Cet ouvrage présente le point de vue de l'Islam sur la gestion de l'eau, notamment la demande en eau, la réutilisation des eaux usées et la hausse des tarifs. Il ouvre la voie à un meilleur dialogue entre les chercheurs intéressés par la gestion de l'eau; il enrichit nos connaissances sur les influences qui s'exercent sur la politique officielle et la pratique officieuse, puis il propose ces idées à un public élargi. Il montre concrètement l'intérêt d'examiner le développement dans le contexte des valeurs et de la culture. Il dissipe aussi des malentendus liés à la conception musulmane de la gestion de l'eau, telles la vente de l'eau et la réutilisation des eaux usées. Cet ouvrage intéressera les chercheurs, les érudits et les étudiants de divers domaines.

Au Moyen-Orient et en Afrique du Nord, l'eau devient l'enjeu crucial du développement. La région est caractérisée par l'un des taux moyens de croissance démographique les plus élevés du monde et par des ressources en eau peu abondantes. Dans cette région et dans d'autres, les responsables des politiques ont souvent proposé, voire tenté de mettre en œuvre, des politiques de gestion de la demande en eau, par exemple des tarifs plus élevés ou la privatisation, sans prendre en compte la culture et les valeurs locales. Pourtant, la culture, largement marquée par la religion, influence manifestement.

Water is a matter of life and death. Advanced technology and engineering enable humans to gain better access to it. Nonetheless, the conditions and effort required to reach this goal remain colossal in many countries. Building a lasting infrastructure for adequate treatment before and after use is costly. Therefore, the author believes that a radical change of thinking among people around the world, from the domestic to the large-scale users, becomes a priority. Even if the United Nations entitles all people to justice for water, more responsible and ethical use of it by all interested parties is more important than the spreading of promises, which, in practice, may turn out to be a sham. Only a better understanding that access to water rests on the efforts of everyone, without exception, will reduce overuse, waste, and pollution of the indispensable resource. This volume, while written from a theological, philosophical, and legal perspective (focusing on John Calvin, John Rawls, and Paul Ricoeur), demonstrates that water cannot be merely understood as a human right, but also has to be dealt with from an economic point of view as well as under the authority of the Golden Rule.

In one form or another, water participates in the making and unmaking of people’s lives, practices, and stories. Contributors’ detailed ethnographic work analyzes the union and mutual shaping of water and social lives. This volume discusses current ecological disturbances and engages in a world where unbounded relationalities and unsettled frames of orientation mark the lives of all, anthropologists included. Water emerges as a fluid object in more senses than one, challenging anthropologists to foreground the mutable character of their objects of study and to responsibly engage with the generative role of cultural analysis.

The right to clean water has been adopted by the United Nations as a basic human right. Yet how such universal calls for a right to water are understood, negotiated, experienced and struggled over remain key challenges. The Right to Water elucidates how universal calls for rights articulate with local historical geographical contexts, governance, politics and social struggles, thereby highlighting the challenges and the possibilities that exist. Bringing together a unique range of academics, policy-makers and activists, the book analyzes how struggles for the right to water have attempted to translate moral arguments over access to safe water into workable claims. This book is an intervention at a crucial moment into the shape and future direction of struggles for the right to water in a range of political, geographic and socio-economics contexts, seeking to be pro-active in defining what this struggle could mean and how it might be taken forward in a far broader transformative politics. The Right to Water engages with a range of approaches that focus on philosophical, legal and governance perspectives before seeking to apply these more abstract arguments to an array of concrete struggles and case studies. In so doing, the book builds on empirical examples from Africa, Asia, Oceania, Latin America, the Middle East, North America and the European Union.