LIST OF PANELS

Specific public policy frames shape water governance, policy designs, and determine policy choices. These considerations shape decision-making for managing the landscape, water quality, food production, and are undertaken at multiple levels.  The management of water in its many dimensions must consider a range of valuations that are based on economic value, social and human value, administrative enforcement, legal substantiation, and political considerations. Public policy provides the necessary framing for identifying and evaluating such valuations. Policy choices depend on how policy frames prioritize various stakeholders' motives in designing solutions. The manner in which different stakeholders in governments and societies address water has become more significant with growing scarcity, competing usages, and distributive challenges due to climate change. It becomes even more pressing to analyse the different public policy frameworks adopted by states, cities, and varied local contexts. For instance, states would like to enhance their share of water rights, municipalities would prefer financial sustainability, and local contexts would try to address challenges of extreme climate fluctuations - increasing aridity and flooding - that they are impacted by. Such public policy frames shape policy responses, policy designs, and decision-making.  A perspective that centers policy frames adds value to our discussion on water governance, for it identifies the path of policy choices that emerge from these frames. Various governance decisions vary across states and societies concerning the organization of extraction, provision, financing, use, distribution, and disposal of water. 

Examining these policy frames would create the crucial policy question of how different responses on account of a range of actors — government organisations, community organisations, and companies — can collectively address climate-induced considerations. An appreciation of varying policy frames and their paths to mitigate the effects of climate change could lead to developing new policy perspectives that attempt to harmonize the existing competing frames.

A second research question is how to identify the knowledge held by each of these actors regarding the forms and processes of power and politics in shaping water governance. This makes framing public policy design and policy choices explicit to address the production and reproduction of class, gender, ethnic, and political inequalities in water access and usage. These themes are relevant when many states, cities, and local contexts have insufficient water for all usages, including food production, municipal services, and biodiversity conservation. Water quality is also threatened by intensive land use and industrial and domestic wastewater production. Consequently, addressing research questions regarding the framing of public policy around different responses and types of knowledge will be necessary to manage disputes between stakeholders with diverging interests. The answers to the research questions will also make explicit the differences in institutional, economic, geographic, ideological and social positions on the valuation of water.

Thirdly, it will show the relationship between water decisions and governance and the imaginaries, narratives, and values identified by different agents and stakeholders from various perspectives, case studies, and contexts. 

This panel seeks to understand policy frames of policy designs; knowledge bases with their critiques and contestations; analyse innovative governance solutions around water in specific climate impacted contexts; while highlighting the emerging intersectionality that brings convergences in interactions between the state, corporates and civil society. These challenges require the collation of investigations by interdisciplinary contributors. The panel brings together researchers who document the policy dynamics and interactions between water, governments, and societies. Within this framework our call for papers encourages submissions along the following strands but is not restricted to papers in these research areas from the developed and developing countries:

• Supply and demand-driven policy initiatives that focus on macro or local contexts of understanding policy frames, water governance, and policy choices.
• Policy analysis that intersects with sustaining livelihoods and seeking to secure rights to water for socially marginalised and vulnerable sections including children, gender, caste, and indigeneity.
• Conceptual issues in policy framing around valuations, power and politics, and contestations due to climate-induced vulnerabilities.
• Trade policies, incentives, and structures that incentivise or disincentivise the virtual export of water.
• Interactions that make visible the policy and political dimensions of hydraulic infrastructures (wells, boreholes, dams, irrigation networks, etc), and/or their intersections with social infrastructures.
• Different technologies of valuation, and the role of socio-technical devices (meters, models, standards, etc.) that mediate between water, state and societies.
• An analysis of ethical and social values, how water is incorporated into different social systems, including the economic, ideological and philosophical roles of water in society.
• Impact, including differential impact, of water concerns such as scarcity, pollution and floods in cities/regions, including analysis of adaptations and governance responses.
• Emerging and innovative evidence of water management, including biotic, abiotic, ethnographic and archaeological data and their spatial patterns.
• The role of knowledge of traditional and sustainable water management in local communities, and interpretations of this feature by different stakeholders.
• A critical examination of modernist water pricing, efficiency and productivity paradigms.
• Cases/models that show how technological and institutional innovations proposed by public policy design are associated with different ways of knowing and relating to water translates to other ways of governing water.
• Cases/models of how territorial notions and alternative ways of knowing nature and rivers influence stakeholder valuation of water and impact their stance on the role of state/collective policy makings.
• Analysis of cases where modern technology has distanced societies, in some cases, from water or analysis of cases where modern technology has facilitated new solutions that promote efficient and novel conservation methods to improve water quality and monitoring.
• Emerging alternative models by small-holder farmers in managing local water systems and the associated ontologies of water.