Justice as a pillar for the water sector

Towards a just water transition

Increasing drought, excessively rapid water discharge, growing water use, pollution and salinisation necessitate a water transition to render the water system climate-robust. This water transition involves making different choices that can have positive and negative consequences for different stakeholders, including citizens. When weighing these choices, it is important that justice be included as a guiding principle and that potential damages or losses on the part of the most vulnerable be avoided. It is however still unclear how thinking in terms of justice can be anchored in the water sector.

This project investigates the degree to which existing approaches and notions of justice are applicable and relevant to the water sector. This also involves compiling an inventory of the challenges facing the sector when it comes to justice in the water transition.

Joint knowledge development

Justice has already been the subject of a great deal of thinking and writing, including in the context of climate and environmental issues. As a first step in this project, the existing visions of justice will be collected and discussed in workshops with water professionals, with a focus on their relevance for the drinking water sector. This will also involve the identification of areas of tension that arise when it comes to achieving a just water transition. These areas of tension will be further analysed and elaborated in follow-up interviews with professionals. The extent to which these areas of tension are generally recognized and relevant to the water sector will be assessed in a closing workshop.

Outcomes

This project’s findings will be incorporated in a final report with a theoretical framework, within which various approaches will be explored with regard to how justice can find a place in the water transition. In this manner, we will contribute to the development of ethical-normative knowledge for the sector: knowledge that is indispensable to successful transitions. A number of the associated areas of tension with be elaborated in visual narratives, which will be widely shared within the sector, and thereby initiate a dialogue about this issue and develop a sensitivity to (justice) issues of this kind. The findings of the project will be made available to both academic and professional publics by means of a scientific article in a trade journal.