Urban Water Economies: Governance and the sustainability dilemma in global cities

Increased urbanization coupled with demand for water has placed the provision of a sustainable supply of clean water high on the agenda for large cities. The approach of this book is to describe various contexts in a range of global cities, starting with many of the larger cities in Asia, including Beijing, Hong Kong, Osaka and Singapore. These are compared with other cities across Europe, Australia and the Americas.

In these largely mature water economies, per capita use has usually begun to decline or at least level out, although the causes are not clear. Yet provision costs have not declined commensurately, often generating a conservation-driven crisis. Sometimes complications arise from the need of megacities to reach across administrative boundaries and watersheds to secure their supply. One key focus of the work is the evolution of pricing of water and sanitation as a political and governance issue as well as economic.

The authors review different approaches and perspectives that examine key urban water governance issues but primarily pull together water stories without imposing a model a priori. Their synthesis proposes that paths depend upon critical choices at certain tipping points and larger governance considerations beyond the water sector.