Author: Saurabh Gupta
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 331921392X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 175
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Book Description
This book examines the politics of rural development with special reference to watershed development interventions in the desert province of Rajasthan in India. Watershed development (and rainwater harvesting) is one of the most significant rural development interventions in rainfed areas of India since the early 1990s. A range of developmental actors including the state watershed department, international donors, NGOs and grassroots organisations are involved in sponsoring watershed development projects. Using multi-sited ethnography and conversational interviews with the deliverers as well as recipients of development, the book compares and contrasts the watershed interventions of the state and two different kinds of NGOs in Rajasthan. While conventional studies on watershed development have focused on the evaluation of ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of particular projects, whether implemented by the state or NGOs, the book moves beyond this narrow analytical gaze to look at the roles, agendas and interests of multiple development agencies, often partnering together and sometimes competing with each other as part of, what the author calls, the ‘watershed development regime’. Taking cue from watershed development and water conservation projects over the last two decades, the book engages with the larger question of ‘how’ of delivering development. It examines the complex processes of cooperation, competition, negotiations, contestations and conflicts between different stakeholders, including the agents of development and differently positioned rural social groups in the context of Rajasthan. The book demonstrates that the recent interventions in watershed development and rainwater harvesting have considerably shaped the politics of development in Rajasthan in a number of ways: by becoming a site for the remaking of the ‘state’ and its internal relations, by disturbing the local hegemony in the countryside, by creating new relations of patronage between diverse agents and recipients of development, by increasing the associational capacity as well as creating new conflicts (intra and inter village) and by initiating competition and cooperation between the various agents of development over control of local resources and power.
Author: David L. Feldman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509504656
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 236
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Book Description
As the world faces another water crisis, it is easy to understand why this precious and highly-disputed resource could determine the fate of entire nations. In reality, however, water conflicts rarely result in violence and more often lead to collaborative governance, however precarious. In this comprehensive and accessible text, David Feldman introduces readers to the key issues, debates, and challenges in water politics today. Its ten chapters explore the processes that determine how this unique resource captures our attention, the sources of power that determine how we allocate, use, and protect it, and the purposes that direct decisions over its cost, availability, and access. Drawing on contemporary water controversies from every continent from Flint, Michigan to Mumbai, Sao Paulo, and Beijing the book argues that cooperation and more equitable water management are imperative if the global community is to adequately address water challenges and their associated risks, particularly in the developing world. While alternatives for enhancing water supply, including waste-water re-use, desalination, and conservation abound, without inclusive means of addressing citizens' concerns, their adoption faces severe hurdles that can impede cooperation and generate additional conflicts.
Author: George Lambert Bristol
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1603447776
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 548
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Book Description
When George Bristol first saw the mountains surrounding East Glacier, Montana, in the early summer of 1961, he was, in his own words, awed to his depths. Thus began a love affair with nature and public parks that has endured for more than fifty years. This same love affair would lead Bristol to become a crusader for America’s national parks and, later, to be largely credited for the rescue of the ailing public park system in his home state. In On Politics and Parks, Bristol tells his own story in lively prose that includes many intriguing peeks at behind-the-scenes events in Washington, Austin, and elsewhere. Beginning with his upbringing by a widowed young mother with a passion for music and literature, he narrates the converging of influences that led him to an influential political career, including active involvement in national campaigns for Lyndon B. Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Lloyd Bentsen, and Jimmy Carter. After working for the Democratic National Committee and Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, Bristol was asked to join President Clinton’s administration. However, what he really wanted was a place on the board of the National Park Foundation (NPF). With decades-old images of Glacier still burning brightly in his memory, he helped spearhead efforts to elevate the image of the National Park Service and helped establish a highly successful fundraising strategy for the NPF, giving both organizations greater national awareness and stature. Having acquired a well-earned reputation for fundraising and effective advocacy, Bristol soon began to do for his home state what he had done for the NPF: solidify support and funding for the Texas park system. Over ten years and five legislative sessions, Bristol, through the Texas Coalition for Conservation, the nonprofit organization he founded, fought for the full claim of Texas state parks to the sporting goods tax. Utilizing his many contacts, his well-honed political sense, and his dogged patience, he forged an alliance that would win the day for everyone who loves the state’s public lands. In 2007, in the last bill passed on the last day of the session, the Texas legislature nearly doubled the operating budget for parks. On Politics and Parks is at once a lesson in conservation history and a captivating personal memoir that will inform, entertain, and inspire all those who share Bristol’s love for the unspoiled beauty of the outdoors and his commitment to preserve that beauty for future generations. To learn more about The Meadows Center for Water and the Environment, sponsors of this book's series, please click here.
Author: Nicole J. Wilson
Publisher: MDPI
ISBN: 3039215604
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 334
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Book Description
This republished Special Issue highlights recent and emergent concepts and approaches to water governance that re-centers the political in relation to water-related decision making, use, and management. To do so at once is to focus on diverse ontologies, meanings and values of water, and related contestations regarding its use, or its importance for livelihoods, identity, or place-making. Building on insights from science and technology studies, feminist, and postcolonial approaches, we engage broadly with the ways that water-related decision making is often depoliticized and evacuated of political content or meaning—and to what effect. Key themes that emerged from the contributions include the politics of water infrastructure and insecurity; participatory politics and multi-scalar governance dynamics; politics related to emergent technologies of water (bottled or packaged water, and water desalination); and Indigenous water governance.
Author: Emma S. Norman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317089170
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 341
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Book Description
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? This book brings together and connects the work of scholars to engage with such questions. The introduction of scalar debates into water governance discussions is a significant advancement of both governance studies and scalar theory: decision-making with respect to water is often, implicitly, a decision about scale and its related politics. When water managers or scholars explore municipal water service delivery systems, argue that integrated approaches to salmon stewardship are critical to their survival, query the damming of a river to provide power to another region and investigate access to potable water - they are deliberating the politics of scale. Accessible, engaging, and informative, the volume offers an overview and advancement of both scalar and governance studies while examining practical solutions to the challenges of water governance.
Author: Ken Conca
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199335087
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 713
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Book Description
This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online. For more information, please read the site FAQs.
Author: M. Dinesh Kumar
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 0128149043
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
Water Policy Science and Politics: An Indian Perspective presents the importance of politics and science working together in policymaking in the water sector. Many countries around the developed and developing world, including India, are experiencing major water scarcity problems that will undoubtedly increase with the impacts of climate change. This book discusses specific topics in India's water, agriculture and energy sectors, focusing on scientific aspects, academic and political discourse, and policy issues. The author presents cases from the interrelated sectors of water resources, supplies, sanitation, and energy and climate, including controversial topics that illustrate how science and politics can work together. - Challenges the linear and conventional approaches to water management and water policymaking in India that are also applicable in developing countries across South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa - Presents best practice ideas and methods that help science and politics work together - Highlights a key gap of communication between science and policy in water research, with solutions on how this can be addressed
Author: David Soll
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 080146806X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297
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Book Description
Supplying water to millions is not simply an engineering and logistical challenge. As David Soll shows in his finely observed history of the nation’s largest municipal water system, the task of providing water to New Yorkers transformed the natural and built environment of the city, its suburbs, and distant rural watersheds. Almost as soon as New York City completed its first municipal water system in 1842, it began to expand the network, eventually reaching far into the Catskill Mountains, more than one hundred miles from the city. Empire of Water explores the history of New York City’s water system from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century, focusing on the geographical, environmental, and political repercussions of the city’s search for more water. Soll vividly recounts the profound environmental implications for both city and countryside. Some of the region’s most prominent landmarks, such as the High Bridge across the Harlem River, Central Park’s Great Lawn, and the Ashokan Reservoir in Ulster County, have their origins in the city’s water system. By tracing the evolution of the city’s water conservation efforts and watershed management regime, Soll reveals the tremendous shifts in environmental practices and consciousness that occurred during the twentieth century. Few episodes better capture the long-standing upstate-downstate divide in New York than the story of how mountain water came to flow from spigots in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Soll concludes by focusing on the landmark watershed protection agreement signed in 1997 between the city, watershed residents, environmental organizations, and the state and federal governments. After decades of rancor between the city and Catskill residents, the two sides set aside their differences to forge a new model of environmental stewardship. His account of this unlikely environmental success story offers a behind the scenes perspective on the nation’s most ambitious and wide-ranging watershed protection program.
Author: Dean E. Mann
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816535310
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
“Mann’s book is timely, and its central theme, the role of legal, political, and scientific institutions in the utilization of water in Arizona, is appropriate. It is appropriate, moreover, for the greater region of California and the Southwest, where exist similar problems. . . . The Politics of Water in Arizona ranks along with Richard Cooley’s prize winning Politics and Conservation: The Decline of the Alaska Salmon as an outstanding contribution of a political science to the field of conservation and resource utilization.”—California Historical Society Quarterly
Author: Patricia Mulroy
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0815727844
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
Climate change: a strategic opportunity for water managers? / Kathy Jacobs and Paul Fleming -- The delta : resolving California's water conundrum / Pat Mulroy -- The San Diego strategy : a sea change in western water / Maureen A. Stapleton -- The Colorado River story / Jim Lochhead and Pat Mulroy -- Why examine Nebraska's water governance framework? / Ann Bleed -- Harnessing hydrogeological analysis to improve groundwater management across the American West / Burke W. Griggs and James J. Butler Jr -- Southeast Florida : ground zero for sea level rise / Doug Yoder -- Finding the balance : developing resilient, sustainable water and wastewater systems in New York City / Alan Cohn, Angela Licata, and Emily Lloyd
