The Global Politics of Water Grabbing
Open accessAbstract
The contestation and appropriation of water is not new, but it has been highlighted by recent global debates on land grabbing. Water grabbing takes place in a field that is locally and globally plural-legal. Formal law has been fostering both land and water grabs but formal water and land management have been separated from each other—an institutional void that makes encroachment even easier. Ambiguous processes of global water and land governance have increased local-level uncertainties and complexities that powerful players can navigate, making them into mechanisms of exclusion of poor and marginalised people. As in formal land management corporate influence has grown. For less powerful players resolving ambiguities in conflicting regulatory frameworks may require tipping the balance towards the most congenial. Yet, compared with land governance, global water governance is less contested from an equity and water justice perspective, even though land is fixed, while water is fluid and part of the hydrological cycle; therefore water grabbing potentially affects greater numbers of diverse water users. Water grabbing can be a powerful entry point for the contestation needed to build counterweights to the neoliberal, corporate business-led convergence in global resource governance discourses and processes. Elaborating a human right to water in response to water grabbing is urgently needed.
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Research on land grabbing soon began to focus on conservation, biofuels and sustainable development projects, eventually extending to dams, solar energy, wind turbines and marine territories.
“This research soon began to focus on conservation, biofuels and sustainable development projects (Fairhead et al., 2012; Corson et al., 2013; Rocheleau, 2015; Núñez et al. 2022), eventually extending to dams (Franco et al., 2013; Zerrouk, 2013), solar energy (Siamanta, 2017; Stock & Birkenholtz, 2019; Avila, et al., 2022; Tornel, 2023b, this Section), wind turbines (Dunlap, 2019a, 2017; Avila, 201”
From The political ecologies of "green" extractivism(s): An introduction (2024) · cites this paper as Franco et al., 2013
Franco et al. is cited specifically for the extension of this research to dams. The passages available from our copy contain bibliographic metadata but no discussion of dams; searches for dams and hydropower returned no relevant passage. The claim cannot be verified from our copy. (LLM, conf=0.72)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Cited by
Sorted by citations
The political ecologies of "green" extractivism(s): An introduction
Dunlap, A., Verweijen, J., & Tornel, C. (2024) · Journal of Political Ecology · doi:10.2458/jpe.6131 · Cited by 126 · see citing works
“…sustainable development projects (Fairhead et al. , 2012; Corson et al. , 2013; Rocheleau, 2015; Núñez et al. 2022), eventually extending to dams (Franco et al. , 2013; Zerrouk, 2013), solar energy (Siamanta, 2017; Stock & Birkenholtz, 2019; Avila, et al. , 2022; Tornel, 2023b, this Section),…”
- Authors
- Franco, J., Mehta, L., & Veldwisch, G. J.
- Affiliations
- China Agricultural University (CN)
- Corresponding author
- Franco, Jennifer
- Venue
- Third World Quarterly
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2013-10
- Volume
- 34
- Issue
- 9
- Pages
- 1651-1675
- ISSN
- 0143-6597 (ISSN-L)
- 1360-2241
- OpenAlex
- W2135127949
- Cited by
- 147
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 11 · 2025: 12 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 15 · 2022: 10 · 2021: 9 · 2020: 7 · 2019: 10 · 2018: 14 · 2017: 13 · 2016: 14 · 2015: 16 · 2014: 8
- FWCI
- 74.93
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- research.wur.nl
- Locations
- Third World Quarterly (publishedVersion)
- Socio-Environmental Systems Modeling (acceptedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- OpenDocs (Institute of Development Studies) (submittedVersion)
- Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Water Governance and Infrastructure
- Social Sciences › Law › Water Resources and Governance
- Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › General Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development
- Keywords
- water grabbing, land grabbing, global water governance, water justice, right to water, corporate influence, neoliberalism, natural resource governance, water equity, water cycle
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
