My latest paper has just come out in the journal Environmental Values, co-written with Dan Shrubsole: “Modern water ethics: implications for shared governance – full reference here or on my ‘publications’ page.
This essay formed the literature review for my dissertation so, as you might expect, it has a lot of references to the literature on water ethics. Some recent ones are missing, since the piece was submitted in 2011.
Here is the editor’s intro to the essay followed by the abstract. If you’d like a copy of this paper (or any of my papers) I’d be happy to send one.
“Schmidt and Shrubsole (2013) argue that the early creators of United States’ water policy saw their policies as an expression of the success of European civilisation. On this view, U.S. utilitarian approaches to water policy should not be seen as attempts to be ‘value neutral’, but rather as attempts to promote a certain set of ethnocentric values.
It has been suggested that water and social values were divorced in modernity. This paper argues otherwise. First, it demonstrates the historical link between ethics and politics using the case of American water governance. It engages theories regarding state-centric water planning under ‘high modernism’ and the claim that water was seen as a neutral resource that could be objectively governed. By developing an alternate view from the writings of early American water leaders, J.W. Powell and W.J. McGee, the paper offers a way to understand the project of state-centred governance without the claim that water falls to the latter half of a society/nature dualism. Second, the paper reviews how the emerging ‘water ethics’ discourse helps organise both the ethical and legal norms at play within contemporary political shifts towards decentralised governance. The review identifies how McGee’s early influence may warrant more attention, both in terms of water governance and environmental ethics. The paper concludes by arguing that, given the arguments presented, success in decentralising water governance turns not only on political considerations, but also on fairly ordering normative claims as part of fostering and extending the reach of coordinated water governance.
the anthropo.scene 