Understanding OECD’s (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) discourse on good water governance

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is a major donor and norm-setter in global water governance. Its research programme ‘Studies on Water’ has produced 55 long policy reports between 2009 and 2021. Using these studies as a corpus, and through innovative integration of qualitative critical discourse analysis (e.g. social actor analysis, metaphor analysis, rhetorical analysis) and quantitative techniques in natural language processing (e.g. structured topic modelling [STM], word frequencies, named entity recognition), this paper addresses the following research question: “how does OECD frame good water governance”? OECD advocates for ‘good water governance’ through establishing and promoting the twelve water governance principles and a plethora of ‘best practices’ to support these. According to STM, economic and financial aspects of water governance occupy a disproportional part in the discourses compared to other aspects of governance (e.g. justice, participation, knowledge pluralism). We have further established the key conceptual metaphor used in the documents, namely the frame of ‘water governance is a machine’ that further strips the subject of politics, power discussions and equity/equality considerations. An actor-network analysis reveals further rhetorical strategies used by OECD in establishing its authority through reliance on technocratic vocabulary, pervasive referencing of itself and a small number of associate actors and privileging knowledge sources from the Global North over those from the Global South.