Irrelevant economics: The water pricing and pollution charging debate

Conventional economic appraisals of the water industry have concentrated on economic efficiency defined almost entirely in allocative terms, the key issues being the efficiency with which available water resources are allocated between users and with which factors of production are invested in new facilities. Since marginal cost pricing has been viewed as the mechanism theoretically capable of bringing about optimality in resource allocation, assessments of water industry practices have all too often been reduced to reiteration of the extent to which current pricing practices diverge from the theoretical optima. This paper, based on empirical work on water suppliers in both Britain and Australia, questions the relevance of this conventional approach.First, it is argued that the concentration on allocative efficiency has diverted attention from the equally crucial issue of whether the industry is efficient in managerial, technical and product terms. Since technological efficiency must exist in an industry before a Pareto optimal allocation of resources can occur, the presupposition, in papers which argue that the introduction of optimal pricing rules will ensure allocative efficiency, must be that the industry is already producing an appropriate product using least cost production methods. No such presupposition can be made in an industry where the profit motive and competitive forces do not operate.Second, it is argued that optimal pricing policies can only produce optimal resource allocations if consumers act in a prescribedly rational way to the prices set. Although it is well known that ‘second-best’ pricing rules may be needed to counter inefficient conditions prevailing in other sectors of the economy, the effect of market imperfec- tions on the way consumers react to prices has been less well analysed. Using results from a study of firms' reactions to trade effluent charges, it is shown that the structure of companies and the way they operate their revenue and capital budgets may severely limit the effectiveness of the price mechanism in ensuring allocative efficiency.Finally, the paper considers the ‘equity’ with which the costs of water services are distributed between consumers. Once again it is argued that the issue has been neglected since the distribution of income is irrelevant to the achievement of allocative optimality in Paretian terms. Evidence is presented that contradicts the popular myth that, although current pricing arrangements may be less than efficient, they are at least ‘broadly fair’. It is shown that, in practice, price discrimination against low income consumers is widespread, and this can hardly be regarded as equitable, whatever definition of equity is used.     

Regional policy in Cameroon: The case of planning without facts

Cameroon's economic development is without doubt a story of success. Since independence, the country has been favoured by internal and external advantages but, as in most African countries south of the Sahara, the results of regional development policies — in spite of an existing and sound planning structure — are disappointing. Cameroon was always well-provided with the now fashionable ‘integrated’, ‘basic need-oriented’, ‘bottom-up’ and ‘development-from-within’ regional policy programmes. In discussing such a programme and proposing elements of a modified development strategy, it can, however, be argued that even the first step of creating a basic regional development project has been far from satisfactory. Further, in spite of government rhetoric, no regional development policy as normally defined exists. What does exist are regional effects of development projects. This prompts the question of whether it may be preferable to replace the term ‘regional development policy’, and to return to a ‘regionally based, comprehensively planned, project policy’, based on facts which first have to be collected and analysed.     

Ecological modernization and water resource management: a critique of institutional transitions in Ghana

Ghana is endowed with surface and ground water resources. These resources prior to the colonial era were managed by traditional societies through various conventional methods embedded in their cosmovision. However during the colonial and postcolonial regimes, in response to climate change, economic globalization, and population pressure, there has been a conscious shift from customary water management systems towards paradigms cast in the contemporary mould (legislation, policies, and institutions). These modern approaches have been shown over the years to be insufficient in ensuring water sustainability. This insufficiency manifests itself in the increasing water scarcity through anthropogenic-induced water resources degradation and severe climatic variability. Using content analysis, this paper reviews this transition, first to fully understand the intricacies of the evolution and second to draw lessons for better water resources management in Ghana. This paper contends that although Ghana’s water related institutions, laws, and policies are undergoing significant reforms, implementation and practice remains embedded in weak ecological modernization (EM). Institutionalizing a narrow conception of EM will only perpetuate ‘organized irresponsibility’ and permit the continued production of ecological problems, leaving open the question of whether modernization is compatible with ecological sustainability. Though customary water management approaches are not entirely devoid of limitations, simply branding them as obsolete may obviate an important vehicle for water sustainability. In the spirit paradigmatic complementarity, ecosystem-friendly indigenous approaches must be integrated with contemporary management systems for the long term goal of sustainability.     

Dispossessing irrigators: Water grabbing,supply-side growth and farmer resistance in India

This paper examines, first, the conditions under which irrigating farmers are being alienated from their water through a state-led process of dispossession, and then, second, details the dialectical process of farmers’ resistance to these efforts. The paper advances recent scholarship on water grabbing and ‘accumulation by dispossession’ by drawing on a case from northwestern India to explore the connections between non-agrarian economic growth, irrigated agriculture and farmer livelihoods. Specifically, it examines an urban water infrastructure development project that aims to provide water to Jaipur, the Indian state of Rajasthan’s capital city, through the appropriation of an existing rural dam/reservoir complex built for irrigation and redirecting it to domestic, commercial and industrial uses. Drawing on an examination of policy documents and interviews with farmers and state planners, this paper argues that these transfers must be understood as a supply-side solution to support economic growth, where the lack of stable water supplies is a barrier to capital accumulation. The paper contributes to critical scholarship by showing that the processes underpinning water’s reallocation are specific acts of ongoing ‘dispossession’ through extra-economic means under advanced neoliberal capitalism, which alienates water away from peasant producers towards new centers of capital accumulation, dialectically creating peasant resistance to these efforts.     

以色列依靠科技创新走出缺水困境的经验

以色列地处中东,降雨稀少且分布不均,天然淡水资源短缺。为解决这一困境,以色列自1948年建国后就一直致力于发展水资源高效利用技术,在水资源生产、运输、回收等领域研发出诸多领先全球的新技术。经过多年努力,该国从一个缺水的国家成为高效用水的农业大国,甚至被誉为“欧洲国家的菜篮子”。文章首先介绍了以色列的地理气候情况和水资源类型,然后介绍了水资源利用结构,最后列举了以色列在解决水资源危机时发展的6项创新技术。文章可为我国水资源高效利用与管理提供借鉴,同时也可为今后我国与以色列开展水资源方面的相关合作及学术研究提供基础资料。     

Natural resources as national fantasies

The development of agriculture is recognised to be an essential preliminary and on-going element in the economic development strategies of most developing countries. The contribution of agricultural production to gross domestic product, food self-sufficiency and export income are amongst the major development goals exercising the governments of such countries. In addition, in many countries the agricultural sector is regarded as one with a potential for generating a surplus to sustain other economic activities and to have an important stabilising role in reducing the movement of population from rural areas. This article discusses renewable natural resources, soil and water, as the basis for agricultural development and especially of irrigated farming. A number of case studies will be referred to which illustrate the idea that many national governments attribute quite unreal qualities to soil and water resources. Once development schemes were launched appropriate rhetoric was mobilised to invest the reclamation of ‘virgin lands’ and ‘new lands’, with the character of ‘green revolutions’. These ventures have been sustained not because of their success but because the ‘fantasies’ have been circulated amongst ill-formed urban populations, remote from the arduous realities of land reclamation. Case studies in the Soviet Union and the Middle East are discussed.     

The inner city: In search of the problem

This paper explores the theoretical content of the inner-city debate in Britain and seeks to examine the extent to which the ‘problem’ is either new or primarily economic. It is argued that the inner-city issue, while subject to specific political and ideological forces, is associated with the general processes of uneven capitalist development. In this sense, metropolitan decline is a further manifestation of the relationship between the built environment, the transience of economic activity and social change. More specifically the decline of the inner city relates to the incipient role of Britain in the development of capitalism and its current position in the world economy. The emergence of this as a ‘problem’ for the British state is combined with a convenient spatial determinism, which isolates the inner city as an anomaly even as the search for palliatives is erected to the status of a major social task.     

Why data for a political-industrial ecology of cities?

Despite our declared era of ‘Big Data,’ we lack information on the flows of energy, water, and materials that support modern societies. These data are essential to understand how ecologies and the labor of people in far flung places supply urban areas, as well as how these resource flows are used by whom, where, and for what purpose. Like other places, the state of California is struggling with issues of data privacy and access. Water scarcity and the state’s commitments to greenhouse gas emission (GHG) mandates raise the issue of consumption and the unequal burdens that derive from it. These mandates have unveiled the lack of comparable and verifiable data to understand crucial production-consumption dynamics. This paper illustrates how spatially-explicit big data can be harnessed to delineate an urban political-industrial ecology of resource flows. Based on research using address-level energy and water use consumption data for Los Angeles County, the analysis reveals how the region’s wealthy residents use a disproportionate share of the water and energy resources. The paper also identifies structural obstacles to increasing fees and taxes or altering property rights that would reduce this consumption and foster more equitable resource use. This study has implications for theory, method, and policy related to urban sustainability, which is unobtainable without first unraveling the political-industrial ecology of the material basis of urbanization processes.     

Data on thrusting and metamorphism in the eastern Sierra de los Filabres: Higher Nevado — Filabride units and the glaucophanitic greenschist facies

Data are presented which make it possible to complete the alpine deformation scheme in the rocks of the eastern Sierra de los Filabres (southeast Spain). The deformation schemes of the basal part and cover of the Nevado—Filabride complex have been compared in order to establish the possible existence of a pre-alpine regional metamorphism. It is further argued that the first alpine kinematic metamorphism in the Nevado-Filabride rocks has not taken place under typical HP-LT conditions. Evidence is given to show that the ‘late’ thrust masses — distinguished by H.W. Voet (1967) — should be considered as distinct tectonic units whereby the Nevado—Filabride rocks are grouped together in the ‘higher Nevado-Filabride units’.     

Regional geography considered from the systems' approach

The main critiques of the term ‘region’ were directed in the 1950s against the ‘uniqueness’ of the region: being not repetitive, it was considered not to be of general value. In the author's opinion the term ‘uniqueness’ was misinterpreted: a region is made unique by the unique relationship between natural, cultural, economic, political and social elements existing in it. However, as these relationships are repetitive, or some at least can be repeated, regional geography is of general value. If the geographical study of a region invests its efforts and interests in functions, processes and relationships between the elements existing in a region, the concept of a region becomes, in fact, a concept of a system, with epistemological and methodolgical consequences. A model of ‘region as a system’ is the approach taken in this paper. Such an approach can resolve some basic problems of geography: the dichotomy between natural and anthropic elements of the region, which cannot be treated except by a systems approach; the tension existing between ‘space’ and ‘place’, which is perpetuated by the dichotomy between regional and systematic geography. Through a systems approach, the choice of a scale appropriate to a particular study can be directed by a distinction between system and subsystem; inclusion or exclusion of an element in the study of a region is not an arbitrary one, but depends on its relevance to the processes within the region. Perhaps the ‘personality of the region’, so often misinterpreted by scorners of regional geography, can be accepted as a legitimate part of the regional output.     

Improving school children’s understanding of water scarcity with a co-produced book on groundwater in Central Chile

Water scarcity is a critical issue worldwide, and Chile is no exception. Since 2010, Central Chile has been enduring an ongoing water crisis due to the coupled effects of a severe drought and the overuse of water resources, especially groundwater. Rural communities have been strongly impacted, mainly because wells from which drinking water is supplied show a dramatic drop in water levels, and some have even dried up. The water scarcity scenario requires the integration of actors and disciplines to increase awareness of groundwater; however, how to make this valuable element visible in society is an issue that remains open to debate. This paper describes and reflects on the process of making educational material about groundwater and water scarcity for children to promote public awareness. Based on transdisciplinary and co-designing processes, this work describes the social perceptions of groundwater among children and community leaders, as well as how scientific information and local knowledge of water scarcity could be integrated into a book for the young population. This research finds that educational projects on groundwater resources increase people’s awareness of the role of this hidden resource in the water cycle. Such projects encourage the creation of grounded and contextualised materials that incorporate the knowledge and experience already present in the communities, increasing public awareness of the role of groundwater and associated water scarcity issues, thereby integrating academia and society. This approach could be a tool to lay the foundations for successfully addressing the water crisis in Chile over generations.

     

Hummocky cross-stratification, tropical hurricanes, and intense winter storms

Duke (1985b) argues that ‘most examples (of hummocky cross-stratification) were formed by tropical hurricanes.’ His statement is based on the assumption that ‘hurricane-generated surface gravity waves form powerful oscillating or multidirectional flows at the water-sediment interface which do not possess a significant unidirectional component.’ It is true, as one of us has previously stated, that hurricanes are rapidly-moving, short-lived, localized, and infrequent systems as compared with mid-latitude storms; midlatitude storms are consequently more efficient in coupling with the shelf water-column than are hurricanes. However, Duke's argument that hummocky cross-stratification may be the result of purely oscillatory flow is untenable. His reasoning contradicts established theory about oscillatory bedforms, and his numerous examples of hummocky cross-stratification come largely from continental shelf settings where the storms (tropical or otherwise) would have created concurrent alongshelf undirectional flow as well as wave oscillatory motion. There is no theoretical or observational basis for the belief that water movement on the sea-floor during hurricanes is qualitatively different from water movement during mid-latitude storms. Consequently, hummocks are no more liable to form beneath hurricanes than they are beneath mid-latitude storms.     

An evaluation of CM patterns for grain-size studies of fine grained sediments

Grain-size data of Boom clay (Belgium) are represented on CM, AM, LM diagrams as suggested by Passega. They show a typical ‘uniform suspension’ pattern. It is argued that a ‘uniform suspension’ pattern can be due simply to the clay-rich nature of the sediments. As these sediments are not deposited by a single transport mechanism, the ‘uniform suspension’pattern does not necessarily indicate a specific transport mechanism.     

Seeing the Copperbelt: Science,mining and colonial power in Northern Rhodesia

This article explores the relationship between science and the extension of colonial power through an examination of the rise of the Northern Rhodesian (later, Zambian) Copperbelt in the 1930s. The rise of the Copperbelt rested in part on scientific prospecting operations perhaps unparalleled in size and scope in the world at the time. These operations brought new ‘scientific’ prospecting techniques to the area which enabled the Northern Rhodesian subsurface to be ‘seen’ in new ways. The seemingly universal and fixed knowledge scientists produced served both political and commercial aims, animating the ‘civilising’ project of imperial power and transforming a newly acquired territory into a profitable annex to empire. Two prospecting operations are explored in detail: (1) the first large concession floated as the Rhodesian Congo Border Concession and (2) the first attempt to use geological science to generate a complete geological map of mineral resources on the Copperbelt in the Nkana Concession. Examining the efforts of these two prospecting operations reveals the methodological, theoretical and epistemological challenges of producing a viable mineral investment and practicing science in the periphery. Finally, the disconnects between the logics and goals of science and those of colonial extraction in Africa are explored. Here it is argued that it was the very malleability of the knowledge produced by European scientists, rather than its abstract fixity or placeless universality, that enabled it to become part of wider political and economic flows.     

Situating the geographies of injustice in democratic theory

Post-Marxist and poststructuralist ontologies of the political have been important reference points for recent discussions of democracy in critical human geography and related fields. This paper considers the conceptual placement of contestation in a strand of democratic theory often denigrated by these approaches, namely theories of deliberative democracy informed by post-Habermasian Critical Theory. It is argued that this concern with contestation derives from a focus on the relationships between different rationalities of action. It is proposed that this tradition of thought informs a distinctively phenomenological approach to understanding the situations out of which democratic energies emerge. In elaborating on this phenomenological understanding of the emergence of political space, the paper proceeds in three stages. First, it is argued that the strong affinities between ontological conceptualisations of ‘the political’ and the ontological register of canonical spatial theory squeezes out any serious consideration of the plural rationalities of ordinary political action. Second, debates between deliberative and agonistic theorists of democracy are relocated away from questions of ontology. These are centred instead on disputed understandings of ‘normativity’. This move opens up conceptual space for the analysis of phenomenologies of injustice. Third, using the example of debates about transnational democracy in which critical theorists of deliberative democracy explicitly address the reconfigurations of the space of ‘the political’, it is argued that this Critical Theory tradition can contribute to a distinctively ‘topological’ sense of political space which follows from thinking of political action as emerging from worldly situations of injustice. In bringing into focus this phenomenological approach to political action, the paper has lessons for both geographers and political theorists. Rather than continuing to resort to a priori models of what is properly political or authentically democratic, geographers would do well to acknowledge the ordinary dynamics and disappointments which shape political action. On the other hand, political theorists might do well to acknowledge the limits of the ‘methodological globalism’ that characterises so much recent work on the re-scaling of democracy.     

Measurement of pressure drop in drainage boreholes and its effects on the performance of coal seam gas extraction: a case study in the Jiulishan Mine with strong coal and gas outburst dangers

Although it is a well-accepted belief in the petroleum industry that horizontal well productivity can be limited by the pressure drop within the wellbore, little has been reported regarding how this pressure drop affects gas extraction from a coal seam and its further effects on mitigating coal and gas outburst dangers in coal. One of the major reasons for this scarcity is that the pressure-drop distribution in horizontal drainage boreholes is difficult to obtain. In this study, measurements of pressure drops in 54 drainage boreholes were performed in the No. 2₁ coal seam, which is the primary mining layer of Jiulishan Mine and poses a strong danger of coal and gas outbursts. Next, a coupled governing finite-element model, which includes the pressure drop in the borehole, Darcy flow in fractures, gas diffusion in the matrix blocks, and the dynamic evolution of the permeability of coal, was developed and implemented using a finite-element method to quantify the pressure-drop effects. Field tests of the pressure drops indicate that the pressure increases in a parabolic form with the increasing depth of the borehole, and lower outer end pressure is associated with larger pressure increments. The numerical results indicate that the pressure drop does affect the coal seam gas extraction, the pressure around the borehole increases with increasing borehole depth, and the increment of the pressure becomes larger when the borehole’s drainage effect is enhanced. However, the impact is small and can be ignored in engineering.     

Artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) in sub-Saharan Africa: Re-conceptualizing formalization and ‘illegal’ activity

This article contributes to the debate on the formalization of artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) – low-tech, labour-intensive mineral extraction and processing – in developing countries. A unique sector populated by an eclectic group of individuals, ASM has expanded rapidly in all corners of the world in recent years. Most of its activities, however, are informal, scattered across lands which are not officially titled. But growing recognition of the sector's economic importance, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, has forced donors, and to some extent, policymakers, to ‘rethink’ development strategies for ASM. As part of broader moves to improve the regulation of, and occasionally intensify the delivery of assistance to, the sector, many are now searching frantically for fresh ideas on how to bring operations into the legal domain, where, it is believed, they can be regulated, monitored and supported more effectively. A challenging exercise, this entails first determining, with some degree of precision, why people choose to operate informally in this sector. Drawing on analysis from the literature and findings from research conducted in Ghana and Niger, it is argued that the legalist school (on informality) in part explains how governments across sub-Saharan Africa are ‘creating’ bureaucracies which are stifling the formalization of ASM activities in the region. A more nuanced development strategy grounded in local realities is needed if formalization is to have a transformative effect on the livelihoods of those engaged in ASM in the region and elsewhere in the developing world.