Jessica Budds

University of Bonn | Uni Bonn ·  Department of Geography

This paper has two principal aims: first, to unravel some of the arguments mobilized in the controversial privatization debate, and second, to review the scale and nature of private sector provision of water and sanitation in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Despite being vigorously promoted in the policy arena and having been implemented in several...

This paper critically explores the politics that mediate the use of environmental science assessments as the basis of resource management policy. Drawing on recent literature in the political ecology tradition that has emphasised the politicised nature of the production and use of scientific knowledge in environmental management, the paper analyses...

The relationship between water and society has come to the forefront of critical inquiry in recent years, attracting significant scholarly and popular interest. As the state hydraulic paradigm gives way to modes of water governance, there is a need to recognize, reflect and represent water’s broader social dimensions. In this article, we advance th...

The governance of water resources is prominent in both water policy agendas and academic scholarship. Political ecologists have made important advances in reconceptualising the relationship between water and society. Yet while they have stressed both the scalar dimensions and the politicised nature of water governance, analyses of its scalar politi...

Our aim in this paper is not to abandon, but rather reconceptualize, water security in ways that explicitly link to broader social and political relations that enable benefits to water related services (e.g., drinking, recreation, productive uses, cultural practices) rather than focus on the materiality of access to water in and of itself. Our conc...

In Ethiopia, large-scale agricultural investment (LAI) is promoted to foster adaptation to climate change among smallholder farmers by improving farming conditions and productivity. However, little has been known about this condition so far. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to study the implications of LAI for the capacity for climate change ada...

Analysing the drivers and implications of land use and cover (LULC) dynamics in land leased areas is essential for sustainable land use planning and environmental management interventions. The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between large-scale agricultural investment and the socioecological implications of land use change in west...

This paper explores factors influencing smallholder farmers’ attitudes towards integrated soil fertility management (ISFM). ISFM is paramount to improve soil fertility for sustainable agricultural productivity, especially in contexts where smallholder agriculture is an important local livelihood and economic activity, as in many countries of the Gl...

This study analyzed the patterns and drivers of LULC dynamics in relation to the expansion of large-scale irrigated agriculture in the Central Rift Valley of Ethiopia from 1972 to 2016. Aerial photographs (1972), Landsat images (1980, 2000) and SPOT5 satellite images (2016) were analyzed using GIS tools to reveal LULC changes, and documentation, ke...

Although India declared itself “open defecation free” in 2019, critics charge that its national urban sanitation campaign, Swachh Bharat Mission–Urban (SBM-U), has failed. SBM-U provided community toilets in informal settlements where household latrines were unviable, delegating their upkeep to local governments and users. Initially, these communit...

2021): Advancing urban water security: The urbanization of water-society relations and entry-points for political engagement, Water International, ABSTRACT We seek to advance a critical and relational concept of urban water security that theorizes urban processes in relation to the hydro-social dynamics that produce experiences of water securities...

Overcoming the challenges facing water resources management has necessitated the development and implementation of flexible, problem-solving approaches; these include building social partnerships, as well as recognizing scarcity signals, and developing market and exchange mechanisms. The critical role of water in sustainable development processes,...

Recent studies have reconceptualized infrastructure as comprising both material and social processes , thus offering insights into lived experiences, governance, and socio-spatial reordering. More specific attention to infrastructure's temporality has challenged its supposed inertia and inevitable completeness, leading to an engagement with questio...

This special issue bridges human geography, anthropology and political ecology to understand infrastructure in between conditions of decay and repair, and how embodied experiences of infrastructure intersect with processes of socio-spatial transformation. Our focus on decay and repair builds on literature that understands infrastructure as material...

Small-scale agriculture is an important livelihood in sub-Saharan Africa. In the face of land degradation, identifying the constraints to smallholder farmers in improving soil quality is important to inform institutional interventions. While previous policies and studies have concentrated on structural land management practices, less attention has...

Originally proposed by ecological economists, the concept of ecosystem services has gained traction in demonstrating the importance of ecosystems for providing goods and services to society. While much work has sought to develop and operationalise the concept as the basis of scientific research and ecosystem conservation, most thinking and practice...

To say that Covid-19 has changed everything about how we do geography is by now cliche. Multiple academic journals, including this one, have published special issues on Covid-19, and countless editorials signal how the on-going pandemic deepens existing inequalities, not only in the worlds we study as scholars but also in the ways in which we produ...

Mediante la aplicación de principios "neoliberales" (derechos de propiedad privada, mercados y desregulación), el objetivo del Código de Aguas de Chile de 1981 era fomentar la inversión de los usuarios en la infraestructura hidráulica y la eficiencia en el uso del agua. Sin embargo, el Código de Aguas se ve cada vez más cuestionado por su asociació...

Chile has operated a system of private tradable water rights since 1981. In theory, this framework contributes to water security by instituting private property rights to water to enable permanent access, and by using market transactions to facilitate the reallocation of scarce water to ensure optimal distribution. Yet, since 2010, the country has...

The Journal of Latin American Geography is happy to announce a newly expanded editorial team, including the addition of three new Associate Editors and a new Book Review Editor.

In recent weeks, people all over the world have been settling into a ‘new normal’ of restricted mobility, online working, social distancing and enhanced hand hygiene. As part of the global fight against the spread of COVID-19 (the illness caused by SARS-CoV-2), we are repeatedly reminded by public health authorities that frequent and thorough hand-...

In this commentary we draw attention to water sharing as political, highlighting the stakes and concerns around such practices. We engage a broad definition of politics, capturing everyday acts and practices that might be interpreted along a gradient ranging from mundane and banal forms of resistance, to refusal, to more obvious and visible acts of...

Since the 1970s, the Government of Ethiopia has implemented villagization, whereby nomadic pastoralist groups are supported to develop (more) sedentary lifestyles and livelihoods. Villagization has been officially promoted to encourage diversification from livestock herding to agricultural cultivation, and to fulfil basic needs through infrastructu...

Successful attainment of SDG17 is essential for implementing the other 16 SDGs, all of which depend upon secure means of implementation and durable partnerships. Funding for forests from ODA and other sources has trended upwards since 2000, providing reason for cautious optimism. However, REDD+ finance is declining. Private sector investment remain...

In recent years, seawater desalination has become a more viable and common solution to water scarcity around the world. Desalination is a supply‐led solution in that it produces additional water, rather than manages demand for existing resources. Although a growing body of work has analysed the environmental and social implications of desalination,...

Water sharing between households could crucially mitigate short‐term household water shortages, yet it is a vastly understudied phenomenon. Here we use comparative survey data from eight sites in seven sub‐Saharan African countries (Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda) to answer three questions: Wit...

Este libro presenta un panorama desalentador sobre las relaciones hidrosociales en cuatro países andinas: Bolvia, Colombia, Perú y Ecuador. Los capítulos demuestran cómo las relaciones de poder determinan los flujos físicos del agua, los marcos legales, los padrones de (re)asignación, las obras hidráulicas, las instituciones y los discursos hídrico...

Este libro presenta un panorama desalentador sobre las relaciones hidrosociales en cuatro países andinas: Bolvia, Colombia, Perú y Ecuador. Los capítulos demuestran cómo las relaciones de poder determinan los flujos físicos del agua, los marcos legales, los padrones de (re)asignación, las obras hidráulicas, las instituciones y los discursos hídrico...

Between 2013 and 2015, São Paulo experienced a major drought. With drinking water reservoirs reduced to 5% of their capacity, the water supply company, SABESP, implemented measures to reduce household water consumption, and the government of São Paulo state overruled watershed committees to prioritize the supply of water to SABESP. While attention...

Water sharing offers insight into the everyday and, at times, invisible ties that bind people and households with water and to one another. Water sharing can take many forms, including so‐called “pure gifts,” balanced exchanges, and negative reciprocity. In this study, we examine water sharing between households as a culturally embedded practice th...

Household water insecurity has serious implications for the health, livelihoods and wellbeing of people around the world. Existing methods to assess the state of household water insecurity focus largely on water quality, quantity or adequacy, source or reliability, and affordability. These methods have significant advantages in terms of their simpl...

Future sustainability of the conservation management of socio-ecological landscapes is typically reliant on on-going agricultural management. Such management may be threatened by changes in the drivers of management and the fragility of the stakeholder networks that deliver management. This study examined evidence for the risk of abandonment in a s...

Contemporary practice in the conservation of socio-ecological landscapes draws on both a model of responsive management, and also on ideas about historic management. This study considered what evidence might exist for the exercise of these approaches to management in the conservation of floodplain meadows in England, in order to inform understandin...

The culturally and ecologically diverse region of the Eastern Himalayas is the target of ambitious hydropower development plans. Policy discourses at national and international levels position this development as synergistically positive: it combines the production of clean energy to fuel economic growth at regional and national levels with initiat...

Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates is a rapidly developing state reliant on modern water production and distribution systems to support its economic growth and urban development. Whilst often conceptualized as a rentier state, its urban water sector has undergone major economic restructuring over the last decade, resulting in an increasingly imp...

The culturally and ecologically diverse region of the Eastern Himalayas is the target of ambitious hydropower development plans. Policy discourses at national and international levels position this development as synergistically positive: it combines the production of clean energy to fuel economic growth at regional and national levels with initiat...

In Latin America, payment for environmental services (PES) is a tool for watershed conservation that is becoming increasingly promoted by some government agencies, international development organisations and environmental NGOs. However, in pursuit of conservation, PES initiatives implemented at the watershed level may conceal the environmental impa...

Payments for environmental services (PES) schemes are widely promoted to secure ecosystem services through incentives to the owners of land from which they are derived. Furthermore, they are increasingly proposed to foster conservation and poverty alleviation in the global South. In this article, we analyze the social relations that have shaped the...

Chile's free-market economic and political reforms, designed and implemented under General Pinochet's military regime (1973-90), have been important in discussions of neoliberal public policy and environmental governance. However, understandings of how and why these reforms unfolded often overlook the complex power dynamics involved. This paper exa...

Exploring political ecologies of water and development This theme issue draws on political ecology scholarship to explore how hydrosocial relations are produced and transformed through development interventions that provide and manage water in the Global South. In the five papers that draw insights from different contexts globally, the authors exam...

This paper examines the development of export-oriented agriculture and the allocation of water resources for irrigation in La Ligua river basin in Chile's Norte Chico. The paper uses a theoretical framework within the political ecology tradition in order to approach questions of demand, evaluation and allocation of water resources, and related issu...

This paper examines the development of export-oriented agriculture and the allocation of water resources for irrigation in La Ligua river basin in Chile's Norte Chico. The paper uses a theoretical framework within the political ecology tradition in order to approach questions of demand, evaluation and allocation of water resources, and related issu...

'This book is an extraordinary intellectual and political tour de force. For the first time, the complex power-laden processes that shape the relationships between water rights, politics and identity are explored in ways that are academically stimulating, intellectually enriching and politically significant - an indispensible guide for all those wh...

Los asuntos de agua de que se ocupa Justicia Hídrica son complejos y multifacéticos porque implican preguntas sobre cultura, desarrollo, política, economía y ecología. En este documento presento un marco conceptual desde la geografía humana y parto de las teorías de la ecología política para proponer un medio de comprender temas relacionados con el...

One of the most radical neoliberal reforms devised and implemented in Chile under the military regime led by General Pinochet (1973–1990) was the major revision of the water law, the “Water Code”, in 1981. Designed according to free-market principles, the result was a law which introduced a system of private water rights that could be traded in fre...

This chapter examines a conflict over water resources for irrigation in a rapidly developing agricultural valley in Chile’s semi-arid Norte Chico. It explores escalating demand for new water resources, in particular groundwater, for export-oriented fruit plantations, and its implications in terms of water resources management and access to water ri...

São Paulo is one of Latin America’s most modern and developed cities, yet around one-third of its 10 million inhabitants live in poor-quality housing in sub-standard settlements. This paper describes the response of the São Paulo municipal government that took office in 2001. Through its Secretariat of Housing and Urban Development, it designed a n...

Since the 1990s, international water sector reforms have centred heavily on economic and market approaches. In regard to water resources management, tradable water rights have been promoted, often supported by the neoliberal model adopted in Chile. Chile's 1981 Water Code was reformed to comprise a system of water rights that could be freely traded...

As discussed elsewhere (Adell, 1999; Allen, 1999), whilst there is no accepted definition of what precisely constitutes the "peri-urban interface", the project team has identified at least three different approaches from where it has been conventionally conceptualised. These approaches may be classified according to the set of variables they choose...