Thinking Water Relationally: Beyond the Water Governance Discourse

Abstract

"Following the overall objective of the panel, this paper aims to dissect the concept of 'water governance' to understand how it poses water related problems in certain apolitical, ahistorical and technocratic-scientific terms and how we might think of it 'otherwise.' Doing so, the paper first explores the origin of water governance as a concept that shapes how we understand 'water' and 'water related problems,' such as water scarcity, floods, and degradation of rivers, lakes, or wetlands, and their solutions in contemporary theory and practice of water governance. Secondly, the paper explores what thinking of water problems through the concept of water governance renders visible and invisible, to ask the question, 'What practices and enactments do we follow when ‘water problems’ are defined through the concept of water governance, and what practices and enactments are obscured?' and finally, 'How can we think of water and water governance ‘otherwise’'? We glean from ontologically-attuned ethnographies to render the possibilities of how “water governance” could be thought otherwise and what its implications might be."