Intersections of gender and water: comparative approaches to everyday gendered negotiations of water access in underserved areas of Accra,Ghana and Cape Town,South Africa

A large and growing body of literature suggests that women and men often have differentiated relationships to water access, uses, knowledges, governance, and experiences. From a feminist political ecology perspective, these relationships can be mediated by gendered labour practices (within the household, at the community level, or within the workplace), socio-cultural expectations (e.g. related to notions of masculinity and femininity), as well as intersectional differences (e.g. race, income, and so forth). While these relationships are complex, multiple, and vary by context, it is frequently argued that due to responsibility for domestic provision or other pathways, women may be particularly affected if water quality or access is compromised. This paper reports on a statistical evaluation of a 478 household survey conducted in underserved areas of Accra, Ghana and Cape Town, South Africa in early 2012. Interrogating our survey results in the light of the ideas of gender differentiated access, uses, knowledges, governance, and experiences of water, we open up considerations related to the context of each of our study sites, and also invite possible revisions and new directions for these debates. In particular, we are interested in the instances where differences among male and female respondents were less pronounced than expected. Highlighting these unexpected results we find it helpful to draw attention to methods – in particular we argue that a binary male–female approach is not that meaningful for the analysis, and instead, gender analysis requires some attention to intersectional differences (e.g. homeownership, employment, or age). We also make the case for the importance of combining qualitative and quantitative work to understand these relationships, as well as opening up what might be learned by more adequately exploring the resonances and tensions between these approaches.     

Stakeholder involvement in collaborative regulatory processes: Using automated coding to track attendance and actions

Regulation increasingly mandates collaborative approaches to increase stakeholder input and streamline approval processes. However, understanding how to maintain stakeholder involvement over the course of a long collaborative process is vital to optimize effectiveness. This paper observes more than 700 stakeholders involved in developing and implementing a dam operating license over 16 years. We use text mining and Bayesian hierarchical modeling to observe meeting attendance and recorded actions in meeting minutes. We find that involvement decreased after the initial planning phase, but steadily increased through license development and implementation. After the regulatory mandate to consult with external stakeholders dissolved, overall attendance declined while attendance stability increased, meaning that the non‐mandatory stage involved a smaller cadre of dedicated actors. This indicates that high‐performing mandated stakeholder involvement processes rely on a constrained group of conveners to sustain interaction and have less turnover than what might be expected given existing evidence from grassroots involvement; assumptions about group dynamics based on involvement in grassroots processes may lead to improper predictions about who will participate, and how, in processes where stakeholder involvement is mandated.     

加强浙江省水资源管理和水资源费征收的思考

水资源是人们日常生活的必需品,是经济发展的基本要素和基础资源。随着经济社会的快速发展,水资源短缺、水环境恶化等问题日益突出,可开发利用的水资源越来越少。因此,全面推行依法治水,加强水资源的统一管理,加大水资源费征收力度,加强污染治理,建立节水型社会,已显得十分迫切。本文全面分析了浙江省水资源的现状和存在的主要问题,并对加强水资源管理和水资源费征收提出了建议。     

污水处理系统在城市可持续发展中的作用

该文通过对城市自然属性和社会属性的探讨，分析了城市不可持续发展问题的产生原因，剖析了当前中国城市社会发展的阶段性特征，分析总结了中国水污染控制技术与城市污水处理系统的发展方向。     

Administrative Discretion and Environmental Regulation: Agency Substantive Rules and Court Decisions in U.S. Air and Water Quality Policies

The main challenge of the scholarship with administrative discretion is how to reach the appropriate balance between a commitment to legislative preferences and flexibility in regulating diverse targets in constantly changing environments. This article focuses on how regulators and courts interact in influencing the potential for administrative discretion in U.S. environmental policy. It creates an analytical framework highlighting the construction of substantive rules by an agency, the interpretation of agency rulings by courts, capacity of an agency for implementation, and legislative responsiveness to agency rulings. It analyzes several cases of the introduction of incentive-based economic instruments administered by the Environmental Protection Agency in air and water policies. The cases reveal the intensified and expanded production of substantive regulations by the agency and the trajectory of a struggle in the judiciary to advance both the legislative intent and the substantive goal of protecting the environment in a more cost-effective and less burdensome way.     

乡族与中国近代水权纠纷解决

乡族在近代中国基层水权运行与水权纠纷解决过程中扮演着重要的角色。较大的乡族会利用优势地位，控制水源、操纵水权分配、掌控水利组织、主导水利祭祀、垄断水权资料，进而控制地方社会。同时，乡族对水权运行和水权纠纷的态度以及配合程度对水权管理的影响极大。水权纠纷解决之后所面临的执行问题，对地方水利社会是一个真正的难题。而在这一过程中，如果分水方案对某一乡族不利，则会采取一切措施阻挠相关方案的实施；反之，则会积极配合。因此，乡族对水权运行、水权纠纷解决的作用是双重的，既有利于水权运行的一面，又有阻碍水权运行的一面。     

Recent Australian Market Mechanisms as a Component of an Environmental Policy That Can Make Choices Between Sustainability and Social Justice

Markets in terms of tradeable water or pollution rights, are increasingly being offered as rational solutions for environmental problems. The rational pursuit of personal gain through trading is assumed to promote increased efficiency in resource use and promote a reduction in the negative aspects of the resource use. The social and distributive effects of the introduction of markets and their rules and operations have received little concerted study and examination. In this paper the role of justice considerations in the development of economically rational environmental decision making will be addressed through some case studies of rural water markets and urban water markets in Australia.     

Incorporating Equity into International Water Agreements

River basins have provided resources for the advancement of human civilization from the earliest historic times. With river basin development has also come conflict, particularly in the past century. In response, the international community has developed generalized, global principles for the equitable allocation of water resources between nation-states, most notably through the 1997 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses. These principles, however, have rarely been explicitly put into practice. To resolve or avert conflict in the world's 261 international river basins, riparian nations have instead relied upon treaties that incorporate basin-specific needs and conditions and define equity at the most local level. An examination of the progression of geographic thought on river basin development reveals a spatial focus that has not evolved beyond the basin and landscape scales. The absence of theoretical underpinnings for global frameworks may explain why riparian nations have not widely adopted general principles for the equitable allocation of water resources in actual treaty practice.     

A new approach to amino acid racemization in enamel: testing of a less destructive sampling methodology

Aspartic acid racemization has been found to be an accurate measure of age at death for recent forensic material. This paper examines the practicality of using acid etching of the tooth surface to extract amino acids from the enamel for racemization analysis. By serial etching of the tooth and contamination of the teeth with bovine serum albumin prior to etching, the ability of etching to remove contamination was assessed. The destructiveness of the method was visualized and quantified using micro-computed tomography (micro-CT). By bleaching the teeth and by deeper etching it was possible to obtain more consistent values. While etching had little effect on the enamel at the macroscale, it did have an impact at the microscale. The quantities of enamel removed varied depending upon the tooth morphology, but were not large. Acid etching of enamel thus appears to be a promising new method for extracting proteins for amino acid racemization age estimation noninvasively.     

Subterranean successes: Durable regulation and regulatory endowments

Scholars sometimes criticize durable regulatory systems for being costly, inefficient, ineffective, and inequitable. This article reassesses regulation, arguing that a mis-categorization of types of regulatory activity has led critics astray. More specifically, the article observes that regulation “hardened” by being built into infrastructure often ceases to be seen as regulation and its benefits are therefore inappropriately omitted from assessments of regulatory accomplishments. Hardening into one or another durable form can create two important benefits: durable regulation moves some items off the agenda of regulators, conserving resources for other regulatory work; durable regulation also creates regulatory endowments, preserving key bargains struck at the time infrastructure was created and reducing future opportunities for capture. Such endowments can then become the foundation for other regulatory work. Examples from the regulation of drinking water in the United States and brief discussions of road safety and disability regulation illustrate the argument.