Conca Reading

Conca, Ken, “Expert Networks: The Elusive Quest for Integrated Water Resources Management,” pp. 123-143, 158-165, Governing Water: Contentious Transnational Politics and Global Institution Building (2006)

  • Regional Vs International
    • The regional institutions have rules, but there is not a good convergence of these rules on the international sphere.
    • Rivers and watersheds must be understood in terms of larger social-economic context that they exist – a more holistic perspective – and this is due in a large part to the adoption of the IWRM as a normative force
    • IWRM is a good example of a non-state actor network that helped to develop into a serious force
      • Actors with same knowledge formation and value origination can be an important set of norms of world politics
      • Central diplomatic forum is the global experts forum and the central currency is the task force, not the treaty
      • Notwithstanding, the IWRM shows the limits of where institutionalization that is embedded in expert knowledge and networking can take us
  • Mar del Plata
    • An UN event of the late 1970’s that led up to the creation of the IWRM
    • Set the principle that all people should have access to safe, reliable drinking water
    • Many different countries were involved, but it was a challenging discussion
    • Strict divide in rulemaking over treatment of rivers in domestic vs international realm
    • Domestic issues really adopted the principle of providing safe water, but it was much harder for the international realm to have the same attitude
    • Over time, Mar del Plata was seen as a failure in the principle it espoused
  • Regarding Networks
    • Can be very fluid in their orientation in spatial composition; they are more defined by relational rather than positional (132)
    • The IWRM evolved within a politically ambiguous space (133)
  • IWRM
    • Ambiguities:
    • Participation:
      • The concept of who should participate is not clearly defined. Does the principle suggest that the local level community should be the best nexus for resolution or some other level of control?
      • Questions of participation produce “dissension, fragmentation, and debate” (159)
        • The IWRM was supposed to function on two legs, technical committees and parliaments, but the failure of the parliaments to take action leads to the failure of the system.
    • Benefits:
      • Transference of power: as the principles of the IWRM were adopted, a new institution has been created that moves outside the realm of statist authority, territory, and stability.
        • This is in contrast to what the IWRM has not been able to create, which is a technique to manage the intense controversies that exist outside and between regimes (162)
        • Expert technical knowledge and transnational professional networking only goes so far