An Editor's Note

On that trip, they were faced with the realities that women face disproportionate impacts from a lack of sanitation and clean water, yet in many areas are systematically excluded from water and sanitation decisions. They believed that these inequities could be corrected by social action that is informed by science-based data gathering and analyses. “We started this journal because we felt that it is necessary to have academic leadership in this area… We are aiming to be an academic hub for information, research and thought, to augment work already being done, and to help facilitate more work on the issue across the globe…” said wH2O founders Dakota Dobyns and Caroline D’Angelo.

Indeed, IJWEJ is a re-branding of wH2O, but frames the issues in terms of inequities, disparities, and injustices. In doing so, we frame our work in the water world along the same paradigms that can be found in Health (Care), Education, Banking, and other areas of the socio-political structures that define modern societies.

Moreover, in the International Journal for Water Equity and Justice we go beyond gender. We seek to understand water equity and justice around other variables of structuration that we can identify and that are documented. As such the mandate for the Journal is immediately and overarchingly linked to the United Nations as it pertains to programmatic developments such as Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and to the parameters of global policy making as reflected in the conventions, declarations, and resolutions of the UN System. We do so with the understanding that we seek to address equity and justice issues as a major dynamic of humanity’s quest for emancipation, well described by such scholars as Wertheim and Sen.

Whereas several aspects of global water management are discussed in terms of peace and conflict and (criminal) actions around pollutions, water re-allocations and (military) violence, most attention is directed to technical and financial capacities when working on water policies. The issues of equity and justice are only sporadically addressed and put on the agenda of decision-making bodies in a haphazard way. We believe that our journal can provide material for the actors in this Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) sector to place equity and justice issues onto the global water agenda; and doing so with references to important UN documents and UN administrations, such as the GLAAS reports or the Ramsar Convention. The following are some of the UN documents we seek to use for soliciting papers, research documents, blogs, and opinions:

• Universal Declaration of Human Rights;
• Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women;
• The Convention on the Rights of the Child;
• Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities;
• Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples;
• Resolution A/RES/64/292: The Human Right to Water and Sanitation;
• The Regulation of Crimes Against Water in Armed Conflicts and Other Situations of Violence;
• A MATTER OF SURVIVAL: Report of the Global High-Level Panel on Water and Peace.

We opine that the UN system provides a very well positioned framework for setting the editorial policies of IJWEJ. We aim to be global citizens, participants in the global WASH market, and all sharing life on this one planet. We foresee that the publication of this journal, hopefully soon in several languages, will make it possible to reach many citizen groups and environmental activists with information that can underscore the international drive for undoing inequities and injustices through socio-structural approaches in global water management. This subject touches each and every one of us in our daily lives, as water is something we all depend on.