LIST OF PANELS

Cities in the developing countries of the Global South are struggling simultaneously with ‘brown’ issues like asymmetric access to clean water, sanitation, and drainage; ‘grey’ issues like river pollution, overdrawn groundwater, coastal degradation, and shrinking urban waterbodies; and ‘green’ issues like increasing per capita water demand and water scarcity. These developmental water challenges are further augmented by climate change making the cities highly vulnerable to various water-related disasters. The seasonal floods in Mumbai and Jakarta, severe droughts in Cape Town and Sao Paolo, depletion of groundwater aquifers in Mexico City, water shortages in Shenzhen, and all of them simultaneously in Dhaka are common occurrences now. 

The rapidly urbanizing cities in the Global South are mostly developing in an unplanned and unregulated manner making their governance challenging, including that of water resources. These cities are challenged by the complexity associated with population growth, climate change, socioeconomic, and environmental strains. Amidst this, the debates on urban water sustainability and resilience emphasize the dilemma between the policy and planning frameworks developed for the conventional centralized modes of urban water management dominant in the developed countries of Global North and their application to the prevailing mix of formal/informal, centralized/decentralized, and planned/ad-hoc modes of urban water management in most cities of Global South. The contemporary opinion is to use more complex frameworks, theories, and models to understand the challenges of an increasingly complex, interconnected, and uncertain world. Multiple new approaches are being developed, for example, polycentric governance (Ostrom 1990; 2010a; 2010b; Ostrom and Ostrom 2014; Ostrom 2005; McGinnis 1999); community natural resource management (Leach, Mearns, and Scoones 1999; Stephen R. Kellert 2000); distributed governance (Rogers and Hall 2003); multi-level governance (Blomquist 2009; Newig and Fritsch 2009); collaborative governance (Emerson, Nabatchi, and Balogh 2012); network governance (Jones, Hesterly, and Borgatti 1997; Provan and Kenis 2008; Ernstson et al. 2010); and adaptive governance (Folke et al. 2005; Pahl-Wostl 2009; Pahl-Wostl et al. 2012). Although some of these approaches have different foci, they all support the broader agenda of sustainability and resilience of social-ecological systems. 

With much of the water management and governance yet to be planned, the Global South’s growing cities' water challenges are an opportunity to leapfrog the conventional unsustainable norms. To do so, the urban water subject of Global South requires more investigation and engagement, including the contextualization of the borrowed frameworks and the application of new approaches. The aim of this panel is to share emerging frameworks, methodologies, applications, challenges, and best practices on urban water governance from the cities of the Global South. In the process, the objective is also to compile the water problems and solutions in the region to provide an overview for future discussions and policy decisions. 

The panel invites papers that have the potential to leapfrog from the ‘water resource development to ‘water resource conservation’ approach and thus open for novel urban water governance methods and frameworks. The objective is to initiate South-South cooperation and conversations with the scholars working on urban water planning, management, policy, and governance in the region to discuss questions pertaining to urban sustainability and resilience. Keeping the context of cities in the Global South as the focus, besides acknowledging the complexity around urban waters augmented with climate change, the panel invites papers from cross-cutting disciplines, sectors, and philosophies. With collaboration and interdisciplinary perspective as fundamental tenants to solving any water problem, the panel encourages scholars/practitioners from policy, administration, planning, architecture, engineering, management, governance, humanities, natural and social sciences to co-author/co-present comparative and cumulative studies. The papers may focus on, but are not limited to, one or more following topics in the context of cities in the developing countries of the Global South:  

− Water governance towards sustainability/resilience

− Sustainability of urban water systems

− Resilience of urban water systems

− Integrated urban water management

− Urban water security

− Urban water supply and demand management

− Urban stormwater management

− Nature-based solutions/Blue-green infrastructure

− Urban water ecosystem engineering, management, and restoration

− Water conservation, reuse, and recycling in cities

− Water education and awareness in the urban population

− Capacity building of urban institutions

− Urban Flood control and disaster management

− Groundwater protection

− Public participation, consensus building, and confidence building

− Commercialization of water

− Formalizing the informal water sector in cities

− Water quality protection

− Technological-digital innovations and applications for urban waters