Participants in this course will gain an overview of the range of controversies involved in the world’s water conflicts and acquire a good understanding of a particular issue that they choose to research in depth. Hydrological systems on most continents are under severe pressure from economic growth and climate change and the crisis will intensify as a result of population increase, rising levels of individual consumption and inadequacies in the governance systems that determine who will benefit and who will pay the costs of competing agendas. A workshop approach will be used to maximise the active involvement of students. Each week a document that has been selected to highlight significant issues will be examined in detail. Assignments will be designed to encourage students to study the key document before the class discussion (either on-campus or online). 

The document analysis will be supplemented by case studies chosen to reveal a wide range of water conflict situations. The case studies will examine issues such as acid mine drainage in South Africa, arsenic in groundwater in Bangladesh, the politics of cross border rivers such as the Mississippi, Rhine, Indus, Nile, Yellow, Colorado and Murray-Darling, unsustainable levels of extraction in the vast groundwater systems of the central United States and northern India and China, the political and bio-physical dynamics of large deltas such as the Mekong, Ganges and Yangtze, disputes about the building and operation of large dams, the impacts of transformative and disruptive technologies, environmental sustainability (what is it?), public participation, NGOs (international and national) the roles of national governments, international organizations such as the World Bank, gender issues, water markets, environmental refugees, climate change adaptation, international relations related to water, multi-level water governance,  and different approaches to defining water security.