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Review

Hegemony and Colonialization in the Water Management Sector: Issues and Lessons for IWRM

by
Neil Grigg
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523, USA
Water 2024, 16(18), 2624; https://doi.org/10.3390/w16182624
Submission received: 12 August 2024 / Revised: 10 September 2024 / Accepted: 11 September 2024 / Published: 16 September 2024
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Water Contestations: Socio-Technical Entanglements, Politics and Social Mobilisation)
Browse Figures
Figure 1
<p>Varied settings of water resources management.</p> "> Figure 2
<p>Stakeholder group alignment by governance and priorities.</p> "> Figure 3
<p>Hierarchy of water needs with management scenarios.</p> ">
Versions Notes

Abstract

:
Water resources management and the broad concept of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) attract varied perspectives about their effectiveness and equity as they address diverse needs across sectors and contextual situations. Managers in the water sector generally support their current governance models, while anti-poverty advocates seek more equity in the distribution of resources. Another group of stakeholders claims a lack of inclusivity in decision-making, leading to inequitable outcomes due to hegemony and colonialization of the water management domain by sector experts, officials, and other actors. IWRM focuses on reforms in water governance to achieve greater participation and sharing of power by all sectors of society in decision-making. It can facilitate the involvement of all groups of stakeholders, including those who may in some cases need to engage in social action to address water issues. This paper reviews the claims about the validity of IWRM and analyzes them according to management scenarios where water is a connector among sector issues. The scenarios show that participation in utility and local government decisions is the main pathway for urban water, wastewater, and stormwater management, while the same pathway is more difficult to organize in dispersed situations for domestic supply and irrigation in rural areas, some cases of aquifer management, and management of sprawling flood risk zones. The body of knowledge about participation in water resources management is robust, but organizational and financial capacities among existing entities pose barriers. Water resources management and IWRM do involve hegemony, and the field of practice has been colonialized, but the existential issues and complexity of the decisions and systems involved challenge society to manage successfully while assuring equity and participation through governance reform. The debates over hegemony and colonialization in water management provide an opportunity to continue improving the norms of practice and water resources education.

1. Introduction

After decades of development, the professional community of water resources management seems stable and growing, with many standards and norms, organizations, professional journals, and academic programs. The disciplines involved include physical scientists, engineers, and social/behavioral scientists, and, in the broadest sense, they are represented by the community that embraces Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) [1]. Members of the community are organized into niches like hydrology [2], water resources engineering [3], water resources economics, water law [4], and others, which have their own associations, journals, certificates, and norms of practice. Some members identify with IWRM, while others cleave to more traditional views of water resources management. Regardless of its label, management practice in the water sector generally involves planning, analysis, and decision-making based on science, engineering, economics, and socio-environmental considerations. IWRM and water resources management labels will be used as they seem to fit the contexts in the discussion that follows, and the relationship between the two similar concepts will be explained in the next section. Managers of water systems understand that the field of practice involves many complexities and requires expertise from multiple disciplines as they confront diverse situations based on different scales, purposes, ecologies, and socio-economic settings [5].
Despite the seemingly settled status of water resources management as a field of practice, some groups claim a lack of inclusivity in decision-making [6], inequities in outcomes, and low trust in IWRM [7,8,9], with the sense that the field is just another example of elites making decisions without considering all stakeholders [10,11]. Some critics point to the issue of hegemony by water resources managers, especially in transboundary situations [12]. Hegemony is pervasive in society and generally means the dominance of one class over another. In the political arena, thought leaders often cite the thinking of Gramsci, an Italian socialist activist who explained it as a process of intellectual and moral leadership that gives power to ruling classes in society [13]. Such conflicts about the power relationships among classes of society have been ongoing historically.
The issue of hegemony is important across sectors because it affects the democratic participation and access to power that are needed in healthy societies. Allegations of the colonialization of IWRM are closely related and mean the taking over of power and decision resources for water matters. Hegemony and colonialization in IWRM would seem to work against meaningful participation and the sharing of power in water-related decisions that affect stakeholders and influence the equity of outcomes.
Critics advocate a process of counterhegemony where alternative approaches can flourish to change the resources available to groups and communities across sectors. They argue that elites must disclose the claims that form the basis for their positions if they expect to exercise hegemony without coercion. Education is a channel for hegemony to be claimed as valid. Individuals can then explore alternatives at a personal level such that every citizen can govern and mobilize power [14].
The same criticisms about the lack of inclusivity and elites making decisions that lead to inequities and injustices occur with diverse themes in many settings. They stem from core security concerns like access to jobs, housing, and opportunities and have been the cause of many episodes of social unrest [15]. Possible causes of such concerns are expressed in discourses with themes like social democracy [16], progressivism [17], and Marxist theory [18], and they occur across varied sectors such as education, food security, public health, and housing, among many others [19]. Academic discourses about these issues occur among disciplines such as political science, sociology, cultural anthropology, and various subfields of geography. These disciplines continue to spin off new interdisciplinary subfields as knowledge expands [20].
Given the conflicting visions about inclusivity and power in resource-sharing, discourses about hegemony and colonialization in IWRM will continue. While they might seem peripheral to mainstream discussions about water issues that already include social impact analysis, in the aggregate, they can add to the knowledge base about the advancement of water resources management as an interdisciplinary field and create outcomes to benefit the needs and wishes of disenfranchised people to elevate levels of social and environmental justice.
The goal of this review is to explore and analyze the claims about hegemony and colonialization in the water sector and identify areas for improvement by incorporating the relevant views more comprehensively into management practice. The discussion begins with a review of explanations of water resources management and IWRM as broad fields of practice. It then examines the roles of stakeholders and their perspectives on the methods and outcomes across varied purposes of managing water resources. These outcomes include both the involvement of stakeholders by their participation and the impacts of decisions on them. The concept of inclusivity is examined insofar as it is emphasized in water resources management practices, including how it is addressed by IWRM. The concept of hegemony is examined in some detail to identify lessons from general discourses about it and how they might inform our understanding of the unique challenges in water resources management. The final part of this paper explores whether reforms for water resources management should involve alternative models or only some tinkering with the current model.

2. Water Resources Management as a Field of Practice

Water resources management, like other broad fields such as health care or education management, is broad and difficult to define except in general terms [5]. It generally means a process to plan, develop, and manage the quantity and quality of water resources for all uses, including the supporting institutions, infrastructure, incentives, and knowledge systems that are needed. If the concept is taken to include its interrelationships with other sectors, it becomes IWRM, which is like traditional water resources management but broadened to include multiple sectors and perspectives [21]. The added complexity makes it more difficult to define and, as a result, how IWRM works has been the subject of many interchanges among professional groups.
As will be explained later, practitioners of IWRM do not intend to create inequities in addressing water issues, whether through the development of projects or management programs. The criticisms of a lack of inclusivity in decision-making leading to inequitable decisions and low trust in IWRM are found in other sectors where equity in the allocation of public resources is a prominent issue. Examples can include access to housing, education, and health care, for example [22]. The nature and level of these criticisms will be discussed in a later section. The focus of this section is on how such issues may occur within the realms addressed by water resources management or its broader version, IWRM.
Due to its dimensionality, water resources management takes place in many scenarios and settings. One dimension is about its purposes, as it addresses multiple needs of varied water-using groups to provide for drinking water, sanitation, food, energy, and environmental sustainability, among other uses. It is also a multi-means concept and includes functions like policy-making, planning, organizing, implementing, and operating. These can be executed at different working levels, from that of system operator to that of organizational director. Water resources management is also multi-scalar and multijurisdictional and is addressed in the field of political geography to consider the alignment of watersheds and river basins along with political units of cities, counties, states, and nations. Additionally, the context and settings of water resources management vary between, for example, low- or high-income countries, urban or rural areas, and growing or shrinking regions, among others. As can be expected, the way that stakeholder groups see water resources management will differ according to their memberships in different settings with varied incentives and impacts. For example, middle-income customers of a large water utility in the US will have a different perspective on how water should be managed than farmers in a rural area of a low-income country where flooding is prevalent.
While it is not practical to give examples of all the settings across the dimensions of water resources management that are here described, the ways to describe scenarios can be mapped into bins of common situations. For the purposes of this discussion, the management scenarios to be discussed address issues of watersheds, reservoirs and lakes, aquifers, urban water settings, irrigation, and flood risk.
These situations are visualized in the diagram in Figure 1. Watershed management can occur in small or large areas, a large reservoir will control flow into a river and smaller ones can control streamflow in tributaries, urban and rural water management will occur in their settings, irrigation is practiced on cropland, flood risk will occur in various places, and aquifers will be managed as required where they occur.

3. Water Resources Management Scenarios

As reports of water injustice tend to be anecdotal, examples and a system to classify incidences of injustice can provide clarification. Those discussed in this section provide a range of instances to identify issues of participation and criticism of hegemonic management practices. The literature shows many examples, and cases from several countries are provided, with most from the US due to the author’s experience and familiarity.
To provide a range of examples, geography, governance settings, economic conditions, and management attributes can be used for selection. Geographic settings vary across and among watersheds and river basins, urban and rural areas, and surface or groundwater issues. Scale is very important across all of these. The political settings vary by national, state, regional, and city levels and by multijurisdictional and transboundary situations. Economic conditions range from low- to high-income countries and regions. The management attributes refer to purposes and functions, such as water supply and water quality management purposes and functions like planning, investing, implementing projects, and regulating. The large span of possibilities illustrates the complexity of water resources management as a discipline.
The examples are summarized because many case studies are available in the literature and their quality and usefulness are varied. Summaries of a few key examples will provide a more concise picture than detailed anecdotes. In a few cases, general situations like global water and sanitation issues are cited as examples. Table 1 provides a summary of the examples, cites the type of injustices that occur, and relates them to issues of stakeholder participation, which are described in the next section.
Most examples in the literature are about justice issues of water supply and sanitation, where the international reporting system provides global statistics about issues at scale, from large cities to rural villages. While the general issues are common, they occur in different types of cities and rural areas, and they impact individual persons and families such that many types of hardships occur. The specific impacts on access to drinking water and water for hygiene include no water service, poor frequency and reliability of service, unaffordable water, and unsafe drinking water. The sanitation issues are lack of access to adequate wastewater services and inadequate access to toilets, which have been regarded more as a housing sector issue than a water sector issue. Stormwater inequities occur through the exposure of people and property to flooding or water-caused diseases. Lack of access to irrigation water causes food insecurity.
In watersheds, a lack of management capacity due to organization or finance issues causes differential impacts on stakeholders. In larger river basins, injustices can be the same as in smaller watersheds, but they occur at larger scales such that more losses occur to more people in different ways. Dams and reservoirs can cause injustices such as loss of homes and land and effects on water availability in storage or instream water after reservoir releases. Lake settings can often show algae buildup and polluted conditions. Aquifers are like watersheds in that injustices can occur by loss of access to water and polluted water bodies. Flood risks are like stormwater risks, but they involve greater exposures and losses.
The examples show different needs and possibilities for stakeholder participation in water management. In cities, the pathway is usually through organized utilities, but wastewater and stormwater issues may be channeled through local government situations that range from well to poorly organized or even lack of functioning local governments. Sometimes cities involve community organizations, and, in some cases, there is no organized water supply system at all. Irrigation management settings involve collective action at the ditch level and higher, such as through community organizations and water user associations. Watersheds and aquifers require collective action for management, and participation must work through available power centers. River basin issues are like those in watersheds, but management organizations tend to be more formal, such as government-appointed commissions.
The avenue of participation in water resources management can lead to new forms of organization and even to water-centered social movements. Examples of these are presented in the section about hegemony in water management that follows, and how they relate to IWRM is explained in the section after that.
Participation in development or operational issues involving dams and reservoirs also requires work through government institutions such as management authorities. The channels to participate in flood risk decisions are not defined sharply because of their area-wide nature and the chances that flood control infrastructure like levees involves multiple and shared ownership, often without assured maintenance and upkeep.
Because water is a connector among sector issues, in all situations noted, the core inequity issue is the fair allocation of resources and services without discrimination. As individuals have little power without representation and may not have a venue for collective action to address equity issues, hegemonic management may result in inequitable allocation without effective channels for participation. This issue can be observed across management institutions, whether river basin or watershed organizations, utilities, local or higher-level governments, water districts, or even various collectives and associations.

4. Stakeholder Perspectives

To probe assertions of inequities caused by decisions made by elites without inclusivity, the status of the societal groups lacking power must be identified amongst water management stakeholders. In a sense, everyone is a stakeholder in water management because we all use and depend on water. The focus here is on the stakeholders who are involved in the water management decision process. They can be classified in different ways, and, for this analysis, three broad categories will be used. The first comprises the water industry participants who generally support the prevailing guidance and practices of water resources management, although they may be seeking reforms and improvements. These include public officials, consultants, academics, water users with some power, and other water industry players with money, jobs, prestige, satisfaction, and a sense of power at stake such as industrial users, irrigators, commercial users, and some residential customers.
The second group involves participants in the social sector, which is explained as the cluster of advocates and support organizations for lower-income, minority, or marginalized populations. Some members of this group were named “social justice” stakeholders in a recent study to delineate their needs for better access, affordability, and service delivery [36]. The group is represented by anti-poverty coalitions with advocates for the poor, minority groups, NGOs, lawyers, and others focused on environmental and social justice. Members of the group do not express significant opposition to current institutional arrangements, but they want to alter management to obtain better deals for their constituents.
The third group also includes some “social justice” stakeholders, but it advocates for fundamental changes in governance, and its members do not see solutions occurring without change in existing institutional and power arrangements. This group is active in opposing establishment management practices in other sectors as well and might be labeled “anti-establishment”. That label may seem extreme, although it provides a way to distinguish this group from the “anti-poverty” group. The ardency with which members of this group express their views varies, and they exhibit many shades of belief and action such that no single label really fits. As a compromise, the group is labeled here the “governance reform” group.
Figure 2 illustrates the different priorities of the three groups. At the top, water sector management groups are shown as balanced across efficient and equity priorities, with those focused on traditional management approaches being more focused on efficiency and those who embrace IWRM being more on the equity side. The anti-poverty group is neutral on water governance, but firmly on the advocacy side for their main cause. The governance reform group aligns with anti-poverty as a cause, but it rejects traditional water governance approaches and seeks a new model.
Table 2 presents details about the perspectives of the three groups. The bodies of knowledge showing their perspectives differ significantly. Group One’s perspectives are found in the mainstream water resources management literature. Group Two’s views are expressed in the anti-poverty literature and reports and are not restricted to the water sector because poverty involves additional needs like shelter, energy, food, and others. Group Three is more diverse in an academic sense and has niches for specific views like those on political geography [37], political sociology [38], and cultural or social anthropology [39]. The views of each group can be studied to assess the extent to which they affect the impacts of water resources management decisions on stakeholders who lack power in society.
In terms of advocacy, Group One seeks reforms in water resources management within its broad existing framework that includes participation and inclusivity. The IWRM community of adherents has prepared reports about needed reforms [40]. Reports are also available from governance groups like OECD [41], which has issued a report about sustainable financing, effective governance, and coherence between water and other sectoral policies. The stream of literature that informs the work of this group in the realm of inclusivity and equity is generally found in social impact analysis [42].
Group Two does not oppose the framework of IWRM but wants better conditions across sectors like water and sanitation, energy, transportation, and more. Broadly speaking, its views are aligned with the SDGs, and group members do not focus attention on methods of water resources management so much as on the outcomes of decisions. For example, the group will focus on poverty-reduction approaches involving water supply, sanitation, and hygiene to raise the living standards of the poor. Water resources management for poverty reduction can also involve larger-scale projects, which was the goal of developing the Tennessee Valley Authority in the US [43].
Group Three’s arguments are the most complex and diversified. Its philosophical aspect reflects general societal trends in attitudes toward basic issues like economics, social welfare, and forms of governance. Among the many explanations of these trends, reduced trust in institutions and a need for more individual autonomy stand out [44], and these indicate a demand by individuals for more power in water resources management.
As an example of thinking on this strand of the discussion, Trottier [45] wrote about water wars and hegemony, with arguments aligned with the theory of the colonialization of water resources management by the hegemons, who appropriate the domain for their own use and define the structure of the transboundary water conflicts. Accordingly, the decolonialization of water resources management is a goal of Group Three. An explanation by water researchers [46] shows the key concepts: “A decolonized water agenda would acknowledge that purely technological and managerial processes and decisions …, particularly those made in elite, masculine settings… are problematic”. In terms of solutions, the authors wrote, “Water problems require a different scientific vision, one that incorporates the multiplicities of locational and context-specific knowledge, a greater range of political possibilities…”. For a specific example, they explained that “Colonial legacies continue to shape much of our current geographic landscapes in the Global South. This is manifested in the construction of dams, canalisation, embankments, flood control structures, and metropolitan water supplies and their sources, which ignore the day-to-day realities of how human interactions with water have always been”.
To summarize, stakeholder perspectives about the need to reform water resources management divide along the lines of fundamental assumptions. The water sector group subscribes generally to the current trajectory of the field, including IWRM, and seeks to improve it incrementally, with more effective participation to align with democratic governance. The anti-poverty group views water resources management as one of many decision processes that can be influenced to allow for more equitable sharing of resources. Finally, and most complexly, the reform governance group also seeks a fairer distribution of resources but differs in its views about power relationships in how decisions should be made.

5. Impacts on Stakeholder Groups

When a hierarchy of human needs and desires is considered, the views of the three stakeholder groups about which water resources should be distributed are seen to be similar at the basic level but perhaps different at higher levels. Using the Maslow hierarchy of human needs as a basic model, water needs and scenarios can be modeled, as shown in Figure 3, which shows water-related needs from the most basic to the highest level.
At the most basic level, access to a safe, secure, and adequate water supply and sanitation stands out. Next, enough water for subsistence agriculture is needed, and then security against flooding and public health issues of clean streams and adequate drainage are evident. After that, the issue of water for household and business uses considers economic, social, and environmental needs. Maslow called the level of higher needs “self-actualization”, or the level where all bodily and ego needs are met [47]. This is a broad category, including common examples like water uses for aesthetics and community enhancement or even participation in decision-making about water, which offers citizenship benefits and a sense of power in the democratic process.
The water management categories cited earlier with examples are shown alongside the hierarchy. Water supply for drinking is the highest priority at the most basic level of needs, and the other scenarios align with higher needs, such as stormwater, wastewater, and flood risk management relating to safety and security. Note that sanitation is not shown as it is not mainly a water management issue but is more of a housing issue. If it is bundled with wastewater, then it becomes a shared issue among water and housing. Examples could be provided for the higher two levels, but they are seldom the main reasons for water projects. The multipurpose scenarios shown involve more than one of the services shown on the right.
The impacts where the degree of participation is an issue are as shown in Table 3. The entry points for most scenarios are through utilities, water authorities, local governments, and community organizations. How individuals and groups might access the participatory processes is shown by extracting and prioritizing the scenarios and participation issues for water services from Table 2 and adding how water resources managers can facilitate the participation. Prioritization is mainly according to the hierarchy of needs and secondarily according to the frequency of occurrence of the situations. A discussion of multipurpose scenarios follows afterward.
To summarize, the impacts on stakeholders for key water issues show that participation in utilities or related management organizations poses the main avenue for influence related to urban water supply and, in some cases, wastewater. Participation in decisions about water services requiring local government facilitation occur for stormwater and sometimes wastewater. The main gaps are the need for organizational focal points to manage water for domestic supply, irrigation in rural areas, aquifers, and the difficult issue of drawing boundaries around flood risk zones to facilitate management and participation.

6. Participation in Water Resources Management Scenarios

This section addresses the question of whether more effective participation by all stakeholders in water resources management decisions can address the criticisms of hegemony and colonialization and, if it can, what will be needed to facilitate it. It will not be a situation where one size fits all because, like other water resources issues, the needs and opportunities vary across contextual situations. Points where water stakeholders can participate vary.
Formal organizations, like water utilities, authorities, and local governments, may have defined pathways for citizen participation, which can always be improved, but face constraints in, for example, workforce and financial capacities. Privately owned water service organizations and providers create other and more diverse situations. The drinking water industry advocates that both publicly and privately owned utilities should engage actively with their stakeholders and the public to improve communication and promote trust [48,49,50]. In cases like these, where the organizations must make business decisions to continue and sustain their operations, they are not able to address every situation of equity.
The literature on participation in local government and utility decision-making provides insight into such well-structured situations. The management environments involved include cultural differences, as well as different socio-economic conditions and financial capacities, among other factors. Ethnic composition is an important cultural variable, and surveys show that some ethnic groups trust water organizations less than others do [51]. Poor levels of water services can be considered discriminatory against minority residents, despite severe financial headwinds. On an overall basis, how management environments affect the possibility of participation is not well understood [52].
Trust in utilities seems higher in Europe than in the US, including a high of 97% in Finland, where most citizens trust public institutions more than they do in the US [53,54]. There is a gap between high-trust countries such as Switzerland and Sweden and low-trust countries in parts of Eastern Europe, which can be explained by culture and historical precedents.
Unstructured situations where organizational pathways to enable participation are not clearly identified pose a more difficult scenario than structured situations like utilities and local governments. The unstructured scenarios include domestic supply and irrigation in rural areas, watershed and aquifer management, and management of flood risk zones. Without the organization of management authorities or groups, decision-making about collective issues will be hampered and participation will be difficult to arrange.
In large and unique projects like dams or large-scale water transfer projects, management will be under the control of higher levels of government, and participation will be via political processes. How such participation can be arranged will depend on the success of democratic processes.
Promoting trust and participation in water management organizations is like that of other societal institutions, where public confidence seems to be declining due to concerns about medical, public health, and governmental systems [55]. The public seems overwhelmed with information, polarization, disinformation, and media misuse [56,57]. Reported public feelings due to fears of contamination, disease, and failing infrastructure run deep. [53]. Media releases about disasters such as that in Flint, Michigan [58], fuel the fears, and they can destroy trust that has taken a long time to develop. An old proverb explains this problem: “Trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback” [59,60]. Methods to avoid this loss in trust are based largely on communications and outreach [61].
Despite the challenges, the importance of promoting trust in drinking water is recognized by US water utilities and has become a key part of the strategic plan of the American Water Works Association [62,63,64,65]. Ultimately, greater trust in drinking water may bolster trust in local governments, which is also influenced by the performance of other public services [66].
To encourage trust, city leaders provide information to help community stakeholders understand the need for plans, projects, programs, funding, and policy changes [67,68]. Guidance for utilities about public communication programs for water is widely available, but, due to cultural differences, it has not lifted US trust to the same levels as in several Western European countries [53,54].
Cities and their utility departments have access to many guides about releasing public information. Common approaches are public meetings, focus groups, newsletters, and direct mailings, but these might not be effective in some situations [69]. The guides align with the roles of occupational groups and are available from professional associations [70,71,72].
Recommendations to embed equity in the administration of water organizations are fundamental because all citizens should see their interests reflected in utility management [51]. The other two recommendations, active outreach and issuing water system report cards, will involve direct public communication and engagement and can use performance management measures by water utilities.
Stakeholder analysis can help with the design of a communications program for different publics in the community, and guidance is available from the public relations and strategic communication fields [73]. Stakeholders can be classified as city residents, businesses, and employees; internal stakeholders like other departments, officials, employees, contractors, and regulators; and external stakeholders comprising people, governments, and businesses outside of the city [74]. Still, other ways to classify stakeholders might be as primary or secondary stakeholders in agency actions and key stakeholders with a positive or negative effect on a project or program [68]. Stakeholders can also be classified by areas of interest, like economics, social change, environment, health, and safety and security. A power–interest grid can be used for stakeholder analysis about affecting projects [75].
Outreach to the public and its responses is a two-way street. On the government side, there is an extensive literature base about strategies for public outreach, communication, and engagement. A well-known paradigm to link levels of power with engagement has been developed to show a hierarchy ranging from inform across consult, involve, and collaborate to the empower level [76]. On the citizen side, the levels of involvement range upward from no involvement through passive to active levels [77]. These parallel hierarchies address means to engage more active citizens with power, as well as less active ones who lack power. In the case of trust in drinking water, the fact that more marginalized citizens trust tap water less and are also less likely to trust the government indicates that more engagement with active citizens may not improve perceived levels of trust very much.
Regardless of the activity level of citizen groups, one-way communications will be of limited effectiveness. To correct this problem, different forms of public engagement can be tried. Models for different forms of public engagement begin with popularization and dissemination, which is the dominant model and reaches a core group of interested parties. Strategic communication uses opinion leaders to reach multiple groups and might be a way to communicate better with marginalized groups. Public engagement and dialogue invite the public into the decision-making process to democratize it, and stakeholder-driven science can be used to use science as a cooperative venture between experts and the public [78].

7. Hegemony, Colonialization, and Participation in Water Decisions

The allegations of hegemony and colonialization causing injustice in water resources management seem to be a domain-specific example of the broader historical situation across sectors of seeking reforms in democracy and the distribution of public goods. This is, of course, a historical phenomenon, with many instances occurring across the world. A prominent example can be seen in the 1848 revolutions in Europe, where public demands to wrest power and decision-making from elites were expressed across different countries [79]. The same aspirations continue to occur today in quests for justice in multiple arenas.
For water, the issue can be expressed in the context of human rights, which draws much attention on the international stage. The issue of inequity is focused on the basic levels of water supply and sanitation, access to water for food, and water quality impacts on public health. Criticisms about hegemony leading to inequities extend as well to other situations, like dams inundating homes and subjecting people to polluted sites and flood risk.
A case of water-related social protest that attracted global attention was the Cochabamba Water War in Bolivia. It illustrates how management arrangements for water and wastewater services can encounter difficult issues of human rights in water and lead to protest movements that create sudden changes in water management. The main issue was a shift toward the privatization of water supply and wastewater services, which led to high levels of social conflict. The intent to improve the effectiveness of services through privatization led to high service charges in the city and concerns about traditional rights and access to water for irrigation as well as domestic uses. The outcome of the protests was the restoration of the state-owned utility company with a new governance approach [80].
The Cochabamba Water War changed the organizational form of utility services and left the legacy management organization in place, although hampered by a lack of sufficient financial resources. In other cases, new forms of organization can change management arrangements completely, as in the case where social organizations like associations assume management responsibilities. One example is the local situation where a lack of water services causes residents to self-organize to create a community-based water system. Such an arrangement is like the concept of the homeowner’s association model that is common in the United States. On a larger scale, the Citizens Energy Group of Indianapolis, Indiana, illustrates how a civic organization can be created to provide water services. It stems back to 1887, when civic leaders created a charitable trust for customers and the community. It is governed by a non-partisan board and complies with the laws of the state of Indiana [81]. Globally, examples show diverse forms of organization with participation through water user associations and similar avenues of collective action.
The issue of hegemony in water resources management aligns with the colonialization of the domain of IWRM. This has important effects on the extent to which planning, decision-making, and the development of water resources systems meet human and environmental needs. Such colonialization by elites and experts is common in other sectors as well [82]. Critics advocate for broader access to power in such processes, which would require modifications in approaches to governance and management. Generally, this issue converges into the question of how more genuine public participation can be fostered.
The issue of public participation has been recognized for a long time, but finding the balance can be tricky. Participation adds to the cost of water resources management, which involves many complexities that require understanding to foster wise decision-making. The analysis showed that participation in structured situations must be balanced with the need to make wise business decisions and, in unstructured situations, there may be no pathway to accommodate it.
In democratic settings, the question is how to make participation more effective across the many settings and scales of water resources management that occur. If participation is only a show, the public will become resentful, so it must be a genuine and valid exercise if it is to be effective.
In autocratic countries, participation may be possible in local settings, even if it is not emphasized at larger scales. The possibility of participation will depend on political, legal, and cultural conditions in both settings.

8. Is IWRM a Hegemonic Practice?

While IWRM addresses many diverse situations and some may lack adequate stakeholder participation, its framework and process are meant to be democratic and participatory. There are varied perspectives on it, but the focus on democratic participation is shown by explanations like this from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN): IWRM helps to “… promote democratic participation in governance” and “…IWRM is emerging as an accepted alternative to the sector-by-sector, top-down management style that has dominated in the past” [83]. Of course, this does not happen by only such a declaration, but stating the goal provides a starting point. This explanation was adapted from statements by the Global Water Partnership, the principal sponsor and champion of IWRM methods and practices [1].
Political situations across the world vary markedly, and the promotion of participation and power-sharing will depend on willingness among political actors. Views of what IWRM means and includes also vary [84], so, while water resources managers may claim IWRM in autocratic settings, their examples may not represent a complete version of its practices. The framework of such a complete version is shown by analyses and statements by experts and authorities such as the Global Water Partnerships Technical Committee [1]. It explains as a key component of the IWRM process that it provides “equitable access to water resources through participatory and transparent governance and management”.
The GWP publishes tools to promote such access and participation. Its enabling environment tools include the “Human Rights Based Approach” (Tool A2.05). The institutions and participation tools include Community-based water supply and management organizations (Tool B2.03) and Civil society organizations (B3.03) along with several tools for partnerships and gender issues. Finally, the management instruments include Stakeholder analysis (Tool C1.03), Social assessment (Tool 1.04), Socio-environmental modeling (Tool C2.04), and Youth engagement and empowerment (Tool C5.01), among others [42].
These can be powerful tools to enable communities and social groups to band together to address shared water issues, and they are based on the principles that led to the development of the IWRM concept. While IWRM continues to inspire discussions about its validity and effectiveness, it is good to remember that such a broad concept must stretch across many diverse situations and it will always exhibit some flaws, just as governance and management models at scales from villages to large cities do. The need for improvement continues to focus on the challenge of making imperfect institutions work in the real world.
Whether it embraces the label of IWRM or not, the water resources management community endorses the need for greater participation and consideration of the views of all stakeholders [8]. It implements this by methods of social impact assessment and public participation. How it uses social impact assessment was explained by Lund [85]: “Water management serves social objectives…societies manage water to improve public health and safety, support economic and recreational activities, and sustain a socially desired environment. Social science research has provided fundamental insights on each of these socially and individually desired objectives”.
Achieving these objectives requires political tradeoffs. IWRM enables their achievement through its function as a discursive political process and not just a planning process. This process varies across cultures, and outcomes differ in the Global North and South, as well as specific regions like the Middle East [86].

9. Conclusions

Assessments of the practice of water resources management and IWRM can be different among the three groups of stakeholders. Water sector participants support the prevailing approaches, anti-poverty advocates want fair and adequate distribution of resources for their constituents, and the third group that advocates for governance reform seeks a different distribution of power in decision-making, as well as reforms in resource distribution. This third group bases its criticisms of the status quo on concepts of hegemony and colonialization by the IWRM community, which leads to inequities in outcomes, low trust in decisions, and the claim that IWRM is an example of elites making decisions without considering all stakeholders, which is also observed in other sectors.
While this claim should be examined and taken seriously, water resources management or its IWRM version is broad and must address many types of situations. Evidence shows that practitioners consider equity along with many economic and physical considerations as they confront many scenarios and seek to satisfy multiple purposes across demands for drinking water, sanitation, food, energy, and environmental sustainability, among others. They must use multiple means in planning, organization, implementation, and operation of complex built and natural systems. Contextual situations vary across ranges of democracy and autocracy in low- or high-income countries and among local areas. Stakeholder views differ across these settings due to culture, governance, and socio-economic conditions.
In a general sense, stakeholder views differ by groups that include water industry participants, anti-poverty advocates, and other advocates who seek a different distribution of power in decision-making. The water group subscribes to IWRM and seeks to improve it incrementally with more effective participation, the anti-poverty group views water resources management as one of many decision processes that affect socioeconomic well-being, and the third group also seeks adjustments in power relationships.
All three stakeholder groups seek more effective participation of stakeholders, and they can access a rich set of analysis and management tools to aid their decisions. Participation must be balanced with the need to make wise business decisions, regardless of the situation.
A robust scholarly community studies issues related to hegemony and colonialization in water management, as well as other sectors. The parts of the community that focus on inequities and the quest for justice represent a balancing force to remind water resources management practitioners of the continuing need to search for ways to promote equity and participation. This focus among scholars, with its continuing criticism of IWRM, will provide a healthy dialogue about how to improve water management conditions across society.
IWRM is not perfect and the challenges confronting it represent existential issues of people and the planet. Meeting core needs requires that many complex issues be faced with decisions that must often juggle conflicting goals among people and places. Mass urbanization, energy development, and industrial farming require complex systems of infrastructure and governance that depend on formal processes of planning and development. The issues posed by critics about inequities must be addressed by improvements in current approaches and not by drastic changes in methods, education, and practices among water resources managers. Water resources management and IWRM are not broken, but they can improve and become more responsive to the need to address human rights and the management of water resources systems.

Funding

This research received no external funding.

Data Availability Statement

No new data were created or analyzed in this study.

Conflicts of Interest

The author declares no conflict of interest.

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Water 16 02624 g001
Figure 1. Varied settings of water resources management.
Figure 1. Varied settings of water resources management.
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Figure 2. Stakeholder group alignment by governance and priorities.
Figure 2. Stakeholder group alignment by governance and priorities.
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Figure 3. Hierarchy of water needs with management scenarios.
Figure 3. Hierarchy of water needs with management scenarios.
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Table 1. Water resources management scenarios and injustice examples.
Table 1. Water resources management scenarios and injustice examples.
SchemeExamplesInjusticeParticipation Issues
Water supply and sanitationGlobal situation [23], Flint, Michigan public health emergency [24]Inadequate access to water or sanitation service, poor or unaffordable serviceLack of influence with utility or city government, human rights advocacy weak
WastewaterSewer injustice in Baltimore [25], sewer monitoring of SARS-CoV-2 [26]Poor maintenance and sewer backups, public health inequitiesLack of influence with utility or city government, missing health information
StormwaterStormwater inundation and combined sewer overflow [27]Flood exposure, public health threats, property lossesLack of influence with city government or alternative organization
IrrigationIrrigators require help to manage water as common pool [28]Inadequate access to water and poor food securityLack of participation in system or ditch management
Rural water
supply		Rural situations require support and controls [29]Inadequate access to water supplyLack of organization of participation in district management
WatershedsDistribution of funds for watershed improvement may be unfair [30]Discrimination in the allocation of public fundingNo pathway to influence political decisions or watershed organization
River basinsExclude disenfranchised populations, Chesapeake Bay [31]Lack of access to resources, pollution, loss of fisheriesNo collective action or ways to influence basin organization
Dam issuesRelocation as a result of a dam project in India, loss of resources [32]Forced relocation with inadequate support and participationNo pathway to influence development and relocation decisions
Lake management Many stakeholders in lake management in Kenya [33]Lack of access to resources, pollution, loss of fisheriesNo collective action or influence on management or releases
AquifersEnvironmental justice in groundwater management [34]Depletion of water stocks, inadequate access, cost of pumpingLack of collective action or influence on management
Flood riskMaintenance of aging levees [35]Flood exposure, public health and life threats, property lossesUnclear ways to influence complex, multifactor situations
Table 2. Comparison of perspectives of three stakeholder groups.
Table 2. Comparison of perspectives of three stakeholder groups.
Scheme 100100-Year EvolutionDriving PrincipleReforms Sought
Water resources (management focus)Basic management to IWRM Apply decision science to public problemsExpansion of the meaningful participation of stakeholders
Anti-poverty
(economic focus)		From a struggle for rights to the development of social institutionsAddress poverty in societyFairer distribution of water resources
Governance reform (political focus)Continuing struggle against power status and governmentsReorient the power structure in societyReallocation of power in water decision-making
Table 3. Participation issues and needed reforms.
Table 3. Participation issues and needed reforms.
ScenarioParticipation IssuesFacilitation Needs
Urban water supplyLack of influence with utility or city government. Human rights advocacy weak.Utilities must recognize and take action to facilitate participation. The conflict between recognizing human rights and generating revenue is a key issue.
Rural water
supply		Lack of organization of participation in district management.Rural water supply scenarios are not as well organized as urban situations. Without an organizational focal point, water users are blocked from participation, other than in the self-organization of services.
Irrigation
water		Lack of participation in system or ditch management.The opportunity to participate in irrigation decisions, such as rural water supply, as an organizational focal point is needed, and the power structure must promote participation in the same sense as with utilities.
Aquifer
management		Lack of collective action or influence on management.Participation in aquifer management is also like rural water supply, with a need for an organizational focal point.
Wastewater
management 		Lack of influence with utility or city government. Missing health information.Wastewater involves participation issues in management by utilities and local governments for water supply and stormwater.
Flood riskUnclear ways to influence complex, multifactor situations.Participation in flood risk management decisions needs an organizational focal point, but geographic uncertainties pose barriers to drawing boundaries for such organization.
Stormwater
management 		Lack of influence with city government or alternative organization.Stormwater management normally requires participation in local government and requires an open process by the leadership.
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Grigg, N. Hegemony and Colonialization in the Water Management Sector: Issues and Lessons for IWRM. Water 2024, 16, 2624. https://doi.org/10.3390/w16182624

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Grigg N. Hegemony and Colonialization in the Water Management Sector: Issues and Lessons for IWRM. Water. 2024; 16(18):2624. https://doi.org/10.3390/w16182624

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Grigg, Neil. 2024. "Hegemony and Colonialization in the Water Management Sector: Issues and Lessons for IWRM" Water 16, no. 18: 2624. https://doi.org/10.3390/w16182624

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