Water-Worlds: How to Research Under the Umbrella of Sustainable Development Being Aware of Its Multiple Ambiguities?

Abstract

The United Nations definition of Agenda 2030 re-launched sustainable development as a planetary horizon for eradicating world poverty while at the same time preserving Earth life-support processes. Since the 90s many scholars, activists and politicians have critically assessed sustainable development and considered it an oxymoron in the context of current global capital accumulation. This paper takes the matter seriously and explores the limits and possibilities of researching water management towards Sustainable Development Goal 6: “Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all”. The analysis will touch upon three main fields of enquiry, namely the creation of a world water crisis regime, the encounter of diverse water ontologies while dealing with water management, and the raising of the human right to water and sanitation as a counter-point to the privatization of water resources. Sustainable development requires a stronger inclusion of human rights principles to become a more inspiring narrative for theoretical analysis and transformative interventions. It is argued that embedding sustainable development together with the political and cultural struggles of the human rights idiom, as exemplified in the case of the human right to water and sanitation, could provide a better framework to make sustainable development a useful tensional concept to reflect upon for building more equalitarian societies, and thus to care for life and the environment, within and outside universities.