Water as a global common: A literature review and propositions for governance

This paper asks whether water should be governed as a global common. We synthesize four bodies of literature – common-pool resource economics, global public goods, international environmental agreements, and Earth system science – to show that water exhibits a compound market failure combining jurisdictional gaps, missing property rights, mispriced externalities, and the regulatory leakage problem. We engage with three critiques: that water is fundamentally local, that trade internalizes scarcity, and that the water cycle cannot be governed like carbon emissions. While each contains partial truths, none invalidates the case for global coordination. We finally identify a critical institutional gap: unlike climate or biodiversity, water lacks the science-policy architecture necessary for global cooperation. We conclude with governance propositions for closing this gap.