Water and Politics

In this segment I wanted to explore a slightly newer and very debatable topic, climate-induced hydrpolitical events and answer the question: what is the future for both internal and external water conflict when the world’s most precious resource is becoming scarcer under climate forces? The effect of climate change on water abundance and quality is very much noted in current academic literature, its affects are widespread, rippling and paramount affecting the water cycle in its entirety. Current hydrological models demonstrate three key findings and projections which directly or indirectly support the idea of climate-induced hydrpolitical events or wars; the variability of terrestrial water budgets, the intensification of the water cycle from regional to global scales and an upward trend in global annual evapotranspiration (Tang et al. 2016), there is much consensus within the scientific community that the validity of the “dry gets drier, wet gets wetter” pattern is prone to consider...

  My last article left us pondering, if privatising water supplies and decentralising regulatory provision isn’t the solution to the biggest challenges to water management in East Africa, challenges being: climate change, inadequate funding and political mishandling, then what is the solution? What is the right formula?  So  to speak. In this segment I want to discuss how the movement to privatise water supplies and the aforementioned political pressure from international organisations has left many African cities and rural communities back at square one and in this reveal some of the  the  socio-political impacts of standardising water provision across East Africa,   One article dives straight into this complex question,  Golooba -Mutebi 2012 dissects public and private driven water provision in two specialised East African case studies; Rwanda and Uganda. Echoing the transitions many countries had made in the late 80s, Rwanda and Uganda, to decentral...