Sarah Wolfe and David B. Brooks / Natural Resources Forum 27 (2003) 99–107 99 © 2003 United Nations. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Natural Resources Forum 27 (2003) 99–107 Water scarcity: An alternative view and its implications for policy and capacity building Sarah Wolfe and David B. Brooks Abstract This article focuses on the somewhat ambiguous concept of scarce water, or, more accurately stated, on the rather more ambiguous concept of scarcity. Still today, water scarcity in a region is defined largely in physical terms, typically gallons or cubic metres per capita if a stock or per capita-year if a flow. However useful purely physical measures may be for broad comparisons, they cannot adequately reflect the variety of ways in which human beings use water — neither to their wastefulness when water is perceived as abundant nor to their ingenuity when it is not. This article argues that water scarcity should be defined according to three orders of scarcity that require, respectively, physical, economic and social adaptations. It goes on to demonstrate that perceiving scarcity mainly in physical terms limits opportunities for policymaking and approaches for capacity building. Keywords: Adaptation; Capacity building; Efficiency; Scarcity; Water policy; Water use efficiency; Water demand management. Sarah Wolfe is a Doctoral Student at Guelph Water Management Group, Department of Geography, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada. E-mail: sawolfe@uoguelph.ca. David B. Brooks is Director of Research, Friends of the Earth, Ottawa, Canada. “Resources are not; they become.” (Zimmerman, 1951: 15) 1. Introduction Prior to World War II, natural resources were primarily seen as physical substances, some of which could be turned into marketable commodities or useful services. Of course, economic texts had recognized that natural resources in situ were a form of capital (Scott, 1955), and, at least from the work of Pigou early in the 20 th century (1932), concepts of externalities in the exploitation of natural resources had been worked out. The ‘wise use’ doctrine of the early conservation movements implied policies for coping with demand (short time preference), and limits to demand, if not to growth, but its economics tended to be muddled (Barnett and Morse, 1963). Not surprisingly, public policy and capacity building regarded natural resources in the physical sense, and presumed that national wealth could be determined in considerable part on the availability of (or, in a colonial era, access to) a greater or lesser quantity of natural resources. Careful analysts had always challenged the predomin- ant physical concept of natural resources, but a broader perspective did not become more widely accepted until the 1950s. The report of the Paley Commission (President’s Materials Policy Commission, 1952), the establishment of research groups such as Resources for the Future, and the introduction of texts and courses that went beyond a description of natural resources signalled a new intellec- tual era. The development, use and conservation of natural resources became matters of economic efficiency and effi- cient management, not just man vs. nature. Already by 1952, Ciriacy-Wantrup could write that: “. . . resources, their scarcity, their depletion, and their conservation are concepts of the social sciences par ex- cellence.... resources are variables in a socially most significant function in which man, his objectives, his knowledge, and his institutions are other variables” (Ciriacy-Wantrup, 1952: 28–29; emphasis in original). These ideas developed further with the publication of Scarcity and Growth by Barnett and Morse (1963), which demonstrated, on the basis of statistical evidence, that technological progress had fully compensated for depletion in the best sources of natural resources. In a prescient