Water crises: political construction or physical reality?

Various definitions of water crises emerge from epistemic communities deploying a great disparity of methodologies and fundamental hypotheses. Scientists' perceptions of which power structures legitimately carry out water management affect their definition of a crisis, their capacity to ask questions and the manner they formulate them. This determines the stakes and the actors they can observe or the scale of analysis they find relevant. This leads some to recommend a ‘solution’ that appears to be a disaster to others. This article examines how three epistemic communities have each built their science by promoting very specific understandings of what is a water crisis. Proponents of the ‘global water crisis’ spawned Integrated Water Resources Management while proponents of the ‘municipal water crisis’ locked the perception of water equity within the Millennium Development Goals. Researchers on small-scale irrigation and property regimes have often disagreed with such recommendations, often presented as inevitable.