Practice and Teaching of American Water Management in a Changing World

Once upon a time the United States was the undisputed leader of the world. In that era the United States was also the undisputed leader in the practice of water resources development and management, and in the education of water professionals and future leaders from around the world. This editorial argues that time has passed, and that now is the time for a major rethink if the United States is to regain the role as a world leader of both water resource practice and graduate education. By way of preface, over the past 40 years I have engaged with water management in the developing world from many perspectives: in the Ministry of Water in my home country of South Africa; as a graduate student working on India and Pakistan in the Harvard Water Program; as an epidemiologist at the Cholera Research Laboratory in Bangladesh; as an engineer in the Ministry of Water in newly independent Mozambique; working on Africa and the Philippines as a professor of water resources at the University of North Carolina, and for the last twenty years in Asia, Latin America, and Africa in a variety of operational and policy positions in the World Bank. Of particular relevance for this editorial are my two final World Bank assignments: for three years as the World Bank’s senior water advisor in New Delhi, and for three years as the World Bank’s country director for Brazil. Now I am a faculty member in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard, charged with developing a new universitywide “Harvard Water Initiative.” Over the course of this life in water, I have seen, from the rivers’ edge, as it were, dramatic changes in global power, in ideas as much as finance. This experience suggests that just as the United States has lost its unquestioned global economic preeminence and is having to learn to see the world through a different economic lens, so, too, the U.S. water community is losing its preeminence in the practice and education of water resource management. This editorial outlines some ideas that might be relevant to a rethink in both the practical and educational spheres. I start with a few observations.