Water and Gender
Special Issue of Rural Society
Volume 18 Issue 3 December 2008
ii+110 pages ISBN 978-1-921348-11-2
Editor:
Kathleen Bowmer
Charles Sturt University, NSW
This special issue of Rural Society on Water Policy and Gender is critical and timely. Already an estimated one billion people are short of safe water supplies for drinking and basic life needs and it is foreshadowed that lack of access to clean reliable freshwater will be the world's greatest threat in the 21st century. In many cultures men and women are affected differently by these challenges, so gender ought to be explicit in designing policy, aid, communication and education programmes.
However, authors from Malawi, China, India, Kenya and Uganda highlight the struggle of rural women to access water and the disturbing gap between government policy and on-ground reality. It seems that inequity in representation and decision-making is still a major problem in the developing world.
Australian authors, as might be expected, were more concerned with gender differences relating to quality of life and dealing with the current drought. They report on the cultural values of water, risk perception and water quality, opportunities for water recycling, and methods for analysing gender differences in domestic water use. They also describe the challenges of dealing with powerful interests and the suppression of women's voices. They support a broader range of social and cultural approaches to water policy, beyond utilitarian economic considerations.
In spite of international consensus and agreements achieved at numerous well-intentioned summits and conferences, the lack of effective public participation and the suppression of women's interests and voices emerge as recurrent themes.
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