Unequal Waters: Eight principles for a Just Water Transformation
by Savithri Sellapperumage; Barbara Schreiner, Executive Director, Water Integrity Network; Aaron Salzburg, CEO, The American Water Resources Association; Nick Hepworth, Strategic Advisor, Water Witness International; Nchedi Moripe
In a previous blog titled Unequal Waters: Why water poverty is a problem of power, not governance failure, it was emphasised that the water crisis goes beyond a crisis of political will, technical and fiscal capacity, or governance. It is rather the result of structural and systemically reinforced inequalities, driven by unequal access to power and a failure of accountability. Six mechanisms, namely; political exclusion, resource capture, rights denial, knowledge suppression, process capture and social reproduction, form a self-reinforcing loop that traps communities in water insecurity across generations. While these mechanisms help diagnose the underlying conditions, what could be the treatment?
The three-part seminar series at Stockholm Water Week 2026 attempted to address these reinforcing mechanisms by setting out principles for just water transformations. These principles moving beyond proposing improved efficiency in the continuation of current systems, urging us to rather address the existing power structures. The principles address the need to change who holds power, where resources flow, whose knowledge counts, and who is accountable to whom. These ideas are capture in eight principles; six directly address the mechanisms of the Inequality Trap, while the remaining two look beyond the water sector and push us to reflect on our own roles, assumptions, and responsibilities in shaping just water futures.
The eight principles:
Shift power. Put people experiencing water insecurity at the centre of decisions that affect them. Move beyond consultation towards meaningful representation, shared power, community leadership and accountability.
Allocate fairly. Direct water, finance and infrastructure toward people and places with the greatest need, not those with the greatest influence. Today, unconnected households often pay multiple folds more for water than wealthier, networked communities.
Make rights real. Indigenous communities, and those in informal housing are rendered invisible and often have no legal standing to challenge utilisation and allocation of their own water. We need to strengthen equitable enforcement, and accountability is what turns a right on paper into a right in practice.
Democratise knowledge. Hydrological monitoring gaps leave the most vulnerable communities invisible in the data that shapes investment decisions. In order to close that gap, we must validate lived experiences and Indigenous knowledge alongside technical expertise, and enable these invisible data to be accessible.
Make participation count. Multi-stakeholder platforms often legitimise decisions that have already been made, while barriers of class and language exclude the communities most affected. Participation has to be judged by ability to influence, not attendance.
Break the cycle. Water insecurity follows gender, class and caste systems, and geography affecting marginalised communities through generations. As a result, women in marginalised communities are mainly responsible for collecting water and may even be denied access to public water systems such as the Dalit communities in India. Breaking that cycle means connecting water policies and action, to health, social protection, land rights and historical legacies.
Turn the lens on ourselves. Inequalities are embedded and maintained in institutions and systems. This does not exempt us from reflecting on our own ways of working. Who gets funded? Who leads? Whose expertise counts, and in which language? The water sector’s funding strcutures, conferences, research and networks can reproduce the very inequalities we are trying to solve.
Align with other struggles. Water insecurity is shaped by forces outside the water sector. Historical dispossession, concentration of power, lack of accountablity, and an unequal global political economy in which trade, tax, and debt regulations favour profits over water rights. These issues cannot be fixed with tools within the water sector alone. Solving them requires us to build alliances and cross-sectoral commitments on, for example, tax justice, trade rules, land, and labour rights.
How does this look like in practice?
Applying these principles looks different depending on different actors. For governments, it means reforming trax, trade regulations and subsidies that produce water insecurities, while protecting and expanding civic space and platforms that allow communities to hold those in power accountable. For donors and finance institutions, it means supporting governments' ability to realise the human rights to water and sanitation, recognising that these burdens are often linked to past development financing models. For business and corporations, it means adopting water justice not as an act of philanthropy or corporate social responsibility but a condition of legitimate business, and paying the full social and ecological costs of water use, rather than externalising the costs onto communities, the environment or future generations. For civil society and NGO’s it means, building collective power and investing in community agency to claim rights that exist on paper. For researchers, it means protecting scientific independence, academic freedom and recognising lived knowledge as evidence in its own. And for those working in the water sector, it means accepting where own instituions concentrate power rather than sharing it.
However, the challenge of application comes at a precarious moment. Cuts to development assistance and geopolitical turmoil across the globe have exposed communities to further vulnerabilities and climate change is deepening insecurities for those least responsible for it. Water inequalities, if built by systems and institutions around us, should strive to dismantle them too, but only if we are willing to look beyond the water sector at the same time turn the lens on ourselves first.
These ideas are brought together in the background paper Forging a Fair Water Future produced as part of the seminar series held at Stockholm. We invite you to engage with the paper by sending your comments to: nickhepworth@waterwitness.org
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