Naho Mirumachi, Head of King’s Water, is a specialist in transboundary water governance. Her recent book, Transboundary Water Politics in the Developing World (Routledge, 2015), asks how and why shared water resources become contested.
This Wednesday, Dr Mirumachi spoke about her work at the University of Oxford. Hosted by the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, she presented a new review paper on “Revisiting water governance: seeking insights to challenges of depoliticisation”.
In the paper, Naho demonstrates that the importance of water governance is emphasised in both academic and policy literature. It has been widely acknowledged that the crisis around water issues is one resulting from governance challenges. Given the diversity and complexity of water use and management, there is increasing recognition that governance mechanisms need to fit these contexts and to cope with changes to socio-economic and environmental conditions. Despite these advancements in scholarship, ideals of a single institutional model, universal framework and diagnostics are some dominant features in the water governance debate. The review paper highlights how water governance discourses tend to obfuscate nodes of politics on scale and knowledge, resulting in a depoliticisation of water governance approaches.