Negotiating water governance: why the politics of scale matter

Those who control water, hold power. Complicating matters, water is a flow resource; constantly changing states between liquid, solid, and gas, being incorporated into living and non-living things and crossing boundaries of all kinds.

As a result, water governance has much to do with the question of boundaries and scale: who is in and who is out of decision-making structures?

Which of the many boundaries that water crosses should be used for decision-making related to its governance?

Recently, efforts to understand the relationship between water and political boundaries have come to the fore of water governance debates: how and why does water governance fragment across sectors and governmental departments?

How can we govern shared waters more effectively? How do politics and power play out in water governance?