About this Research Topic

Background

International declarations, including the 1970s UN Decade for Women, the 1980s UN Decade for Water, and the 1995 Beijing Conference World Conference on Women, stressed how "water matters significantly to women". Half a century on, women and girls still spend around 200 million hours every day collecting water for domestic use. This situation will continue. By 2030, billions of people will still lack access to domestic water. Women’s bodies will continue to bear the burdens of successive unmet development goals on the part of governments, and the international community.

Covid, climate and conflict challenges show women’s water responsibilities are diverse, complex, and contextual. A "women-and-domestic water supply" policy narrative persists in the absence of understanding of gendered inequalities, social exclusions and power in structures and cultures of water decision-making across institutions and dimensions of water use. As a result, women are occasionally and only peripherally engaged in politically relevant processes of water decision-making, and key water institutions and agendas remain mostly patriarchal, hierarchical, technocratic, and exclusionary by design. This signals the appropriation of local voices, the invisibility of embodied experiences of water insecurity, and the failure to achieve real change through systemic transformations in deep-rooted power, politics, masculinities, and water economics.

Is the water-gender discourse derailed, directionless, and ultimately unfit for purpose and impact? What will it take to achieve real change? Do we need a new feminist water politics to achieve real change, to tackle and disrupt the rules of the game on water and gender?

We invite new ideas and insights on these challenges as well as pathways to transformative change in dynamically evolving and increasingly complex water realities. We encourage contributions from diverse disciplines and lines of investigation to expose the entrenched entanglements of power, difference, and division in water politics, policies, institutions, interventions, and innovations, including in the development practice of "doing gender", as well as stories of change.

The questions to be addressed in this Research Topic are:

• What are embodied experiences of water insecurity amongst diverse and unequal groups of women across different ecologies, geographies, and polities?

• What are the dynamic links between natural systems (ecology, land, water) and gendered human activities across seasons and domains of production and reproduction?

• What are the implications of the above links for women’s work and time burdens as well as physical and emotional well-being in the face of water availability, access, quality, and stability constraints?

• How do we shift the focus from sectoral silos of "water and women" to capturing the systemic ways in which current realities shape the material, physical, as well as emotional experiences of vulnerability that women face in many different societal situations across interlinked systems of production, reproduction, the environment, urbanization, and growth?

• How can we tackle deep-rooted masculinities and patriarchies in the water sector and in sectors shaping water systems (e.g. energy, the environment, and agriculture)?

• What are the learnings from gendered responses to the differential impacts of climate change on the water sector?

• Can we re-imagine a new feminist water politics that seeks explicitly to decolonize overtly technocratic and capitalistic water agendas, challenge hydro-patriarchies, and fundamentally change how water-society-nature interventions work across societies and cultures?

This Research Topic invites feminist scholars, researchers, and activists from diverse disciplines and lines of investigation to expose the entrenched entanglements of power, difference, and division in water politics, policies, institutions, interventions, and innovations, including in the development practice of "doing gender." Possible themes could include:

• International women-water agendas: politics, policies, and patriarchies

• Gendered impacts of international and national policies on local practices

• Power, politics, economics, and top-down drivers of water and gender agendas

• Climate, water conflicts, intersectionality, and vulnerability

• Water-nature-society reciprocities through indigenous and feminist institutions

• Rules of the game: formal and informal water management

• Gendered impacts of water technologies

• Dynamic frameworks that assess the linkages between domestic and productive water security, gendered social relations, and the implications for health, nutrition, and wellbeing

• Theoretical and conceptual silos of looking at water, women, and gender

• Men, masculinities, and water

• Decolonizing the politics of water and gender narrative constructions and apolitical practices of doing "women, water, and gender"

• Citizen science: experiential narratives of women’s resistance and negotiations around technocratic and capitalistic water interventions.

Keywords: water policy, women and water, water inequality, water-gender discourse, social exclusion, water insecurity

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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