Water debates are littered with ‘stuff of life’ arguments, and water is indeed a fundamental requirement for life, and this property adds a human-rights and basic-needs dimension to policy considerations. Not just human life — few of our water decisions do not have implications for the integrity of ecological systems and biodiversity. It is also a systemic economic resource, irreplaceable as an input to production and consumption, and thus implicated in countless other policy sectors: the stuff of life, and the universal solvent, lubricant, coolant and producer of steam.

For example, it is sub-optimal to seek to understand water and to make policy about water without factoring in another, even more systemic resource — energy — which is equally topical at the moment (Proust et al. 2007). Climate change threatens water systems, and is caused largely by energy use. The shower links major uses of water and energy in the household. Different water-supply options (solar, nuclear desalinization, gas turbines, and so on) have very different energy demands, and vice versa. High-efficiency irrigation systems are abstemious but use pumps and energy-rich products; water-wasting flood irrigation is marvellously undemanding on energy. Most pollution is related to our uses of water and/or energy.

This warns against hydrological determinism, of narrow water-fixations in policy and management. In the non-urban domain, recent topicality of water issues has diluted hard-won and still-evolving integrated catchment and landscape-management regimes, where water is one, albeit crucial, component of a portfolio of issues to be managed in a coherent fashion: soils, vegetation, production, biodiversity, etc. In cities, too strong a singular focus on water may serve to embed a forgetting of the links to related issues and trends. The fact that, on a cradle-to-grave basis, the great bulk of water use attributable to household end-point consumption occurs before final consumption (known as virtual or embodied water, used in growing, manufacturing and transporting goods and services) indicates how deeply embedded water is in a modern economy. The same applies to embodied energy.

Water policy is a cross-sectoral, -portfolio and often -jurisdictional matter. These attributes suggest that extant policy and institutional settings, fashioned around levels of understanding before much attention was paid to water (and energy) as sustainability problems, are prima facie likely to be inadequate (Dovers 1997). Water is obviously a cross-disciplinary issue, and while research attention has flowed strongly toward water in recent years, it is largely a portfolio of separate components. Less-than-satisfactory integrative, intellectual attention to water and energy issues stems in great part from the inability of the research and education community to rigorously traverse the disciplinary boundaries within which intellectual activity is clustered (very productively, too, in all sorts of ways).

Water policy is a narrow construct, then, as water use is firmly linked to and determined by other policy and management sectors: planning, landscape and catchment management, fire policy, building regulations, energy availability and price, the evolution of appliances, garden and leisure fashions, and so on. Glib as it sounds, everything is indeed connected to everything else; to be effective, water-policy interventions must take account of the links, of the knowledge that underpins them and the policy frameworks constructed.