Driving through southwestern Arizona under a scorching sun, I was struck by how absurd it is that while the western half of the United States is suffering a prolonged drought, new residential complexes are being built far into the Sonoran desert. The dusty plains of Pima County around Tucson airport are scattered with rundown housing without air conditioning and sometimes even running water. Yet just a few kilometres away there are luxury villas with valley views, surrounded by hundred-year-old cacti and elaborate desert gardens with artfully placed rocks, designed to comply with official injunctions not to waste water.

To support this urban sprawl and the economic benefits it brings, a canal diverts water from the Colorado river. Opened in 1993, the Central Arizona Project, 541km long and averaging seven metres wide, with 14 pumping plants and dozens of sluice gates, carries 85 cubic metres per second.

Pima County, which lives above its means in terms of water, is pursuing various environmental initiatives. The Santa Cruz river, which had been dry for decades because of excessive pumping from aquifers and waterways (for cattle ranching, agroindustry, cotton growing, mining and urban growth), is flowing again, with reclaimed wastewater from Tucson. It doesn’t quite amount to an ecological restoration project, which would entail re-establishing a fully functional water cycle and self-regulating ecosystem, but it highlights a key feature of our relationship with natural resources today, even when we have the best environmental intentions. Access to water depends on massive technological infrastructure (1) – in this case, water treatment plants (which use chemicals) and pipelines to carry the reclaimed water to the Santa Cruz.
Commentary on water conflicts often overlooks this simple fact in favour of a broad and (apparently) generous idea that water should be considered a common good essential to life. This would imply a right to water, formalising the obvious link between nature and humanity. Yet nothing could be less natural than access to water and how societies have acquired it.

Move to managing demand

Civil engineer and city planner Bernard Barraqué (2) identifies three periods in the development of Europe’s water industry: the ‘age of quantity’, when civil engineering brought water from distant sources (19th century), the ‘age of quality’, when sanitary engineering and local government became involved (late 19th-early 20th centuries), and lastly the age of ‘integrated and demand-side management and environmental engineering’ (since the late 20th century). In this third age, he writes, the water industry has moved from supply management (expanding availability) to demand management (discouraging use) in which water is treated less as a natural resource than as a service, especially in cities.

Most international institutions have adopted this supply-and-demand model, but the Global Water Partnership (GWP) – a specialist intergovernmental organisation concerned with water resource management – criticises the apparent lack of concern over drought in EU directives, and the virtual absence of measures to encourage cutting back on water use. Although EU management plans call for increasing the water supply, demand management is ‘broadly missing in the current EU architecture’ (3). Which means ordinary citizens need to work even harder to use less water (give up swimming pools, brush their teeth and pee in the shower).

From water infrastructure to supply and demand policies, the problems are the same. Who should pay for the water we use?

But by placing the burden of responsibility on the individual, and depoliticising the issues – the building, ownership and monitoring of the infrastructure required for collective living – these exhortations to use less water actually limit the scope of what can be done.

Water supply and sewage usually depend on networks of pipes. While rejecting unnecessary mega-projects (huge reservoirs, canals to divert water from one region to another etc), we should not forget that even the worthiest environmental initiatives depend on technology, whether it’s reclaiming wastewater, capturing rainwater, restoring waterways or installing permeable paving.

Implementing these initiatives requires a knowledge of hydrology, economics (pricing, provider status, contracts) and especially environmental engineering which takes account of ecosystems. There are many ‘ecosystem infrastructure’ projects being developed (4), especially the eco-neighbourhoods of the global North, which offer alternative and decentralised solutions.

When water shortages cause conflict

In recent years, water policy has become a focus of attention because of recurrent droughts following severe disruption of the hydrosocial cycle (5): high temperatures lead to more evaporation, streams and rivers run dry, and aquifers are slow to replenish, so access to water is no longer guaranteed everywhere, all year round, even in areas not previously considered arid. Across a growing part of France, water agencies expect shortfalls of up to 50% of annual consumption by 2050. Water shortages have given rise to conflict, as between farmers and environmentalists over ‘mega-basins’ (see Is storing water the real answer?, in this issue). But it’s hard to see what can be done when the balance of political power is so unfavourable to reform.

Whether the starting point is water infrastructure or a vision of a common good to be managed through supply and demand policies, the practical problems are the same. Who should pay for the water we use? Who should finance, build and maintain supply networks, and, above all, who should own and control those networks? For years, it was the state: in Asia and Africa, governments often based their authority on water mega-projects such as irrigation canals and flood defences; and from the 19th century the landscape of the American West was shaped by federal investment in huge water and transport projects, and the greening of the desert.

Western governments saw cities as strategic hubs for growing the economies of developing countries, and in the 1980s and 90s pushed them to outsource the running of urban infrastructure to the private sector, so the water industry became part of the great dismantling of public services. Meanwhile, international institutions mobilised private enterprise to develop networks in the global South.

These policies challenged the universal distribution model that had been seen as the best response to the problem of access to water for all. In particular, water management and major engineering projects were considered too costly for the poor of emerging countries. Yet projects in a number of countries of the global South have shown that people who don’t have access to public water services (and therefore have to buy bottled water, have water delivered by tanker or pay for rainwater capture equipment) end up paying more than those living in neighbourhoods connected to the mains (6). Most would be able to help pay for the building of water networks, provided the service really met their needs. This is one of the paradoxes of demand for urban services: even in poor countries, people would rather have better access than free services.

So it’s not enough to argue that the world’s poorest should have access to water simply because they have the right to it. The situation in regions suffering from water stress shows that (setting aside criteria such as fairness and democratic participation) we need to determine whether the supply model established in Europe and the US in the 19th century – urban networks or operators covering a particular area – is still the best answer to growing demand. It could be better to focus on the decentralised solutions that are emerging in the global North, such as eco-neighbourhoods, which for now exist alongside infrastructure supplying relatively wide areas. These residential developments are equipped to treat wastewater on site, capture rainwater and produce sewage sludge to fertilise their vegetable gardens.

However, these practices, though touted by the well-to-do and politicians keen to promote green technology, may actually be undermining the economic viability of the universal distribution model. Promoters of ‘green secessionism’ have been accused of abandoning public services, and therefore solidarity with society’s poorest. Between the power of the water authorities and the might of the multinationals, is it enough to encourage water-saving measures without addressing the financial and political question that underpins the roll-out of water infrastructure for all?