Routledge Water, Security and U.S. Foreign Policy

The prosperity and national security of the United States depend directly on the prosperity and stability of both partner and competing countries around the world. Today, U.S. interests are under rising pressure from water scarcity, extreme weather events and water-driven ecological change in key geographies of strategic interest to the U.S. Those water-driven stresses are undermining economic productivity, weakening governance systems and fraying social cohesion in scores of countries and, in the process, undermining the vitality of rural livelihoods, fostering local and ethnic conflicts, driving broad migratory movements and contributing to the growth of insurgencies and terrorist networks. While the U.S. intelligence community has steadily expanded natural resource concerns in their global threat analyses, our overseas development assistance remains locked into provision of water and hygienic services rather than responding to the full sweep of global water challenges including governance and policy failures, growing conflicts over water and the need for promoting sustainable transboundary water arrangements in partner countries. A fundamental departure from the past is urgently needed. Based on 18 case studies, Water, Security and U.S. Foreign Policy provides an analytical framework to help policy makers, scholars and researchers studying the intersection of U.S. foreign policy with the environment and sustainability issues, interpret the impacts of water-driven social disruptions on the stability of partner governments and U.S. interests abroad. The book also delivers specific recommendations to reorient U.S. development and diplomatic engagements that can forestall and prevent social disruptions and ensuing threats to U.S. prosperity and national security. Review 'This impressive volume brings together many of the world's leading thinkers and practitioners on global water policy. The chapters survey the water and governance challenges in a number of important countries and regions. The contributors grapple with the complexity of how problems related to water potentially create security concerns for the United States and what, if anything, the U.S. government can do to help others and thereby help itself.' - Joshua Busby, Associate Professor of Public Affairs at the University of Texas-Austin and author of Water and U.S. National Security (Council on Foreign Relations 2017) 'Climate change has driven home what we should have known for a long time: water is the root of much of the world's instability and conflict. And there is no one better than David Reed to apply his enormous experience across a score of regions. His careful book drives home a second truth we should have known: water is the problem but mismanagment is the curse. Accordingly, he provides a framework for critical shift in policy, from providing water to managing watershed, almost always involving more than one country.' - Greg Treverton, former chair of the U.S. National Intelligence Council About the Author David Reed is Senior Policy Advisor for WWF-US.