New Water Policy and Practice Volume 1, Number 1 - Fall 2014 | Page 19

New Water Policy and Practice

They fail to offer practical alternatives and,
in so doing, strengthen the hands of those
who would make choices by distorting discourses to enforce their own preferences
rather than recognizing the claims of a wider society.
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Allan, T. 2003. “IWRM/IWRAM: A New
Sanctioned Discourse?” Occasional Paper
50 SOAS Water Issues Study Group School
of Oriental and African Studies/King’s College London University of London, April
2003.

Disclosure of Interests from the Author Bakker, K. 2007. “The 'Commons' versus the

'Commodity': Alter-Globalization, Anti-PriSince I am critical of other authors and their vatization, and the Human Right to Water in
interests in this paper, I should declare my own the Global South.” Antipode 39 (3): 430-455.
position. I come to this topic from a variety of
perspectives, as a practitioner active at both operational and policy levels in water resources
and water services, from local to regional scale in
southern Africa, particularly Mozambique and
South Africa; as a Commissioner with South Africa’s National Planning Commission and therefore still an actor in some of the issues; I have
been an activist on health and development issues, including campaigns against harmful marketing in developing countries by milk, pharmaceutical and tobacco multinationals; I also
wrote on environment and development issues
for Earthscan in the 1970s. But as a student and
a researcher (inter alia, as visiting adjunct professor at the University of Witwatersrand School
of Governance), I also try to understand some
of the technical dimensions of a range of critical
policy issues in order to inform those debates. As
a practitioner and activist, I am conscious of the
importance of objective scholarship and unbiased information which can support robust societal processes to make the best possible decisions
about contentious issues. After extensive engagement with international aid community including six years with the Global Water Partnership’s
technical advisory committee and two years
as chair of a World Economic Forum “Agenda
Council” on water security, I have argued that
much of the discourse about water that is imposed on developing countries, initially through
aid-driven hegemonies but increasingly through
other channels, is actually damaging their people
and economies rather than helping them to meet
their diverse societal goals.

Biswas, A. 2012. “Impact of Large Dams: Issues, Opportunities and Constraints.” In Impacts of Large Dams: A Global Assessment,
eds. Cecilia Tortajada, Dogan Altinbilek,
Asit Biswas. Springer. 2012.
Bond, P. 2010. “Water, Health, and the Commodification Debate.” Review of Radical Political Economics 42 (4): 452.
Bond, P. and Dugard, J. 2008. “The Case
of Johannesburg Water: What Really Happened at the Pre-Paid ‘Parish Pump’.” Law,
Democracy & Development, 12 (1): 1-28.
Briscoe, J. 2010a. “International Financing
Institutions and Hydropower in the Developing World.” Hydropower & Dams 17 (6):
55-59.
Briscoe, J. 2010b. “Viewpoint—Overreach
and Response, The Politics of the WCD and
Its Aftermath.” Water Alternatives 3 (2): 399415.
Budds, J. and McGranahan, G. 2003. “Are
the Debates on Water Privatization Missing
the Point?.” Experiences from Africa, Asia
and Latin America, Environment and Urbanization 15 (2): 87-114.
Constitutional Court. 2009. Judgement.
Mazibuko and others vs City of Johannes-

References

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