Equity and the Ethics of Water Governance

Equity and the Ethics of Water Governance

Doorn, N.

Technology, Policy and Management

Values and Technology

2012-06-18

Water is recognized to pose some very urgent questions in the near future. A significant number of people are deprived of clean drinking water and sanitation services, with an accordingly high percentage of people dying from water borne diseases. At the same time, an increasing percentage of the global population lives in areas that are at risk of flooding, partly exacerbated by climate change. In this paper, it is argued that ethics should be an integrated part of water governance in order to address these pressing issues. This paper consists of two parts. In the first part, some conceptual groundwork is done to clarify a number of persistent ambiguities and misunderstandings in the debate on water governance. In the second part, three distributive questions are outlined, concerning (1) the distribution of scarce resources, (2) the distribution of risks, and (3) the distribution of responsibilities. The paper is concluded with an outline for an ethics of water governance.

water
access,
allocation
equity
ethics
distributive justice
human rights
values
property regimes

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:1b6609a4-3199-4706-83f3-2aa5a1220150

CESUN 2012: 3rd International Engineering Systems Symposium, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, 18-20 June 2012

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conference paper

(c) 2012 The Author(s)
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