Presentation

The mechanisms of public decision making on hydric resources management and the hydrological cycle (water governance) are crucial to reach the seventh Goal of the Millennium related to water and environmental sustainability which suggests reducing by half the proportion of people that lack sustainable access to potable water.

The discussion about how water governance must be introduced in the state structures of government is far from being solved.

The neoliberal policies derived from the Consensus of Washington, in their obsession to minimize the role of the state, tend to play down the importance of the nature of water as an essential common good and to treat it more and more just as merchandise. From this point of view, the market is highlighted as the main mechanism to distribute resources so that users’ payment ability acquires a predominant role in the potable water management. This leads to scenarios more and more far from the mentioned Millennium Goal and to an increase in the number of people that do not have a proper access to potable water.

The political version of this point of view and the conflicts derived from the application of new models of management have often resulted in a confusion between the necessary decentralization (return of the competences to the operative local levels) and the privatization of the water management. In a great number of cases, reforms in this sense have been undertaken with no minimum conditions of institutional security that could guarantee the continuity among models and with public modalities of management and existing systems of economic solidarity being discarded for a start as a norm.

Water, as a resource, is distributed in aquifers and superficial basins that would not form a network without the human intervention. It cannot be denied that it is a local good which is inherently bound to the territory and that it must be managed as such. With the pre-eminence of the current paradigms of thought, this basic ascertainment has often been obviated, but it is necessary to recover it as an important initial hypothesis if we want to base the discussion of water governance on serious and solid grounds.

From the point of view of the rights of the people and the distributive justice, water can be dealt with from three perspectives: as a human right (water to live, without possibility of "price" or compensation), as a citizen right (right to the water for uses derived from a social contract that requires some type of civic compensation) and water considered as an economic merchandise subject to a regulations regime similar to the one applied in other markets. The not at all easy demarcation of these three modalities of water and their consequent associated legal regimes has to be another issue in the debate on water governance.

Finally, the different peculiarities of the sustainability of the access to potable water and its correct management in rural, urban and periurban areas must also be included in the complex panorama of water governance. The institutional weaknesses and the lack of citizen empowerment, both in some rural areas with few opportunities and in the degraded situations of wide periurban territories of Southern cities , have to be taken into account when trying to find better solutions for the public management of the water.

The situation is especially difficult in the rural areas, those that concentrate the lowest indexes of services coverage, where the resources are more gathered and the local governments are technically, economically and democratically weaker. The construction of political spaces by the civil society is necessary in the process of strengthening the constitutional state and creating and legitimizing the institutions that guarantee the access and the proper use of the hydric resources, as a key element for human development and for governance in Southern countries.

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