The Politics of Water Science: On Unresolved Water Problems and Biased Research Agendas

Introduction

Many serious water-related societal problems remain unresolved. Examples include (a) the number of people without access to potable drinking water (about 1 billion) and sanitation (more than 2 billion), located mainly in Africa and Asia; (b) the challenges of avoiding and abating environmental degradation and water pollution in many densely populated regions of the world; (c) the low crop yields obtained by the majority of smallholder farmers, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa; and (d) the tensions that simmer between rival water uses and users within water scarce catchment areas and river basins, which may also involve nation states.

The need to address these serious problems, as recognized in the Millennium Development Goals, is made all the more difficult by (e) the need to enhance the capacity of water systems to respond to climate change impacts (increased variability of rainfall, increased intensity of extreme events, and, in many parts, a decrease in the utilizable amounts of surface- and groundwater). Furthermore, the South is now faced with (f) a sudden increase in biofuel demand (from the EU and US as a way to mitigate their greenhouse gas emissions and reduce dependency on oil exporters), which leads to shifts towards biofuel production in the South and thereby causes competition with other existing uses of land and water resources.

Is water science, where science includes knowledge claims from both social and natural sciences,¹ doing enough to contribute to resolving these problems? We define water science as the systematic study of water and its uses encompassing the natural (biogeochemical), engineering, social and humanities knowledge fields. Science makes knowledge claims that are presented as authoritative. In the classical sense the scientific method strives to produce objective and verifiable facts that are reproducible. However, research is often a function of the context in which it is produced. Funding sources, reward systems, scientific values and paradigms and a researcher’s country of residence all push research in certain directions, and by consequence, not in others. In the process, values are intertwined in science. Some science gets more recognition at the cost of other science;² some types of science (e.g. indigenous knowledge) are often ignored;³ and, as former secretary general of the UN points out, some types of problems are just not researched.⁴

Our experience as water researchers and teachers over the past twenty years has often shown that published research seldom provides answers to many of the key water challenges faced by our students. In an attempt to verify if our intuitive thoughts were matched by a systematic search of the literature, this forum paper discusses the research effort on the water problems identified above on the basis of bibliometric statistics over a ten year period (1998–2007) provided by the Scopus data base.⁵ We have verified the outcomes with the ISI web of science database and the results show similar trends. There are several limitations of the study: The bibliometric results only covered the English language literature; the grey literature was excluded; and no trend analysis was conducted to verify if the identified biases changed over time. However, we feel that the results are worth noting, despite these limitations.

A preliminary assessment of our findings reveals that there are at least four significant biases in water research that appear to stand in the way of addressing (aspects of) the water problems identified above. We argue that a first step towards enhancing the relevance of science towards problem solving is to acknowledge the existence of these biases and to take active measures to counterbalance them where possible.

The “Justified” Bias with an Unintended Consequence: Where is Water Cooperation?

A first bias is a fascination in the literature for water conflict. The water wars hypothesis is still very much alive, and much research effort focuses on conflict. However, this focus appears to be at the expense of understanding the role of water in fostering cooperation between users, communities and nations. Table 1 shows that nearly three times more scientific articles are published on the topic of...