Description
Understanding water as a security concern has become a prominent framework for analysing global water politics and has implications for its governance. In recent years, a wealth of scholarship has critically examined the ‘security’ framing of politics in contemporary world politics (see for example, Fischhendler 2015; Pahl-Wostl, Bhaduri, and Gupta 2016; Fröhlich et al. 2018), with many studies highlighting the importance of transboundary or global water governance in resolving water insecurity (Swatuk et al 2015; Harris et al. 2015; Sultana and Loftus 2019). However, analyses of transboundary water governance rarely investigate the historical legacies that inform unspoken assumptions and practices over shared water – particularly as the development of early global governance and the first international organizations in 19th century Europe rested on contestations over the meaning of and collective practices concerning transboundary rivers. By analysing current institutions on the Nile and Mekong Rivers, this paper will highlight the ways in which today’s transboundary water management institutions are shaped by the legacies of imperialism that spread institutional models from Europe. In doing so, this paper argues that the imperial legacies that underpin these water governance institutions perpetuate problematic framings of water security that end up institutionalizing unequal power among actors.
