Race, Ethnicity, and the Case for Intersectional Water Security
Publisher: Global Environmental Politics
Author(s): Cameron Harrington, Phellecitus Montana, Jeremy J. Schmidt, and Ashok Swain
Date: 2023
Topics: Conflict Causes, Conflict Prevention, Gender, Livelihoods, Renewable Resources
This Forum article reports on a meta-review of more than 19,000 published works on water security, of which less than 1 percent explicitly focus on race or ethnicity. This is deeply concerning, because it indicates that race and ethnicity—crucial factors that affect the provision of safe, reliable water—continue to be ignored in academic and policy literatures. In response to this finding the Forum calls for building intersectional water security frameworks that recognize how empirical drivers of social and environmental inequality vary both within and across groups. Intersectional frameworks of water security can retain policy focus on the key material concerns regarding access, safety, and the distribution of water-related risks. They can also explicitly incorporate issues of race and ethnicity alongside other vectors of inequality to address key, overlooked concerns of water security.
Water security scholarship almost uniformly excludes an explicit treatment of race or ethnicity. This is a critical issue, because without an adequate account of water security’s relationships to race and ethnicity, crucial factors affecting the provision of safe, reliable water will continue to go unaddressed. In response to this exclusion, we call for intersectional analyses of water security as an anti-oppressive approach that can orient academic and policy analysis to multiple dimensions of inequality and insecurity, including ones dependent on ethnic and racial discrimination.