A Starting Point: Understanding Governance, Good Governance and Water Governance

Abstract

Governance has been a widely and deeply discussed concept in the political sciences. As global freshwater resources have become increasingly degraded and impacts of climate change begin to take hold on local hydrological systems, scholars and practitioners have increasingly recognised a crisis of governance. This chapter presents a broad overview of governance theories and discusses the shifts from state centric notions of ‘government’ to a wider range of governance modes and types, as a way of contextualising the shift from a ‘command and control’ paradigm in water governance to more decentralised, integrated and flexible approaches.