Water, politics, and river basin governance: Repoliticizing approaches to river basin management.

Current mainstream visions of water management tend to promote a view of river basin development as a technical issue where experts and managers endeavour to match supply and demand by the application of technology, sound science, rational and neutral problem-solving approaches, and-whenever deemed necessary- an adequate cocktail of participation from relevant stakeholders. This paper, in contrast, emphasizes that river basin development and management is about shifting patterns of access to a contested and scarce resource and, as such, is inherently a political process. I argue that an analysis of physical and social characteristics and constraints of river basins must be paralleled by giving attention to ideas, interests and institutions. In particular I focus on two crucial political drivers of river basin development that need to be given more consideration: the converging interests of the main actors involved in capital-intensive water investments and the use of discursive power in the justification of large-scale investments. This serves as a background to explain why some river basins get overbuilt and how scarcity is generated artificially. With growing competition and pressure over resources, river basin development and management is an arena where actors mobilize discursive, political and other resources to shift benefits, costs and risk, spatially and socially, in a way that favours their interests or world view. Repoliticizing visions of river basin management offers a different and complementary perspective that allows a better understanding of society/environment relationships