
This paper by Vishal Narain for SaciWaters seeks to contribute to developing a shared understanding of some of the core concepts related to water security in a peri-urban context. It is a part of the peri-urban water security project discussion paper series that aims at having a collection of research papers relevant to the concepts and processes involved in the project that represent preliminary ideas circulated to encourage discussion and comments.
Though the relevant literature is cited at many places, this is not intended to be a literature review per se, but instead seeks to develop a shared framework to identify a set of common issues and questions that merit investigation.
The paper argues that peri-urban can be better understood in terms of its characteristics - a mix of agricultural and non-agricultural land uses, flows of goods, services and resources between villages and urban centers and a social profile that is very heterogeneous and in a state of flux. All these impact upon the local natural resource base, creating particular environmental and natural resource management problems that are often beyond the scope of urban or rural governments alone and require innovative ways of being addressed.
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