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Corporations as Custodians of the Public Good? pp 57–80Cite as

The Rise of Corporate Water Stewardship

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Part of the book series: Water Governance - Concepts, Methods, and Practice ((WGCMP))

Abstract

This chapter explores the incentives for different types of actors to advocate corporate water stewardship, and provides an overview of how it has developed since its inception. It finds that there are potential tensions when different actors collaborate under the banner of ‘stewardship’ since different actors conceptualise water problems in distinctive ways. The chapter starts with presenting the corporate perspective and examines how companies conceptualise the water issue and what motivates them to engage. It finds that for companies, the water crisis constitutes a material business risk. However, the risk alone does not explain why companies engage; companies are also incentivised to act because of the business opportunity it can pose, the widening of what constitute as ‘water engagement’, and the pressure from stakeholders and investors to act. The latter part of the chapter turns to examine the water crisis from the perspective of NGOs and finds that for these actors, the water crisis constitutes an environmental or social risk. Despite having a fundamentally different starting point than that of companies, the evidence presented in this chapter suggests that NGOs collaborate with companies to obtain financial and political leverage. The last part of the chapter analyses the evolution of corporate water stewardship, and finds that the concept has been heavily promoted by NGOs, with the purpose of incentivising more companies to engage.

Governments and civil society alike recognise that they can’t tackle the water challenges alone. And I think that they are increasingly aware of the good things that the private sector can do…As they get more aware of this, the willingness to open up and see companies as part of the solution is increasing…The appetite for collaboration is increasing. And I think the appetite is increasing in the right way. Not just seeing companies as a ‘cash-cow’, but as partners in implementation.

Interview 37, 2016, unpublished

Companies are not going to get persuaded by anything other than real demonstrable risk…Companies will not change their behaviour until there is a real business case. You are not going to persuade them. And you can’t criticise them for that. They are in the business to make money, they are not in the business to fix water.

Interview 5, 2015, unpublished.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    As defined by SDG target 6.1,‘safe’ drinking water is free from pathogens and elevated levels of toxic chemicals at all times (WHO/UNICEF JMP 2018a).

  2. 2.

    As defined by the SDG Target 6.2, ‘adequate’ implies a system which hygienically separates excreta from human contact as well as safe reuse/treatment of excreta in situ, or safe transport and treatment off-site (WHO/UNICEF JMP 2018b).

  3. 3.

    The six-year programme (2013–2018) facilitates partnerships between the public sector, the private sector and civil society. It addresses shared water risks on a catchment scale, whilst improving stakeholders’ use and management of water and building their capacity to develop their own solutions (IWaSP 2018).

  4. 4.

    The official United Nations target is to keep ODA at or above 0.7% of GNI.

  5. 5.

    See Chap. 7 for a critical discussion on ‘savings’ and ‘efficiency’.

  6. 6.

    In fact, water often seems to flow in the opposite direction to that which the logic of water savings through ‘virtual water’ trade would suggest. For example, China has a virtual flow of water from its dry north to its wetter south as a result of growing wheat, much of which is then consumed in the wetter south. And to offset the decline in water resources in the north that results from this, they have a south-north transfer of physical water (Guan and Hubacek 2007).

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  1. School of Geography & Sustainable Development, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK

    Thérèse Rudebeck

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Rudebeck, T. (2019). The Rise of Corporate Water Stewardship. In: Corporations as Custodians of the Public Good?. Water Governance - Concepts, Methods, and Practice. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13225-5_3

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