Best Practices in Global Water Policy Revisiting Water Mantras

1. Introduction: Engaging with water policy best practices

François Molle and Sylvain Barone

2. Revisiting: Drip irrigation will save water

François Molle and Jean-Philippe Venot

3. Revisiting: Reusing treated wastewater reduces water scarcity

Anne-Laure Collard

4. Revisiting: Desalination is the new and inexhaustible water source

Joe Williams

5. Revisiting: Large dam water storage is unavoidable or an anathema

Bruce Lankford, Matthew McCartney and Florence Habets

6. Revisiting: Water harvesting is necessary to enhance local supply

M. Dinesh Kumar

7. Revisiting: Abstracting groundwater is safe as long as you pump less than the natural recharge

Sylvain Massuel and François Molle

8. Revisiting: Planting trees will sustain springs and streamflow

Vazken Andréassian

9. Revisiting: Pricing irrigation water will reduce its use

François Molle and Chris Perry

10. Revisiting: Payment for environmental services is a win-win

Jean Carlo Rodríguez-de-Francisco and Audrey Joslin

11. Revisiting: Making space for water

Jeroen Warner, Dik Roth and Rens de Man

12. Revisiting: River weirs are obstacles that must be removed

Régis Barraud and Marie-Anne Germaine

13. Revisiting: Environmental flows are necessary to safeguard nature

Jason Alexandra

14. Revisiting: Rivers should be restored to their 'natural' state

Gabrielle Bouleau and Rebecca Lave

15. Revisiting: All water uses can be reconciled while protecting the environment

Sylvain Barone

16. Revisiting: A river basin begs a river basin organisation

François Molle, Doug Kenney and Bernard Barraqué

17. Revisiting: Collective action needs water user associations

Edwin Rap

18. Revisiting: The myth of private finance and SDG6

David McDonald

19. Revisiting: Private water services are more efficient and reliable

Kate Bayliss

20. Revisiting: Off-grid, the new water supply solution

Alexandre Gaudry, Marine Colon, and Catherine Baron

21. Revisiting: Rivers should have legal rights

Erin O'Donnell and Julián Suárez

22. Conclusion: Revisiting global water mantras

François Molle and Sylvain Barone

Biography

François Molle is Emeritus Director of Research at the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD), France. He has 40 years of experience in development research in topics such as the analysis of irrigation systems, the governance of river basins and groundwater, water policy and the political ecology of the interaction between society, technology and the environment.

Sylvain Barone is Director of Research at the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE), France. For the past 15 years, his research has focused on water policy and governance, environmental policy and the politicisation of ecological issues.

“An engaging contribution to critical water studies, this rich collection simultaneously challenges conventional wisdoms and ‘best practices’, and illuminates the provisional truths, contextual complexities and contradictions of real-world water dynamics”. 

Frances Cleaver, Professor Emeritus, Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University  

“This is a crucial and most welcome volume. François Molle and Sylvain Barone have assembled an impressive collection of authors who together critically examine the received wisdom of “best practices” in water policy. Why, they ask, are these practices considered the “best” of all possible options? Whose interests do they serve? How do they come to be understood as politically neutral and universally accepted, when the opposite is so often the case? By systematically critiquing 20 “best practices” of contemporary water policy orthodoxy, the contributors to this volume probe these and other essential questions. This is a timely and enormously valuable contribution to the literature and, one hopes, to policy making in general”. 

Tom Perreault, Professor of Latin American Geography, Department of Geography and the Environment, Syracuse University

A unique and much needed volume that questions the most pervasive governance myths that rule the water world. The authors dismantle the presumed rationality, universality and objectivity of mainstream water science, policy and development interventions. Rather than solving social and ecological problems, they show that the dreams of engineering water societies and fabricating its water objects and subjects through ready-made expert fixes often lead to producing and intensifying water nightmares -- in particular for the most vulnerable, humans and non-humans”.

Rutgerd Boelens , Professor of Water Governance and Social Justice at Wageningen University and Professor of Political Ecology of Water at the University of Amsterdam.