1st Edition
Routledge Handbook of Gender and Water Governance
This handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the field of gender and water governance, exploring how the use, management and knowledge of water resources, services and the water environment are deeply gendered.
In water there is a recognized gender gap between water responsibilities and water rights and bridging this gap is likely to help achieve not just goals of equity, but also those of sustainability. Building on a rich legacy of feminist water scholarship, the Routledge Handbook of Gender and Water Governance is a collection of reflections and studies that can be used as a prismatic lens into a thriving and ever proliferating array of feminist water studies. It provides a clear testimony of how hydrofeminism has evolved from rather instrumental gender-and-water studies to scholarship that uses feminist tools to pry open, critically reflect on and formulate alternatives to water development-as-usual. The book also show how the community of feminists interested in studying water has diversified and expanded, from often white female scholars studying projects, and gender relations, in the so-called Global South to a varied mix of scholars and activists theorizing from diverse geographical and political locations – prominently including the body. It is organised into five interconnected parts:
• Part I: Positionality and Embodied Waters
• Part II: Revisiting Water Debates: Diplomacy, Security, Justice, and Heritage
• Part III: Sanitation Stories
• Part IV: Precarious Livelihoods
• Part V: New Feminist Futures
Each of these parts brings out the gendered nature of water, shedding light on the often-neglected care and unpaid labour of women and its relationship with extractivism and socioeconomic inequalities. The overall aim of the handbook is to apply social science insights to water governance challenges, creating synergies and linkages between different disciplines and scientific domains.
The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Water Governance is essential reading for students, scholars and professionals interested in water governance, water security, health and sanitation, gender studies and sustainable development more broadly.
Introduction: A Carrier Bag For Gender And Feminist Water Research - Tatiana Acevedo-Guerrero, Lisa Bossenbroek, Irene Leonardelli, Margreet Zwarteveen, and Seema Kulkarni Part 1: Positionality and embodied waters 1. Women’s Anti-Hydropower Activism In Turkey: Water, Environmental Struggles And Bodily Experiences - Özge Yaka 2. Making Engineers Tell Their Stories? Masculinity, Whiteness And Heteronormativity ‘At Work’ In Life History Interviews In Irrigation In Nepal – Janwillem Liebrand 3. Gendering Groundwater Salinity: A Study Of Lodhva, Gujarat, India- Maitreyi Koduganti Venkata and Gabriela Cuadrado-Quesada 4. Mapping Water Care Practices: The Case Of Ennore-Pulicat Wetlands In Chennai, India –Qurratul Ain Contractor 5. Women's bodily experiences: accessing and treating water in the Colombian Caribbean – Silvia Corredor-Rodríguez 6. Embodying the Urban Political Ecology of Water: Three Analytical Approaches to Urban Water Insecurity - Yaffa Truelove 7. The Temporal Fragility Of Water Infrastructure: Conceptualizing The Gendered, Affective Labor Of Maintenance And Repair – Kathleen O'Reilly, Kavita Ramakrishnan, and Jessica Budds Part 2: Revisiting water debates: diplomacy, security, justice, and heritage 8. Household Water Security Experiences Of Women And Girls In Rural Ghana – Benjamin Dosu, Mohammed Abubakari, Maura Hanrahan, and Tom Johnston 9. Toxic Homes, Toxic Water: Housing, Segregation, and Gendered Responsibilities for Household Water Insecurity in the American Rust Belt – Cara Jacob, Lucero Radonic, and Priyanka Jayakodi 10. Poverty, Water Security, and Women’s Activism in Liberia – Chantal Victoria Bright 11. Gender, Human Rights and Water Governance in Indonesia - Stroma Cole, Paula Skye Tallman, Gabriela Salmon-Mulanovich, Binahayati Rusyidi, and Yesaya Sandang 12. Peace, Power, Participation: Transboundary Water Cooperation through a Gender Lens – Rozemarijn ter Horst 13. New Spaces for Water Justice? Groundwater Extraction and Changing Gendered Subjectivities in Morocco's Saïss Region – Lisa Bossenbroek and Margreet Zwarteveen 14. Liquid Heritage: Can Water Museums Facilitate A New Gendered Water Ethics? – Sara Ahmed Part 3: Sanitation stories 15. The Contentious Path Of Menstrual Health: Reflections On The Past And Provocations For The Future Of The Water Sanitation And Hygiene Sector – Jacqueline Gaybor Tobar 16. The Many Meanings Of Menstruation: Practices, Imaginaries and Access to Water and Sanitation Infrastructure In Lusaka, Zambia– Amie Jammeh and Tatiana Acevedo-Guerrero 17. Access To Water, Sanitation And Hygiene For All: Focusing On Transgender Experiences In India – Durba Biswas 18. Harvest Of Uterus: Poor Sanitation, Water Scarcity And The Political Economy Of Sugarcane In Maharashtra, India – Seema Kulkarni and Abhay Shukla 19. Care-Full Sanitation For Shared Water Futures - Kelly Dombrowski Part 4: Precarious livelihoods 20. Water Reuse Irrigation, Gender, and Poverty Inequalities in Kafr El Sheikh, Egypt – Deepa Joshi, Amina Dessouki, and Alexandra Schindler 21. Altering Water Flows In The Draa Valley, Morocco: A Feminist Analysis - Lisa Bossenbroek and Hind Ftouhi 22. Water, Women and Fishing Livelihoods in South and Southeast Asia - Holly M. Hapke, Nikita Gopal, Kyoko Kusakabe, and Gayathri Lokuge 23. Wet’suwet’en Women Leading The Defense Of Rivers And Water From Abuses Committed In Connection With Megaprojects. The Persistent Legacies Of The Past In Canada – Nancy R. Tapias Torrado 24. Domesticity, Masculinities and Femininities: Complicating Gender And Dealing With Water In Pemba, Mozambique– Sandra Manuel, Margarida Paulo, Tatiana Acevedo-Guerrero, Danícia Munguambe, and Amanda Matabele Part 5: New feminist futures 25. How Water Changes (Every)Things: A Feminist Study Of How ‘Water Worlds’ Shape Processes Of Rural Agrarian Transformations In Maharashtra, India – Arianna Tozzi and Irene Leonardelli 26. Beyond Water Justice And Water Security: Debates On Water, Women, And Climate Change In Latin America – Catalina Quiroga and Anyi Castelblanco 27. Beyond Material Dimensions Of Water Insecurity: Gendered Subjectivities, Senses Of Community, And Renewed Political Possibilities - Evelyn Arriagada, Leila M. Harris, and Dacotah-Victoria Splichalova 28. Semá:th X_ó:tsa: Fringe Natures as Decolonial Feminist-Queer-Trans Water Imaginaries - Madeline Donald and Astrida Neimanis Concluding Reflections - Future Directions For Feminist Water Research
Biography
Tatiana Acevedo-Guerrero is Assistant Professor at the Copernicus Institute for Sustainable Development, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She leads the ERC project titled ‘Homescapes make the world we live in’, that takes water as an entry point of an investigation into the homes of the urban South.
Lisa Bossenbroek is a Researcher at the iES, Institute of Environmental Sciences, University of Kaiserslautern-Landau, Germany
Irene Leonardelli is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Calabria, Italy. She holds a PhD from the IHE-Delft Institute for Water Education, the Netherlands, where she worked at IHE Delft for more than four years as a Junior Researcher.
Margreet Zwarteveen is Professor Water Governance at the IHE-Delft Institute for Water Education and the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She is the co-editor of Drip Irrigation for Agriculture (Routledge, 2017).
Seema Kulkarni is a Senior Fellow at the Society for Promoting Participative Ecosystem Management (SOPPECOM).
"The handbook refreshingly celebrates a carrier bag-full of multiple and insightful engagements with gender in watery contexts. Together with its commitment to highlight differently situated hydrofeminisms, this collection also draws on more than 40 years of shared intellectual and activist streams that questioned harmful water and knowledge authorities, along with their neoliberal extractivist logics, lying at the heart of persistent water-related intersectional injustice, inequitable distributions, pollutions, and precarity. This handbook is a must-read for those contemplating feminist, water, and more-than-human futures."
Bernadette P. Resurrección, Professor, Global Development Studies, Queen’s University, Canada
"This book fizzes and pops with fresh perspectives, thought-provoking provocations and original insights. The carefully curated collection celebrates the richness and diversity of gender and water research, embracing differences between the varied contributions. Some of the chapters revisit old debates, updating and nuancing our understanding of gender -water dynamics, others venture into emerging areas for gender and water research.
The introductory chapter sets the tone for the collection – written with a light touch and expressing a collaborative, reflective approach to water research, rooted in the authors’ personal experiences as scholars and activists. It usefully locates the collection in the last 40 years of gender and water scholarship, and shows that feminist water studies continue to be needed to inform ongoing struggles against injustice and to imagine more just and sustainable futures."
Frances Cleaver, Professor of Political Ecology, Lancaster Environment Center, Lancaster University, UK
"The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Water Governance weaves together an impressive collection of voices, perspectives, and framings from around the world on feminist water studies. It offers critically important insights to advance interdisciplinary water scholarship as a whole, and in particular to those interested in pluralizing and achieving water justice for all."
Farhana Sultana, Professor of Geography and the Environment, Syracuse University, New York, Washington D.C., USA
"Amid the gloom and doom of news on water, this book provides refreshing glimpses of hope. The feminist lens on water expands recognition of the range of water-related issues, from embodied experiences of accessing water to transboundary water cooperation, but also expands our understanding of how to address the challenges through examples of individual and collective agency and activism and creative approaches such as water museums to shape the water heritage and ethics. The understanding of care—for water, for, the environment, and for each other—as a central concept and motivation provides a welcome alternative to mechanistic regulatory or economic approaches to motivating people’s actions in relation to water. The diversity of action research case studies does not define rigid boundaries, but invites and inspires others to join in."
Ruth Meinzen-Dick, Senior Research Fellow, International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington D.C., USA
"A significant contribution to the extensive body of literature on the gendered nature of water from a wonderful collective of established and younger researchers. A comprehensive volume of this nature and coverage has been lacking in the shelves for some time, and this book will fill that gap. Readers will enjoy the book for the timeliness of its topic, its scope and the mastery of the style of the authors selected carefully by the editors. This book is a momentous addition to the growing understanding of women, gender and the resources and the environment. It weaves together contributions from a range of disciplinary scholars and valuable insights from practitioners on a wide variety of themes to draw out the intersecting threads that makes gender more visible in thinking about water. I can guarantee the readers they will never see water management in the same way again."
Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt, Professor, Crawford School of public Policy, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
