The litany of alarming observations about water use and misuse is now familiar-over a billion people without access to safe drinking water; almost every major river dammed and diverted; increasing conflicts over the delivery of water in urban areas; continuing threats to water quality from agricultural inputs and industrial wastes; and the increasing variability of climate, including threats of severe droughts and flooding across locales and regions. These issues present tremendous challenges for water governance. This book focuses on three major concepts and approaches that have gained currency in policy and governance circles, both globally and regionally-scarcity and crisis, marketization and privatization, and participation. It provides a historical and contextual overview of each of these ideas as they have emerged in global and regional policy and governance circles and pairs these with in-depth case studies that examine manifestations and contestations of water governance internationally. The book interrogates ideas of water crisis and scarcity in the broader bio-physical, political, social and environmental landscapes to better understand how certain ideas and practices take hold, are replicated, and become entrenched in policy and practice. It critically investigates ideas of participation and democratic local-scale governance by querying the disconnects between global discourses on participatory practice and the local realities related to participation, particularly as they intersect with the themes of scarcity and privatization, of inequality and difference, and broader development discourses and water related schematics. Promoting a more holistic view of how governance structures are changing with contemporary realities, this topical book is of great interest to students, researchers and policy makers in the field of water governance.