«Water is a fundamental human right and a necessity for the flourishing of all life on earth. Water should be held as a public good to ensure water justice globally. But commodification and privatization of water are challenging that. We must continue to fight for water justice for all.»
Farhana Sultana is a Full Professor of Geography at Syracuse University, where she is also a Research Director for the Program on Environmental Collaboration and Conflicts at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. Her research considers how water management and climate change impact society. She is a feminist political ecologist whose work focuses on climate justice, water governance, sustainability, international development, and decolonizing global frameworks.
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Awards and honours
- 2019 American Association of Geographers Glenda Laws Award
- Co-signatory with Pope Francis in “Rome Declaration on the Human Right to Water”
Books
- Sultana, Farhana (2011). The Right to Water: Politics, Governance and Social Struggles. Routledge. ISBN 978-1849713603.
- Sultana, Farhana (2016). Eating, Drinking: Surviving. Springer. ISBN 978-3-319-42467-5.
- Sultana, Farhana (2019). Water Politics: Governance, Justice and the Right to Water. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-138-32003-1.
- Sultana Farhana (2024). Confronting Climate Coloniality: Decolonizing Pathways for Climate Justice. ISBN Pb: 978-1-032-73785-0 / Hb: 978-1-032-73791-1
Water Politics. Governance, Justice and the Right to Water (2019)
Edited by Farhana Sultana and Alex Loftus
Abstract: Scholarship on the right to water has proliferated in interesting and unexpected ways in recent years. This book broadens existing discussions on the right to water in order to shed critical light on the pathways, pitfalls, prospects, and constraints that exist in achieving global goals, as well as advancing debates around water governance and water justice.
The book shows how both discourses and struggles around the right to water have opened new perspectives, and possibilities in water governance, fostering new collective and moral claims for water justice, while effecting changes in laws and policies around the world. In light of the 2010 UN ratification on the human right to water and sanitation, shifts have taken place in policy, legal frameworks, local implementation, as well as in national dialogues. Chapters in the book illustrate the novel ways in which the right to water has been taken up in locations drawn globally, highlighting the material politics that are enabled and negotiated through this framework in order to address ongoing water insecurities. This book reflects the urgent need to take stock of debates in light of new concerns around post-neoliberal political developments, the challenges of the Anthropocene and climate change, the transition from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as well as the mobilizations around the right to water in the global North.
This book is essential reading for scholars and students of water governance, environmental policy, politics, geography, and law. It will be of great interest to policymakers and practitioners working in water governance, as well as the human right to water and sanitation.
Sultana, F., & Loftus, A. (Eds.). (2019). Water Politics: Governance, Justice and the Right to Water (1st ed.). Routledge. doi. 10.4324/9780429453571
The Right to Water: Politics, Governance and Social Struggles (2011)
Farhana Sultana (Syracuse University, USA) and Alex Loftus (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK)
Book Description: The right to clean water has been adopted by the United Nations as a basic human right. Yet how such universal calls for a right to water are understood, negotiated, experienced and struggled over remain key challenges. This book elucidates how universal calls for rights articulate with local historical geographical contexts, governance, politics and social struggles, thereby highlighting the challenges and the possibilities that exist. Bringing together a unique range of academics, policymakers and activists, the book analyzes how struggles for the right to water have attempted to translate moral arguments over access to safe water into workable claims. This book is an intervention at a crucial moment into the shape and future direction of struggles for the right to water in a range of political, geographic and socio-economics contexts, seeking to be pro-active in defining what this struggle could mean and how it might be taken forward in a far broader transformative politics. The book engages with a range of approaches that focus on philosophical, legal and governance perspectives before seeking to apply these more abstract arguments to an array of concrete struggles and case studies. In so doing, the book builds on empirical examples from Africa, Asia, Oceania, Latin America, the Middle East, North America and the European Union.
Sultana, F., & Loftus, A. (Eds.). (2011). The Right to Water: Politics, Governance and Social Struggles (1st ed.). Routledge. doi 10.4324/9780203152102
Selected publications, Journal papers
- Sultana, Farhana (2007). “Reflexivity, Positionality and Participatory Ethics: Negotiating Fieldwork Dilemmas in International Research”. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies. 6 (3): 374–385.
- Sultana, Farhana (2011). “Suffering for water, suffering from water: Emotional geographies of resource access, control and conflict”. Geoforum. 42 (2): 163–172. doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2010.12.002.
- Sultana, Farhana (2009). “Fluid lives: subjectivities, gender and water in rural Bangladesh”. Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography. 16 (4): 427–444. doi:10.1080/09663690903003942.
- Sultana, Farhana (2014). “Gendering Climate Change: Geographical Insights”. The Professional Geographer. 66 (3): 372–381. doi:10.1080/00330124.2013.821730. S2CID 59439279.
- Sultana, Farhana; Loftus, Alex (2015). “The Human Right to Water: Critiques and Condition of Possibility”. WIREs Water. 2 (2): 97–105. doi:10.1002/wat2.1067.
- Parizeau, Kate; Shillington, Laura; Hawkins, Roberta; Sultana, Farhana; Mountz, Alison; Mullings, Beverley; Peake, Linda (2016). “Breaking the silence: A feminist call to action: Breaking the silence”. The Canadian Geographer. 60 (2): 192–204. doi:10.1111/cag.12265.
- Sultana, Farhana (2018). “Water justice: why it matters and how to achieve it”. Water International. 43 (4): 483–493. doi:10.1080/02508060.2018.1458272.
- Sultana, Farhana (2019). “Decolonizing Development Education and the Pursuit of Social Justice”. Human Geography. 12 (3): 31–46. doi:10.1177/194277861901200305.
- Sultana, Farhana (2020). “Embodied Intersectionalities of Urban Citizenship: Water, Infrastructure, and Gender in the Global South”. Annals of the American Association of Geographers. 110 (5): 1407–1424. doi:10.1080/24694452.2020.1715193.
- Sultana, Farhana (2021). “Climate change, COVID-19, and the co-production of injustices: a feminist reading of overlapping crises”. Social & Cultural Geography. 22 (4): 447–460. doi:10.1080/14649365.2021.1910994.
- Sultana, Farhana (2022). “Critical climate justice”. The Geographical Journal. 188 (1): 118–124. doi:10.1111/geoj.12417.
- Sultana, Farhana (2022). “The unbearable heaviness of climate coloniality”. Political Geography. 99: 102638. doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2022.102638.