This handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the field of gender and water governance, exploring how the use, management and knowledge of water resources, services and the water environment are deeply gendered.

In water there is a recognized gender gap between water responsibilities and water rights and bridging this gap is likely to help achieve not just goals of equity but also those of sustainability. Building on a rich legacy of feminist water scholarship, the Routledge Handbook of Gender and Water Governance is a collection of reflections and studies that can be used as a prismatic lens into a thriving and ever proliferating array of feminist water studies. It provides a clear testimony of how hydrofeminism has evolved from rather instrumental gender and water studies to scholarship that uses feminist tools to pry open, critically reflect on and formulate alternatives to water development-as-usual. The book also shows how the community of feminists interested in studying water has diversified and expanded, from often white female scholars studying projects and gender relations in the so-called Global South, to a varied mix of scholars and activists theorizing from diverse geographical and political locations – prominently including the body. It is organized into five interconnected parts:

• Part I: Positionality and embodied waters
• Part II: Revisiting water debates: diplomacy, security, justice and heritage
• Part III: Sanitation stories
• Part IV: Precarious livelihoods
• Part V: New feminist futures

Each of these parts brings out the gendered nature of water, shedding light on the often neglected care and unpaid labour of women and its relationship with extractivism and socioeconomic inequalities. The overall aim of the handbook is to apply social science insights to water governance challenges, creating synergies and linkages between different disciplines and scientific domains.

The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Water Governance is essential reading for students, scholars and professionals interested in water governance, water security, health and sanitation, gender studies and sustainable development more broadly.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Tatiana Acevedo-Guerrero is Assistant Professor at the Copernicus Institute for Sustainable Development, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She leads the ERC project titled ‘Homescapes make the world we live in,’ that takes water as an entry point of an investigation into the homes of the urban South.

Lisa Bossenbroek is a researcher at the iES, Institute of Environmental Sciences, University of Kaiserslautern-Landau, Germany.

Irene Leonardelli is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Calabria, Italy. She holds a PhD from the IHE-Delft Institute for Water Education, the Netherlands, where she worked at IHE Delft for more than four years as a junior researcher.

Margreet Zwarteveen is Professor of Water Governance at the IHE-Delft Institute for Water Education and the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She is the co-editor of Drip Irrigation for Agriculture (Routledge, 2017).

Seema Kulkarni is a senior fellow at the Society for Promoting Participative Ecosystem Management (SOPPECOM).