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Climate Change and Water Governance pp 17–28Cite as

A Starting Point: Understanding Governance, Good Governance and Water Governance

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Part of the book series: Advances in Global Change Research ((AGLO,volume 54))

Abstract

Governance has been a widely and deeply discussed concept in the political sciences. As global freshwater resources have become increasingly degraded and impacts of climate change begin to take hold on local hydrological systems, scholars and practitioners have increasingly recognised a crisis of governance. This chapter presents a broad overview of governance theories and discusses the shifts from state centric notions of ‘government’ to a wider range of governance modes and types, as a way of contextualising the shift from a ‘command and control’ paradigm in water governance to more decentralised, integrated and flexible approaches.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For a definition of legitimacy see later discussion of good governance in Sect. 2.2.

  2. 2.

    Demsetz 1967, p 348: Externality is an ambiguous concept. For the purposes of this paper, the concept includes external costs, external benefits, and pecuniary as well as non-pecuniary externalities. No harmful or beneficial effect is external to the world. Some person or persons always suffer or enjoy these effects. That converts a harmful or beneficial effect into an externality is that the cost of bringing the effect to bear on the decisions of one or more of the interacting persons is too high to make it worthwhile, and this is what the term shall mean here. “Internalizing” such effects refers to a process, usually a change in property rights, that enables these effects to bear (in greater degree) on all interacting persons.

  3. 3.

    Refer to: http://www.gwpforum.org/servlet/PSP?iNodeID=1345

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Group on Climate Change and Climate Impacts Institute for Environmental Sciences, University of Geneva, Carouge, GE, Switzerland

    Margot Hill

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  1. Margot Hill
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Correspondence to Margot Hill .

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Hill, M. (2013). A Starting Point: Understanding Governance, Good Governance and Water Governance. In: Climate Change and Water Governance. Advances in Global Change Research, vol 54. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5796-7_2

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