Water Wars by Other Means: Virtual Water and Global Economic Restructuring
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the mid-1990s, Tony Allan coined the term “virtual water” to describe international grain shipments, arguing that for purposes of economic efficiency and political legitimacy, governments in water-scarce nations would be better served by importing grain and diverting limited domestic water supplies to higher-value purposes than by producing grain. This concept has gained considerable traction in explaining the absence of “water wars,” particularly in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). As a prescriptive policy measure, I argue first that the exemplarity of the MENA serves an ideological function, premised on a market environmentalist approach, and framing “water crisis” as a problem of physical scarcity rather than underdevelopment. Historical trends in virtual water imports, as well as the problem of American primacy in virtual water exports, are then used to develop an account of virtual water trade that situates it within the political and economic restructuring associated with US-led globalization.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it