Short Abstract:

We seek to examine the global common good approach to water, and draw attention to the risks involved in ambitions to discursively re-define water and practically re-design its governance to contribute to the debate on ways to navigate the perceived water crisis across multiple scales.

Long Abstract:

Convened by the government of the Netherlands and facilitated by the OECD, the Global Commission on the Economics of Water (GCEW) has rekindled a debate as to how water should be governed across different levels. In its inaugural report, ‘Turning the Tide’, GCEW diagnosed the past approaches to water governance to be ‘too narrow, too local, too short-sighted, too divided, and too incremental’, and pushed for the promotion of water as a ‘global common good’ (GCEW, 2023). In a recent report, ‘The Economics of Water’, GCEW has scaled up its focus to frame the whole hydrological cycle as a global common good (GCEW, 2024). While the idea of ‘globalising’ water gains increasing currency in the global water governance scene, the risks related to the re-framing of water and re-scaling of its governance have not been adequately assessed, except a few works (Heller et al., 2023; Linton & Saadé, 2024; Mehta & Nicol, 2023; Puy & Lankford, 2024). In this roundtable discussion, we seek to examine the global common good approach to water and its potential implications, particularly in terms of the paradigms (water as a human right vs water as a commodity), financing (public sector vs private sector), scales (local vs global), and instruments (context-sensitive vs mission-driven) of water governance. Thus, we aim to draw attention to the risks involved in ambitions to discursively re-define water and practically re-design its governance, and make a critical contribution to the debate on ways to navigate the perceived water crisis across multiple scales.

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