6th World Water Forum

Thoughts on grammar at the World Water Forum

COA Admin March 15, 2012 2 Comments

Ken Cline I have developed an adjective-noun problem. I wrote in an earlier entry that “words matter.” I was thinking about that even more today. It wasn’t even because we have been discussing the wording of proposed statements late into the night or that I have been spending time with Rachel (for whom English grammar is a contact sport). No, I was just sitting in a presentation...

Outlining the Panels

COA Admin March 15, 2012 1 Comment

- Robin Owings As I sit in long meetings on water privatization, scarcity, and ethics, I have taken to documenting panelists (government officials, NGO heads, citizen leaders) with blind contour drawings. I look directly at the subjects and record them using a continuous line. Each line forms a caricature, reflecting the elements of those figures such as slouching shoulders, facial expressions,...

The Perils of Privatization

COA Admin March 15, 2012 0 Comments

-Rachel Briggs Earlier in the week several of us attended a debate on whether water supply should be private or public: Is it appropriate for private, for-profit companies to allocate a resource essential to life, or is that a role only public providers can play ethically? The panel included Gerrard Payen, president of AquaFed, a consortium of private water providers. As he suavely spun his way...

Diluting the Human Right to Water

COA Admin March 13, 2012 0 Comments

-Lisa Bjerke & Ken Cline Past World Water Forums have reverberated with NGO and youth calls for the recognition of water as a human right. After years of campaigning the UN General Assembly declared safe, clean drinking water and sanitation a human right “essential to the full enjoyment of life and all other human rights” on July 28, 2010. UNGA Resolution A/RES/64/292. We thought this...

Water in the Context of Rio+20

COA Admin March 13, 2012 0 Comments

-Rachel Briggs The World Water Forum is organized by the World Water Council, an exclusive group of global water elites—it is not a United Nations process. However, a variety of groups are working to build connections between the Forum and the upcoming Rio+20 conference. Rio+20, falling twenty years after the first Earth Summit in Brazil, is a UN conference focused on Sustainable Development....