This concept, popularized by the 1994 UNDP Human Development Report, shifts security from states to people.
What is human security?
This term refers to countries or regions that share a border with or are located along a river, lake, or other body of water- making them key stakeholders in transboundary water governance.
What are riparian states?
This framework argues water is a shared ecological resource that no individual or corporation owns, and must be collectively protected.
What is the commons?
This 2000 conflict in Bolivia erupted after water privatization led to dramatic price increases, forcing residents to pay for rainwater.
What is the Cochabamba Water War?
This is the longest river in the world.
What is the Nile River? 4,258 mi
This concept is defined as the capacity of a population to safeguard sustainable access to adequate quantities of acceptable quality water for livelihoods, well-being, and socio-economic development.
What is Water Security?
This term refers to informal or illegal networks that control or profit from water distribution.
What is the water mafia?
Loss of customary rights and diversion of water for profit are commonly associated with this process.
What is privatization?
The Pacific Institute classifies water conflict into these three categories.
What are trigger, weapon, and casualty?
Many modern water crises are driven not only by scarcity but by this global environmental change affecting glaciers, drought, and rainfall.
What is climate change?
These are the four key dimensions of water security.
What are drinking water and human well-being, economic activities and development, ecosystems, and water-related hazards and climate change?

Water insecurity is uneven across these global and social divides
What is Global South vs. Global North, urban vs. rural, rich vs. poor?
When water is treated as this, access depends on ability to pay rather than need.
&
Both Maude Barlow and Vandana Shiva argue that achieving water justice requires rejecting this dominant approach to water management.
What is a commodity?
The Cochabamba conflict is best described as this type of conflict over water governance.
What is a privatization conflict?
This is the largest use of freshwater globally.
What is agriculture?
This number of people worldwide lack safely managed drinking water.
What is more than 2 billion?
This Indian scholar and activist is a leading critic of water privatization and defender of water justice.
Who is Vandana Shiva?
This theory predicts that people will overuse shared resources unless regulated by government or privatization.
What is the tragedy of the commons?
There are this many transboundary river basins worldwide, with 40% of the world's population depending on shared waters.
What is 286?
This large human-built structure stores water and often generates electricity.
What is a dam?
This number of people globally lack safely managed sanitation.
What is 3.6 billion?
This Canadian activist is widely known for advocating the human right to water and the water as commons movement.
Who is Maude Barlow?
In water governance, this group's voice is often NOT heard in decision-making processes, despite being most affected.
Who are indigenous communities, women, the poor, and marginalized groups?
Cooperation over shared water most often depends on these
What are treaties, river basin organizations, data sharing, and diplomacy?
Water found underground in soil or rock is called this.
What is groundwater?
This term describes the condition in which people lack reliable access to sufficient quantities of safe, affordable water for a healthy life.
What is water INsecurity?
This global principle recognizes access to safe and affordable drinking water and sanitation as a basic entitlement.
What is the human right to water?
These nine are coined as....
What are the principles of water democracy?
The only legally binding water treaty that has survived wars between two nuclear-armed rivals.
What is the IWT?
Protecting water so future generations can use it is called this.
What is conservation?
Roughly this percentage of the world’s population depends on shared waters.
What is 40 percent?
When water is treated as a commodity, access depends on this rather than need.
What is the ability to pay?
This concept, associated with Elinor Ostrom, directly challenges Hardin's claim, arguing that communities, not just governments or markets, can sustainably manage shared water resources.
What is community governance of the commons?
Shared rivers create tensions mainly because of this geographic relationship between
What is upstream–downstream states?
This staggering percentage of natural disasters worldwide are water-related.
What is 90%?
Lack of water access disproportionately harms these four groups.
Who are women, children, the poor, and people in informal settlements?
According to Maude Barlow, the human right to water is an issue of this _____, not charity.
What is justice?
In water governance, this group’s voice is often heard in decision-making processes.
What is national governments, engineers and technical experts, international donors and institutions, private companies and infrastructure developers?
These are formal, legally binding agreements between countries that regulate the allocation, management, and protection of shared rivers, lakes, or aquifers.
What is a Treaty?
This U.S. river, once one of the world's mightiest, no longer reaches the sea due to overextraction, a symbol of modern water crisis.
What is the Colorado River?
Name seven causes of water insecurity, spanning environmental pressures and human, political, and economic factors.
What are climate change, pollution, population growth, drought, poor governance, privatization, and inequality/unequal access?
According to Maude Barlow, __________ have the responsibility to provide water, sanitation, and protect these sources.
What is governments?
This doctrine, summarized as “first in time, first in right,” governs many Western U.S. water rights.
What is prior appropriation/cowboy economics?
This three-step dispute resolution system is built into the Indus Waters Treaty.
What are commission review, neutral expert, and international arbitration?
The four dimensions of water security cannot function alone, they depend on these four enabling conditions identified by UN-Water.
What are good governance, transboundary cooperation, peace and political stability, and financing?
Who said this and in which paper? pg. 14. "Three obligations are imposed on states with the recognition of a human right:
1. The first is the obligation to respect
2. The second is the obligation to protect
3. The third is the obligation to fulfil"
Who is Maude Barlow, PRINCIPLE ONE, Water is a Human Right in Blue Futures?
This legal concept allows people to use water but not own it. The right to enjoy the benefits of a resource without destroying it.
What is usufruct?
According to Elinor Ostrom, commons can be governed successfully when communities have these six conditions.
What are clear rules and boundaries, participation in decision-making, monitoring and accountability, conflict-resolution mechanisms, local trust and legitimacy, and community governance?