Water Resources Allocation: Interactions Between Equity/Justice and Allocation Strategies

Throughout the past decades, water resource allocation literature has increasingly addressed equity and justice. Despite this, there is a divergence between what different actors in all arenas mean by 'justice and equity'. Meanwhile, the extent to which allocation research has worked to empirically assess and operationalize concepts of equity and justice in practice remains unclear. This study examines how justice and equity are defined and understood within water resources allocation research. It also examines how extensively they are assessed in the allocation literature. We discuss equity/justice from diverse perspectives. We focus on the diversity of societal values related to water resource equitability and the typology of equity factors in water resource allocation. Our argument is that water allocations should be multi-processed to ensure water equitability by analyzing feedback and co-evolving processes and scenarios among economic justice, distributional justice, environmental justice, and institutional justice. We find that the literature has paid more attention to certain aspects of justice (e.g., distributive and procedural justice concerns) on certain topics, such as water resources management and allocation. In order to address this research gap, we call for a multi-scale and holistic approach to justice/equity issues.