Megacities and Rivers: Scalar Mismatches between Urban Water Management and River Basin Management

Authors

Francine van den Brandeler, Joyeeta Gupta, Michaela Hordijk

Due to rapid urbanization, population growth and economic drivers, megacities and metropolises around the world face increasing water challenges, such as water scarcity, degradation of water resources and water-related risks such as flooding. Climate change is expected to put additional stress on already strained metropolitan water management systems. Although there is considerable research on river basin management and on urban water management, there is hardly any on metropolitan water management. Similarly, as urban water generally emerges from and returns to river basins, it is surprising how little literature there is that explicitly connects these two spheres of governance. Hence this review paper addresses the question: What does a review of the literature tell us about the overlap and reconciliation between the concepts of Integrated Water Resources/River Basin Management and Metropolitan/Urban Water Management, particularly in relation to megacities? Based on an extensive literature review, this paper concludes that the key differences between the two are in relation to their overarching framework, scope, inputs and outputs of water and in relation to dealing with extreme weather events. The literature review reveals how sustainable and integrated urban water management increasingly adopt principles and rhetoric from integrated water resource management, this has yet to translate into significant changing practices on the ground. Urban water management still often occurs independently of river basin issues. Achieving coherence between river basin management and sustainable/integrated urban water management is even more difficult in metropolises and megacities, because the latter consists of multiple political-administrative units. The article concludes that the scalar mismatch between river basin management and metropolitan/megacity water governance deserves much greater attention than it currently receives in the academic and policy debates.