The new Handbook of Gender and Water Governance
Tatiana Acevedo-Guerrero, Lisa Bossenbroek, Irene Leonardelli, Margreet Zwarteveen, and Seema Kulkarni edited the newly published Routledge Handbook of Gender and Water Governance, which will be launched at IHE Delft on Friday 8 of November.
We – the editors of the book and authors of this blog post – are thrilled to launch the “Routledge Handbook of Gender and Water Governance”, which is just out and available to order as Hardback or Ebook on the publisher’s website, or in Open Access. The handbook is the fruit of a long and ongoing process of joint learning about the multiple connections between gender and water through several action-research projects and teaching activities. It is also the fruit of shared concerns about the lack of equity and sustainability of prevailing water-related developments, rights, and distributions, accompanied by the hope that a feminist lens on water may offer refreshing glimpses to enhance more sustainable water futures.
The book project started in 2020 and one of our guidelines was not to create another standard handbook consisting of “must-read” texts and authors or to provide a curated introduction to key concepts and theories. Instead, we wanted to invite different inspiring students, researchers, activists, practitioners, journalists (with no clear boundaries between these terms), of different backgrounds, ages, and experiences, and from different places around the world with whom we had learned together along our long research-activist water journey, to contribute. And this is what we did. By weaving voices, methods, positionalities, and theories together without imposing a singular, cohesive framework, our handbook evokes Ursula Le Guin’s carrier bag theory of fiction. In her 1980s essay, Le Guin advocates for shifting away from hero-focused tales of action and triumph — often centered around phallocentric symbols like spears and linear narratives of conquest — toward ‘carrier bag’ stories that emphasize containment, receptivity, and sharing.
The theoretical and analytical diversity of the chapters invites the exploration of new water futures while remaining firmly grounded in the everyday experiences of communities. All contributors draw on a range of research methods, such as photovoice elicitation, life histories, storytelling, creative drawings, focus groups, and surveys. The book hopes to incite the readers’ curiosity when they immerse themselves in these specific water stories and contexts.
The handbook builds on a rich legacy of feminist water/irrigation scholarship. It is inspired by early gender and water studies that started in the 1980s to respond to the gender-blindness of irrigation and drinking water schemes, especially in the global South. Gender specialists and feminist scholars criticized these projects for overlooking prevailing gender relations and inequalities regarding access, use, control, and knowledge of water. These projects marginalized women by not acknowledging them as important water actors – irrigators, farmers – and by failing to recognize their work around water (such as fetching water, cleaning, washing, cooking, bathing children, and irrigating). Women were also often left out of or silenced in formal decision-making bodies, including water committees and irrigation associations.
Gradually, feminist scholarship has expanded beyond highlighting inequalities around water, or arguments for also recognizing the importance of women’s practices and experiences. Increasingly, feminist methodological and analytical tools are also mobilized to question the very logic of water projects and the kinds of development these support, and to propose alternative ways to know, organize, distribute and manage waters. Today, the community of gender and feminist water scholars is enormously diverse and continues growing, demonstrating that feminism in water is alive. It also continues to be very much needed. Ongoing neo-liberal reforms unleash forms of privatization and commercialization of water, both in agriculture as well as in urban areas, that often have detrimental effects on (gender-)equity in access, use, and control of water resources. Climate change, along with the increased awareness of the precarity and finality of water resources, and the loss of biodiversity are further increasing the urgency to re-think ‘(water)development-as-usual’ and the inequalities that it continues to reproduce.
In different ways, feminist scholars – including ecofeminists, feminist political ecologists, and hydrofeminists – continue to demonstrate how the ability of some to access water or accumulate land- and water rights, or to protect themselves against different water-related disasters, often happens at the expense of others. They show how the distribution of water benefits, burdens and risks happens through deeply gendered and racialized institutional structures and ideologies. Feminists also keep questioning how voice and authority in water, like in the context of many other socio-ecological issues, continue to be defined in masculine and Western terms.
The book provides a clear testimony of how feminist engagements with water provide multiple tools, methods and imaginaries that can be mobilized to pry open, critically reflect, and formulate alternatives to water development-as-usual. Indeed, feminist engagements in and around water are about more than making sure that water policies and projects also benefit women or contribute to gender equality. They are for instance also about (re-)appreciating the importance of the work of caring that is often done by women, or about learning different ways of knowing and protecting water, using it frugally, and sharing it fairly.
This handbook, then, is a collection of reflections and studies that can be used as a prismatic lens into a thriving and ever proliferating array of feminist water studies. It is organized in five interconnected sections: 1) Positionality and embodied waters; 2) Revisiting water debates: diplomacy, security, justice, and heritage; 3) Sanitation stories; 4) Precarious livelihoods; 5) New feminist futures. Each of the sections brings out the gendered nature of water, shedding light on the often-neglected care and unpaid labour of women and its relationship with extractivism and socioeconomic inequalities. One thread that connects most chapters in the handbook is the need for forging emotional connections with the more-than-human world, recognising this as critical for bringing about a transformative change. Another thread that weaves some chapters together entails the intricate interrelationship between water governance and gendered bodies. Some chapters in the handbook bring the readers back to where feminist scholars started forty years ago: women’s access to water and their burdens due to its lack. From countries in the Global North, like the USA and Canada to countries in the Global South such as Mozambique and Colombia, the question of poor access to water and the disproportionate burden this puts on women highlights the failure of the privatisation model and the withdrawal of the state from welfare provisioning.
The Table of contents, accessible here, gives you a more specific idea of the many different themes, places, waters, and contributors that you will find in the book. We hope that the book will contribute to open up the field of feminist water studies, providing new insights, ideas, alliances, and energies to ongoing struggles against enduring forms of marginalization, exclusion, and oppression, as well as yielding new inspirations for imagining and enacting more just and sustainable water futures.
Thanks to generous financial contributions from the WEGO programme (thanks Wendy Harcourt!), the DUPC 2 programme (thanks Wim Douven!) and IHE Delft Open Access fund (thanks Loes Westerveen!) – the Routledge Handbook of Gender and Water Governance is now available Open Access at this link!
Note: This piece draws from the “Introduction: A carrier bag for gender and feminist water research” of the Routledge Handbook of Gender and Water Governance, written by Tatiana Acevedo-Guerrero, Lisa Bossenbroek, Irene Leonardelli, Margreet Zwarteveen and Seema Kulkarni.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Tatiana Acevedo Guerrero (November 7, 2024). The new Handbook of Gender and Water Governance. FLOWs. Retrieved June 20, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/12mz9