Hydropolitics

Hello! Welcome back to Hydropolitics: Africa Edition. In this post I want to go over the concept of physical and economic water scarcity , to state how countries can have an abundant supply of water but access to this supply is influenced by politics and governmental management strategies. Africa is the worlds second driest continent. However, the distribution and availability of water is complex, and cannot be narrowed down or applied to the entire continent. Renewable water resources are disproportionately distributed among different regions. Central Africa holds roughly 50% of Africa's total internal water, while northern Africa only contains 2.99% ( UNEP, 2010 ). However, the relative availability of water in different regions does not necessarily correlate with access to safe water. This is a common misconception. Water scarcity is defined by Damkjaer and Taylor ( 2017 ) as a "shortage in the availability of renewable freshwater relative to demand", however, this...

Hello, and welcome to my blog Hydropolitics: Africa Edition. This blog will take you on a journey through the politics of water, drawing on transboundary water resources and the political implications of shared management over water in both Northern and Eastern Africa. I decided to focus my blog on water and politics as water is an essential good that humans can't go without. Water is always political, and politics involves thinking about who makes big decisions regarding shared resources, who decides where and who gets access to a specific source of water, and who puts a price on such a vital resource. My interest in this topic stems from my passion for social sciences and the nature of shared resources and cross-border collaboration in spreading access to a single, highly demanded resource. The theory of the Tragedy of the Commons introduced by Hardin ( 1968 ) conceptualises this interest by highlighting a situation in a shared-resource system where people act independently for...