Water for All
The Effectiveness of Harnessing International Human Rights Across Regime Types in the Middle East
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Gunes Murat Tezcur, Bruce Wilson, Rebecca Schiel
Does the creation of new international human rights enhance the enjoyment of those rights among marginalized people? In this study, we examine the impact of the creation of an international human right to water and sanitation in 2010 on the marginalized peoples in nineteen countries of the Middle East that has home to a variety of regimes including electoral democracies, absolute monarchies, and single-party dictatorships. Has the right become an effective legal and/or political tool (Sikkink 2017) or just a meaningless parchment right (Posner 2014)? Our empirical strategy is twofold. First, we systematically analyze the constitutions and founding documents of the Middle East regimes and identify the clauses about the right to water as a human right. We then offer a general survey how these clauses are utilized by activists. Next, as an illustrative case study, we focus on politics of popular mobilization against the proliferation of hydropower plants in Turkey in the last fifteen years. We study how the activists utilized international treaties and national laws to claim access to water as a human right and the effectiveness of these strategies.
"But the Lagoon Water is Black" - Exploring Natural Sustainability Efforts of Water Levels in Lake Ontario: Political, Community, and Environmental Lessons from the North
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Evelyn Clark, Lisa M Glidden
In 2017 the International Joint Commission (IJC) implemented a December, 2016 order to allow the water levels of Lake Ontario to rise and fall more naturally by changing the management of the release of water to the Great Lakes. The purpose of the policy was to allow for more growth of natural wetland areas and to ease human intervention into water allocation. The implementation of the policy coincided with a higher than average rainy season which led to flooding and erosion of housing and recreation areas along the Ontario lake shore on both the Canada and US sides. This paper explores the policy implementation and its impact on various stakeholders and public opinion to better understand the danger of implementing sustainable ecosystem policies on an uninformed public sees itself as separate from the ecosystem. Through discourse analysis of local US and Canadian Newspaper coverage we examine how the policy was framed, how it was linked to various stakeholders, and how it was perceived as either a policy failure or natural occurrence. Our findings show implications on the importance of community scientific literacy and public education campaigns when implementing sustainability policies.
Discursive Hypoxia and (De)Weaponized Leadership in the Global South: Environmental Stewardship and the Land-ocean Divide
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Will McConnell, Eric Schockman
Multiple examples suggest that the privileging of land-based “first-world” strategies of economically-driven environmental modeling victimizes the peoples of the Global South, indirectly placing the oceans of the entire planet in peril. The International Maritime Organization (IMO) and regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs) along with a plethora of funding strategies from the Global Environmental Facility (GEF), the World Bank, UNEP, IPPC, etc. have received mixed reviews about their individual, let alone their collective, effectiveness. Furthermore, on a macro-political level, the rise of nation-state nativism has produced discursive fragmentation in formulating both a language and series of strategies as a common, effective environmental front. Through case study methodology that identifies the rapidly increasing rates of hypoxic (often referred to as “dead zones”) ocean areas as “canaries in the coal mine,” we will focus first on the emerging studies of hypoxic zones in both coastal waters and global oceans. We demonstrate the need for developing alternative strategies for increasing the coordination of effective approaches, both locally (Bay of Bengal) and globally, in the open ocean of the global south (across the tropical thermocline). Given the large populations in the global south who depend on ocean systems for survival, coordination of approaches to study impacts of deoxygenated zones are, thus, particularly necessary in these areas: we demonstrate the need for significant development of policy for dealing with the rapidly growing problem of deoxygenated areas in the global south and a more nuanced approach to designing marine protected areas (MPAs) as refugia during hypoxic events.
