Draft of my Chapter forthcoming in Palgrave Handbook of International Political Economy 1 A Political Economy of Water Larry A. Swatuk Abstract In the chapter A Political Economy of Water, Swatuk demonstrates that, much like a mirror, water access, use and management reflects society back to itself. No ordinary economic good, water is essential to all aspects of human life. As such, the ability to harness the resource has led to the rise of states, empires and civilisation itself. The author focuses on selected aspects of human water use, in particular water for development, for cities and for agriculture. He highlights the various discourses at play in determining who gets what kind of water when as well as the centrality of economic and political power in determining the social flows of water. In conclusion, the author states that there is no ‘magic bullet’ to solving the world’s water woes, partly due to the multiplicity of stakeholders and their differential interests and capacities. As a result, what we tend to see is that water flows toward money, and therefore for more socially equitable, economically efficient and ecologically sustainable outcomes to emerge, citizens must be organised and active in aiming to secure some water for all forever. Author Bio Larry A. Swatuk is Professor of International Development in the School of Environment, Enterprise and Development (SEED) at the University of Waterloo, Canada and Extraordinary Professor in the Institute for Water Studies at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. For more than 25 years he has worked on the political economy of natural resources with a particular focus on sub‐Saharan Africa. Among his most recent publications are a monograph, Water in Southern Africa (UKZN Press, 2017) and a co‐edited collection (with Corrine Cash) entitled Water, Energy, Food and People Across the Global South: The ‘Nexus’ in an Era of Climate Change (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Introduction Water is no ordinary good, economic or otherwise. Among other things it is essential, non‐substitutable, scarce, fugitive, indivisible, bulky and complex (Savenije 2002). While we all, as individuals, cannot live without it, water used in our highly differentiated daily pursuits varies dramatically in terms of both quantity and quality: from as little as 10‐100 litres (one‐one hundredth to one‐tenth of a cubic metre) per person per day for immediate household purposes, to thousands of cubic metres per day used in complex, extensive, cash‐crop oriented, irrigated agriculture. Water is in everything, and so begins its travails, as humans wrestle with this complex resource so as to bend it to their will. In this short essay, I showcase some of the main points of contention regarding the ways and means of accessing, using and managing water: a political economy of water, if you will. The focus here is on freshwater systems, though, as most of us know, water cycles through the atmosphere with most freshwater deriving from rainfall, some of it from clouds generated by the salty oceans of the world. As stated above, it is an indivisible system, a fact that ‘modern man’, in all his resource gobbling glory, has had a very difficult time accepting.