Where did the idea of “water security” come from? How did countries around the world come to agree on shared goals for drinking water, sanitation, river basin management and sustainable development? And why does water still lack the kind of global institutional architecture that exists for climate change and biodiversity?
In this episode, Dr Roberto Lenton, one of the world’s leading voices on water security and international development joins host Veena Srinivasan for a conversation on the evolution of global water policy over the last eight decades.
Roberto has spent more than six decades working across engineering, research, philanthropy, global institutions and water policy. His career has taken him from the Ford Foundation in India to the founding of the International Irrigation Management Institute, now the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), and to being an early proponent of the Global Water Partnership.
Drawing on his book, Confronting Water Insecurity: Global Institutions and the Transformation of Water Science, Policy and Practice, Roberto traces the history of global water cooperation from the creation of the United Nations after World War II to the Sustainable Development Goals and the water challenges ahead.
Veena and Roberto discuss why global water institutions emerged after 1945, how UNESCO came to host the International Hydrological Programme, and how the Harvard Water Programme helped shape early ideas around integrated planning and managing water for multiple purposes.
The conversation also explores the first UN Water Conference at Mar del Plata in 1977, the International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade, the Dublin Principles, the Rio Earth Summit, the Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goal 6.
Roberto explains how the term “water security” became more than a question of water scarcity. It brought together drinking water, sanitation, irrigation, floods, droughts, pollution, ecosystems and resilience into one wider framework.
The episode also examines the more difficult side of global water governance: the accountability mechanisms that emerged around dams and development projects, the limits of privatisation-led reforms, and the reasons why global institutions have often struggled to translate new ideas into real improvements on the ground.
Finally, Veena and Roberto look ahead to the future of water governance in a changing world shaped by climate extremes, AI data centres, demographic shifts and growing scepticism about multilateral cooperation. They ask whether water needs a stronger global science-policy mechanism, perhaps something equivalent to the IPCC for climate change.
The Water Data Podcast is a talk show on the science, systems, and stories of water, hosted by Veena Srinivasan.
For all references and further readings related to the episode, visit https://welllabs.org/wdp-robert-lenton/
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Recording by Vraj Acharya and Nabina Chakraborty. Video editing by Srisabari Varaguna Pandian. Graphics and artwork by Aparna Nambiar, Kanishka Goyal and Oishika Goswami. Audio mixing and mastering by Vijay Doiphode. Podcast production and management by Nabina Chakraborty and Pavan Srinath.
