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Abstract:
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"The 'politics of water' is an expanding area of scholarship and research, an expansion related obviously to the increasing concern about a pending 'global water crisis'. This concern is now a major component of global and national development agendas (see f.i. HDR, 2006; Molden, 2007). Freshwater resources management by definition is a context‐specific phenomenon, given that it concretely happens through managing river basins, aquifers, landscapes and ecosystems. However, the 'problemsheds' and 'issue networks' of water resources management may stretch well beyond the physical boundaries of these units, and span the globe and history. The study of the politics of water is therefore a rather dispersed field of research, organised in strongly regionally and sector‐wise defined clusters, apart from being disciplinarily divided. The expanding amount of work on the political dimensions of water resources management, however, allows a degree of systematising and abstraction. We discern and delineate an emerging field of research that we have labelled the 'political sociology of water resources management'. This paper discusses these two ideas: that of political inherence, and that of a political sociology of water resources management."
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