Description
Much of the literature on water security has so far tended to take a state-centric, end point dominated perspective. In particular there has been much attention to conceptualising and measuring state progression towards a pre-defined condition of optimal “water security”. For example, the various water security indicators are predicated on the notion that this endpoint is quantifiable and can be managed from the national level – e.g. the Asian Development Bank Water Security Indicators. More recently, a growing number of critical scholars, from geography, public health and anthropology especially, have begun to explore the idea that it is more important to understand the complexities of contemporary water insecurity as experienced by real people in households. The Household Water Insecurity Experiences (HWISE) global consortium has worked since 2016 to create the world’s first cross-culturally validated multidimensional scale for comparative analysis of household scale water insecurity. Launched through publications in the British Medical Journal in 2019, the HWISE scale is now being taken up by scholars and practitioners all over the world and is transforming our understanding of the everyday realities of water insecurity.
