Jessica Budds is a Professor of Development Geography at University of Bonn. In advance of her Kapuscinski Development Lecture, she spoke on the context of and responses to water security and how governance plays a key role.

Water security is the dominant paradigm in the water sector today. It’s tied with the idea of the global water crisis and that water is running out as industrialization advances, population grows and, of course, the effects of climate change set in.

But while it's often defined only in terms of bringing water to the places it's needed, this obscures many of the drivers of lack of access to water, in particular among lower income groups. Water security now focuses on the need to increase sources of water to meet demand, whereas earlier, we had been trying to manage demand for the resources that we had.

It’s very important to understand how water security can be defined and used in multiple ways, especially to justify particular policy directions.

When we talk about water scarcity, we're talking about the absence of water, and we can divide that into two main reasons. One is the physical and hydrological conditions stemming from natural causes. The other is how water is used and allocated, and how scarcity is the outcome of human actions. This can be where sources are polluted so water is not available for use, or large scale extraction, which often occurs with agriculture, industry and mining.

Water scarcity is usually attributed to physical conditions, but they are usually not the main driver in many situations. They provide a convenient excuse for particular water security measures, but they also obscure the key dynamics behind water insecurity.

Can you talk about the links between water scarcity and security and governance?

Water security is really a governance question. So much water security is understood as the need to bring water to where it's needed. This orients towards a supply-led approach, where new sources of water are produced or stored for needs, like desalination, for example, or extremes as you see in the Arabian Peninsula, where excessive water is produced and used in arguably a wasteful way.

The governance dimensions are important because they have the potential to address the causes of water insecurity.

The key consequence of water insecurity is the around 2 billion people on the earth who don't have access to the most basic water supply. Access to water - drinking water, piped water, access to a toilet -  are not major engineering feats. They're the most basic of services we need for human survival and also human dignity. And they are under- or not provided in so many contexts across the global South, but also increasingly in the Global North.

It's more of a political issue than anything else. It has to do with political rights, and lack of access to infrastructure and services. It's a stubborn problem that has not been alleviated in a major way over the last decades, despite major interventions that have tried to, including the Millennium and Sustainable Development Goals. Arguably, that has to do with political and governance reasons.

There's always been a cost to water supply, because there is a cost of provision. And there have been economic interventions in the past around pricing, especially with the private sector role. These are often one-size-fits-all interventions, but marginalized groups, particularly indigenous groups, see their relationship with water very differently and prioritize different aspects, but often there’s no room for that in typical water supply interventions.

So one dimension of water security is also seeing beyond the water provision – from the idea that it needs to be continuous, affordable, of decent quality and sufficient quantity -  to the conditions under which people want water to be provided. What kind of governance structures should be in place for this particular context, what kind of values of water are important here, what kind of cultures of water are in place?

In your lecture, you’ll be using an example from Chile to explore how policy can influence the shift from security to scarcity?

In my #KAPTalks, I’ll talk about the example of Chile, which has a system of water markets across all sectors of water. The economic theory around this is that it’s efficient, it's un-bureaucratic, and it allows water to be transferred between users and sectors, very flexibly, on the basis of an economic transaction. In terms of governance, it's the users who are in control of water, and basically make all the decisions about water, and the state plays a facilitating role in line with the market system.

In theory, this is supposed to reallocate demand within the system and is deemed the best mechanism to manage scarcity, but in this case, lack of regulation has actually produced scarcity (which is then enhanced by hydrological factors, like drought and the influence of El Niño). This pushes a return to supply-led infrastructure, which fits with the current emphasis on water security in response to climate change.

It's an interesting case, on the one hand, of how markets work, because it's the most extensive market system anywhere in the world, and then how it's managing scarcity, which markets were proposed to do, but the country has ended up as being one of the extreme cases of water scarcity in the world.

That's why it's important to look at governance in the efforts of water security, how particular meanings are operationalized in practice, and what their implications are for local places and people.

Be part of the discussion and join her Kapuscinski Development Lecture at Mzumbe University in Tanzania live or online. For more info: https://kapuscinskilectures.eu/lecture/water-security-a-critical-analysis/

The views expressed in this piece do not reflect the official views of UNDP or the European Union.