’s complexity.
Each of these analyses, or any other, when aimed at capturing water resilience indicators, and when performed to keep up with systemic changes under uncertainty, could contribute a storyline to the narrative on water resilience. To that extent, resilience indicators need to be both qualitative and quantitative. But as water resilience is a moving target, indicators will also need to be dynamic to keep feeding into this narrative. One question that remains is what organizational body will collect, analyze and continuously steer this evolving narrative?
This question cannot be answered here. But it is important to have an organizational body that operates above the sectoral water uses to guide the water resilience narrative. The narrative should be integrated into national climate planning documents, but at the same time be more dynamic as any systemic change in water resources and uncertainty might lead to sectoral negotiations or even to spontaneous conflict over water use priorities.
Getting back to the three glasses of drinking water, the different systems (a drinking water utility, a local bottler, a multinational corporation) tap into a single outcome, yet there might be little sectoral-, or maybe even regulatory, overlap. Sometimes, the systems work complementarily; when one system is contaminated for example, people can switch to another, if supply allows. At other times, they are in direct economic competition, where the different bottlers might compete over a consumer base. For indicating water resilience, it is not necessary to dissect the systems in full technical detail as there is no single resilience indicator on drinking water, that would capture the overall narrative. But by compiling an evolving narrative based on the water throughout the different systems, the technological, organizations, socio-economic and political dimensions of water resilience become evident.
Nikolai Sindorf
Delft, Netherlands