Month: April 2020

Post by Cathy Smith

The latter twentieth century saw a global shift towards ‘participatory’ approaches in environmental management. Calls for public participation have had different emphases, from normative arguments that foreground democracy, equity and human rights, to pragmatic arguments that direct involvement makes people more likely to agree with management interventions, or that local knowledge helps adapt management to context. Since the late 1990s the public right to participation in environmental management has been enshrined in various policies and legal instruments with relevance for Scotland’s fresh and coastal waters.

In 1998, the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) Aarhus Convention established the rights of the public to participate in environmental decision-making. In 2000, the European Union (EU) Water Framework Directive called on member states to consult the public and involve stakeholders in creating river basin management plans. In 2008 the EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive similarly called for public participation in creating national and regional marine plans. Scotland has ratified these directives, creating plans for two River Basin Districts and starting marine planning processes with a National Marine Plan and regional plans for the Clyde and Shetland Isles. Scotland has also adopted the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, of which Target 6.B, under Goal 6 (sustainable management of water and sanitation for all), calls for the ‘participation of local communities in improving water and sanitation management’. There are also a number of local stakeholder partnerships that have created plans for integrated river catchment or coastal management independently of Government-led processes, including the Tweed Forum.

We recently used Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science (WoS) to examine which of these policy and legal instruments are referenced in academic papers that discuss public participation in fresh or coastal water management in Scotland. Our search threw up 46 papers, all published since 2000. The Water Framework Directive is mentioned in 59 percent of the papers. Equal amounts of papers referenced the government-led river basin management planning and marine planning processes as referenced independent local stakeholder partnerships. Interestingly, the Water Framework Directive was used to frame both government-led and independent planning processes. The SDGs are mentioned only in one of the papers (and this paper does not reference any of the goals specifically). This fits with a finding we shared in a recent blog post, that little research around SDG 6 is centred on developed countries. Far more could be done to link ongoing efforts in Scotland to the SDG agenda.

Post by Cathy Smith

In 2015 the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted by world leaders. The 17 goals are a call to action for all countries, recognising that many issues, such as ending poverty, protecting ecosystems, tackling the climate crisis and ending violent conflict, are intricately interlinked. While many of the goals are relevant to fresh water in some way, the most directly relevant is SDG 6, ‘ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all’. This two-part blog post looks at trends in academic publishing related to SDG 6, using data from Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science (WoS), an online portal for searching multiple databases containing bibliographic records from over ten thousand of the world’s academic journals. In today’s post we look at what is being published: Which academic disciplines are publishing papers referring to SDG 6, do the publications link SDG 6 to the other SDGs, and which of the eight specific targets under SDG 6 are getting the most attention?

We searched for all papers on WoS that mention SDG 6 in the title, keywords or abstract, and found 167 relevant papers, all published since 2015. WoS automatically associates each paper with one or more of five broad research areas: arts & humanities, life sciences & biomedicine, physical sciences, social sciences, technology. We found that most of the papers fall under natural sciences, while social sciences, arts and humanities are underrepresented. This may, in part, reflect biases in the journals included in WoS (e.g. many law journals are not included).

We found that only 31% of the papers explicitly refer to one of the other SDGs in the title, keywords or abstract. The other SDGs most often referred to are SDG 6 are SDG 13 (climate action), SDG 15 (life on land), SDG 2 (zero hunger), SDG 7 (energy) and SDG 3 (good health and wellbeing).

69 percent of the papers do not mention one of the eight SDG 6 targets specifically. Of the SDG 6 targets specifically mentioned, targets 6.1 (safe and affordable drinking water for all) 6.2 (adequate and equitable sanitation and hygiene for all and end to open defecation) are the most referred to. Targets and 6.6 (protection and restoration of freshwater ecosystems), 6.A (international cooperation and capacity building) and 6.B (community participation) are the least referred to. This suggests that water in the environment and water governance are less commonly associated with SDG 6 than supply of water to people and industry. This might be related to the fact that the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which preceded the SDGs, were more focussed on development than environment, and only referred to fresh water in terms of total water resource consumption, safe drinking water and sanitation. Research is certainly being done in areas related to integrated water resource management and water governance, but it is not commonly being linked explicitly to the SDG agenda.

Post by Cathy Smith

In 2015 the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted by world leaders. The 17 goals are a call to action for all countries, recognising that many issues, such as ending poverty, protecting ecosystems, tackling the climate crisis and ending violent conflict, are intricately interlinked. While most of the goals are relevant to fresh water in some way, the most directly relevant is SDG 6, ‘ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all’. This two-part blog post looks at trends in academic publishing related to SDG 6, using data from Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science (WoS), an online portal for searching multiple databases containing bibliographic records from over ten thousand of the world’s academic journals. In today’s post we look at geographical trends: Which countries are being studied in relation to SDG 6, which countries are publishing about SDG 6, and do the two align?

We searched for all papers on WoS that mention SDG 6 in the title, keywords or abstract, and found 167 relevant papers, all published since 2015. Just over half of the papers focus on a specific geographical area (in a named country or region), and the rest give a general or global analysis. While both developed and developing countries have adopted the SDGs there is a clear emphasis on developing countries in the papers: of those that named a specific geographical area, 85 percent focus on a developing country or countries (here we used the UN’s classification of countries as developing or developed for 2019).

We also looked at the location of the institutions that authors of the papers are affiliated with. 70 different countries are represented by these institutions and 57% of the papers are linked to institutions in more than one country, suggesting a high level of international cooperation for research towards SDG 6. Despite the focus on developing countries within the papers themselves, developed countries dominate in publishing research referring to SDG 6, with the USA and UK publishing the most papers. 82% have at least one author in a developed country, and for 72%, the first author is based at an institution in a developed country.

These results are not surprising. They are part of a wider pattern of significant global inequality in the production of research. It is interesting, however, that while much research that explicitly refers to the SDGs is being published by authors based in developed countries, so little of it focuses on the developed countries themselves. There is certainly research being published about many aspects of fresh water use, condition and management that focuses on developing countries, but it seems that this research is not often being linked to the SDG agenda.