Drought is a Justice Issue.
Drought governance is failing along the same fault lines of coloniality and exclusion that shape the accelerating climate crisis. In my research, I have seen how communities bearing the worst of intensifying drought face co-produced crises of water insecurity and livelihood collapse. Poor women provisioning water for households walk longer, Indigenous peoples struggle to steward degraded landscapes, and smallholder farmers experience crop failures as aquifers deplete. They are often excluded from the institutions that manage droughts. This exclusion is structured by colonial legacies of land and water dispossession, extractive capitalism, and hydrosocial inequities that have damaged the ecosystems drought recovery depends on.
Inclusive drought management must confront the coloniality embedded in water governance at different scales. Institutions for drought response privilege large-scale hydraulic infrastructure and market-based water allocation while sidelining place-based ecological knowledge. Addressing accelerating and unexpected droughts requires democratizing water governance such that drought-affected populations co-produce drought policies. Adaptation finance must be safeguarded to reach the communities who need it most. Accountability must address global ecological debt and the racialized, gendered dimensions of water scarcity that colonial and capitalist structures have entrenched over time.
Drought is an intersectional and intergenerational justice issue tied to wider struggles over water and climate. Until drought governance addresses the structural issues, interventions will only manage symptoms.
