# Transformations to groundwater sustainability: From individuals and pumps to communities and aquifers

Margreet Zwarteveen, Marcel Kuper, Cristian Olmos-Herrera, Muna Dajani, Jeltsje Kemerink-Seyoum, Cleaver Frances, Linnea Beckett, Flora Lu, Seema Kulkarni, Himanshu Kulkarni, et al.

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## To cite this version:

Margreet Zwarteveen, Marcel Kuper, Cristian Olmos-Herrera, Muna Dajani, Jeltsje Kemerink-Seyoum, et al. Transformations to groundwater sustainability: From individuals and pumps to communities and aquifers. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 2021, 49, pp.88-97. 10.1016/j.cosust.2021.03.004. hal-03237543

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# Transformations to groundwater sustainability: from individuals and pumps to communities and aquifers

Margreet Zwarteveen<fnref n="1" />, Marcel Kuper<fnref n="2" />, Cristian Olmos-Herrera<fnref n="3" />, Muna Dajani<fnref n="4" />, Jeltsje Kemerink-Seyoum<fnref n="5" />, Cleaver Frances<fnref n="4" />, Linnea Beckett<fnref n="6" />, Flora Lu<fnref n="7" />, Seema Kulkarni<fnref n="8" />, Himanshu Kulkarni<fnref n="9" />, Uma Aslekar<fnref n="9" />, Lowe Börjeson<fnref n="10" />, Andres Verzijl<fnref n="11" />, Carolina Dominguez Guzmán<fnref n="12" />, Maria Teresa Oré<fnref n="13" />, Irene Leonardelli<fnref n="14" />, Lisa Bossenbroek<fnref n="15" />, Hind Ftouhi<fnref n="16" />, Tavengwa Chitata<fnref n="17" />, Tarik Hartani<fnref n="18" />, Amine Saidani<fnref n="19" />, Michelaina Johnson<fnref n="7" />, Aysha Peterson<fnref n="7" />, Sneha Bhat<fnref n="8" />, Sachin Bhopal<fnref n="8" />, Zakaria Kadiri<fnref n="16" />, Rucha Deshmukh<fnref n="9" />, Dhaval Joshi<fnref n="20" />, Hans Komakech<fnref n="21" />, Kerstin Joseph<fnref n="21" />, Ebrania Mlimbila<fnref n="21" /> and Chris De Bont<fnref n="10" />

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If the success of agricultural intensification continues to rely on the depletion of aquifers and exploitation of (female) labour, transformations to groundwater sustainability will be impossible to achieve. Hence, the development of new groundwater imaginaries, based on alternative ways of organizing society-water relations is highly important. This paper argues that a comparative documentation of grass-roots initiatives to care for, share or recharge aquifers in places with acute resource pressures provides an important source of inspiration. Using a grounded anti-colonial and feminist approach, we combine an ethnographic documentation of groundwater practices with hydrogeological and engineering insights to enunciate, normatively assess and jointly learn from the knowledges, technologies and institutions that characterize such initiatives. Doing this usefully shifts the focus of planned efforts to regulate and govern groundwater away from government efforts to control individual pumping behaviours, to the identification of possibilities to anchor transformations to sustainability in collective action.

## Addresses

Corresponding author: Zwarteveen, Margreet (m.z.zwarteveen@uva.nl)

## Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 2021, 49:88–97

This review comes from a themed issue on **Transformations to sustainability: critical social science perspectives**

Edited by Emily Boyd, Eduardo Brondizio and Eleanor Fisher

Received: 01 August 2020; Accepted: 02 March 2021

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2021.03.004

1877-3435/Crown Copyright © 2021 Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

## Introduction

Over the past half century, a ‘groundwater revolution’ [1] has occurred: a shift from using relatively easily available

<footnote n="1">¹University of Amsterdam, Governance and Inclusive Development. IHE Delft, Department of Water Governance</footnote>

<footnote n="2">²University of Montpellier, UMR G-Eau/Cirad, Montpellier, France</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³University of Amsterdam, Governance and Inclusive Development</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵IHE Delft, Department of Water Governance. University of Amsterdam, Governance and Inclusive Development</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶Colleges 9 & 10, Division of Social Sciences, University of California Santa Cruz</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷Department of Environmental Studies, University of California Santa Cruz</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸Society for Promoting Participative Eco-system Management, Pune (SOPPECOM)</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹Advanced Centre for Water resources Development and Management, ACWADAM</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰Department of Human Geography, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹Governance and Inclusive Development, University of Amsterdam. International Development Studies Group, Utrecht University</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹²Anthropology Department, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³Department of Social Sciences of the Pontifical Catholic University of Perú</footnote>

<footnote n="14">¹⁴IHE Delft Institute for Water Education</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵University Koblenz-Landau</footnote>

<footnote n="16">¹⁶University Hassan II, Casablanca</footnote>

<footnote n="17">¹⁷The University of Sheffield, Department of Geography</footnote>

<footnote n="18">¹⁸Laboratory management and valorization of agricultural and aquatic ecosystems Morsli Abdellah Tipaza University Center, Oued Merzoug 42000 Tipaza, Algeria</footnote>

<footnote n="19">¹⁹CREAD, Algeria. Agronomy and Veterinary Sciences Institute, IAV Hassan II, Rabat, Morocco. SupAgro, Montpellier, France</footnote>

<footnote n="20">²⁰School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh, UK</footnote>

<footnote n="21">²¹WISE – Futures, Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology, Arusha, Tanzania</footnote>
shallow subsurface waters to using much deeper under-
ground waters that are not always replenishable. This
shift happened by replacing often centuries-old technol-
ogies for capturing and distributing or storing groundwa-
ter (wells, qanats, drains, pozas) with new — ever better
and cheaper — technologies for drilling, pumping and
conveying water. In agriculture — which is the focus of
this paper — the availability of groundwater has allowed
the expansion of agricultural frontiers [2] by extending
irrigated areas and making farming possible in arid places.
Currently, some forty-two percent of the world's irrigated
lands is irrigated with groundwater [3].

Both scientific scholarship and policy statements, under-
score the strategic importance of tapping into previously
inaccessible groundwater reserves for realizing present-
day and future global water, food security and climate
resilience ambitions [4–8]. Yet, they also, and somewhat
paradoxically, draw attention to the overexploitation and
pollution of aquifers [9,10]. Analyses point out how the
intensified use of groundwater for agriculture results in
rapidly falling groundwater tables, declining water qual-
ity, increased rates of saltwater intrusion and land subsi-
dence, while also drying up natural water bodies like
wetlands and rivers with detrimental effects to biodiver-
sity. Excessive groundwater pumping may also

irreversibly destroy or reduce underground storage capacity as well as damage hydraulic connections between surface and groundwater systems [11].

Governing groundwater is notoriously challenging, with
widespread scholarly agreement that past and current
attempts are disappointing or ineffective [12**,13–15].
This is because groundwater is invisible, making it diffi-
cult, cumbersome and often expensive to determine and
monitor quantities available. It is also because groundwa-
ter flows are connected to other water flows — surface,
rain and subsurface — and because there are different
types of groundwater, with some being easier to re-charge
than others. An additional complexity is that groundwater
is a common pool resource with high subtractability,
meaning that one person's use can change the availability
or quality for other current or future users. However,
unlike other common pool resources, the need for infra-
structure to access the water increases the potential for
excludability. There are two types of tensions here:
between individual and collective interests and between
short-term gains and longer-term sustainability [16,17].

Figure 1 summarises how recent reviews on groundwater governance [12**,13,18,19,15] display strikingly similar lines of argumentation and conclusions, something that

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>Figure 1</figcaption></figure>

Focus areas of international scholarship on groundwater governance.
can perhaps be attributed to the fact that most ground-
water governance scholarship appears to come from just a
few international research centres (such as IWMI, FAO,
IGRAC, OECD). Writings are resource-oriented and
intervention-oriented and assume that governing ground-
water is primarily a public concern. Most studies are
geared towards the formulation of generic guidelines
(glossing over socio-ecological differences), clearly anchor
prescriptions (or recipes) in the assumption that similar
hydrogeological conditions warrant similar institutional or
governance arrangements, and place faith in the use of
ever more advanced modelling and remote sensing tech-
niques to better know and manage groundwater. Overall,
a ‘tragedy of the commons’ reasoning prevails, with
attention focusing on what governments can do to either
curb the greed of individual extractors through licensing
and sanctioning, often in combination with efforts to
institutionalize property rights, or to increase supply
through advanced technological means such as inter-
basin transfers, or desalinization [13].

In the rest of this paper, we make a plea for pluralizing
groundwater governance scholarship. We argue that there
is merit in complementing the current focus on govern-
ment efforts to better regulate and control extraction,
with efforts to document and learn from community
initiatives to care for, share or recharge the aquifers they
depend on for livelihoods and incomes.

Transformations to groundwater
sustainability

Our project, Transformations to Groundwater Sustain-
ability (T2GS), brings together a network of scholars,
activists and practitioners with backgrounds in critical
social science, engineering and hydrogeology, who work
in different countries on water-related themes. Through
the project, we aspire to contribute to the anti-coloniza-
tion and pluralization of groundwater scholarship
[20,21*,22]. The purpose of anti-colonization is to trace
how current groundwater crises are caused by or intrinsic
to particular models of agricultural intensification (and
development) - those premised on systematically under-
valuing water (and the environment more broadly) as well
as labor (much of it from women).

Anti-colonization importantly includes developing sensi-
bility to how prevailing scientific ways of knowing (mea-
suring, thinking about, imagining) and managing ground-
water originate in, or help legitimate such unsustainable
models of farming and development. Pluralization is a
necessary parallel move to anti-colonial critique. It con-
sists of looking beyond accepted science-based expertise
and solutions to (re-)appreciate and learn from the wis-
doms, technologies and institutions that communities
have devised — often based on generations of living in
a territory — or are experimenting with to protect,
recharge, access and share groundwater.

Pluralization also entails developing new circuits and
ways for knowledges to travel. We are interested in
finding ways of joint learning that do not depend on
grand theorizations and the adoption of single idioms,
and resist the pressures for equivalence, commensuration
and coherence that often come with a desire for global
comparison and universality. We propose to instead cher-
ish pluriversality: allowing many knowers, knowledges
and versions of groundwater to co-exist, learning from and
living with, rather than overcoming, differences [23–25].
Doing this means developing awareness of the many
translations needed to contrast and compare what hap-
pens in one place to what happens elsewhere. In our
collaborations in the project, we actively experiment with
different ways of doing this. We for instance organize
monthly online workshops, make podcasts, encourage
social scientists to learn about hydrogeology and hydro-
geologists to learn about critical social science and femi-
nism, and we jointly search for the shared origin of
dominant groundwater imaginaries, tracing how these
resonate in the study cases. We have also started to make
use of drawings to capture the complexities of community
groundwater practices in the different places where we
study. We use these drawings as a horizontal tool for
interpretation and critical reflection. An example is a
drawing based on the study carried out by the Indian
team in Randullabad (Figure 2). The making of, compar-
ing, and joint conversations about these drawings allow
discussions to emerge about different ways of under-
standing groundwater injustices, inequalities and gover-
nance challenges. Experimenting with different ways of
representing, comparing and translating experiences,
ideas and findings is proving to also be a joyful way to
start practicing care and solidarity in how we learn and
develop knowledge: attempting to make sure that all
voices, experiences and stories matter.

Guiding our efforts is a conscious attempt to shift the
current emphasis in groundwater governance scholarship
from command and control — aiming to regulate the
pumping behaviour of individuals — to an approach
which recognizes and supports the care of communities
for aquifers [27,28*] through identifying and assessing
forms of solidarity and collective action [27,29]. In addi-
tion to mobilizing feminist and anti-colonial thinkers to
help do this [23,26*,29,30**,31**,32**,33,34], we are inter-
ested in a broader ‘return to practice’ [35,36] and take the
idea of hydrosociality [37,38] seriously. An important
premise that guides our efforts is that lessons about
possibilities to use, care for and share groundwater in
ecologically wise and socially just ways need to be empir-
ically anchored in the actual practices of those engaging
with groundwater on a day-to-day basis: diggers, artisans,
farmers and dowsers, to just name a few.

The remarkable existence of community-based initia-
tives and engagements with groundwater in India,
<figure><img src="image_6.png" /><figcaption>Figure 2</figcaption></figure>

The Participatory Groundwater Management Initiative in Randullabad, India. (Co-produced by Uma Aslekar, Dhaval Joshi, Rucha Deshmukh and Cristian Olmos Herrera).

Algeria, Morocco, Tanzania, Chile, Peru, USA, Zimbabwe, Syria forms a source of inspiration and starting point of our exercise. These initiatives consist of people who, sometimes with outside support, organize to capture, share, re-charge or protect groundwater in places where threats of depletion and pollution are particularly acute.<fnref n="1" /> Their collective action is catalyzed by direct experiences of harm caused by declining water availabilities or deteriorating qualities, a sense of territorial belonging, or a connection to place [36,39*]. Such efforts to defend groundwater reserves and longstanding practices of stewardship counter narratives of the ‘tragedy of the commons’, demonstrating that degradation and depletion of the resource is not inevitable, as farmers may be motivated to cooperate to avoid these risks. Especially where state-initiated programmes of agricultural intensification actively promote the exploitation of aquifers for profit — such as in Morocco, parts of India, and Peru — the continued existence of such grassroots initiatives shows that processes of modernization are never complete or uniform. The question of whether these initiatives indeed represent examples of more environmentally sustainable and socially equitable forms of groundwater governance, or whether they instead consist of more temporal and perhaps fragile socio-political compromises [2] is central to our conversation and analysis [40]. In this

sense our approach is agnostic; our investigations are not based on an assumption that community initiatives are ‘better’ (more sustainable or just) than government-initiated ones. In one of the cases we study, in Ravangaon (India), female farmers are for instance quick to point out how the unsustainability of current groundwater practices is importantly caused by macro-policy orientations that are difficult to change at their level. Our hope is that serious critical attention to and engagement with what communities do — learning from the wisdoms, technologies and institutions that they have devised or are experimenting with to protect, recharge, access and share groundwater or resist its depletion — will widen and pluralize ideas about how to generate transformations to groundwater sustainability beyond currently accepted science-based solutions. It may also provide inspiration for new groundwater imaginaries, cosmologies or moral ecological rationalities [41] of engaging with neighbors, future generations, water itself and more-than-humans dependent on water.

We used an ethnographic approach as the empirical starting point for the documentation and analysis of the identified community initiatives. To allow positioning ourselves in academic as well as policy debates, we pragmatically divided this effort into three broad, loosely defined, and intertwined categories: *knowledges, technologies and institutions* (see Figure 3). We remain sensitive to the connections between these categories: It is through technologies such as wells and pumps, for instance, that

<footnote n="1">¹ The Supplementary material to this article contains ten short narratives about the ongoing action-research projects happening in each of the project sites.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_7.png" /><figcaption>Figure 3</figcaption></figure>

The Groundwater Governance framework of the Transformations to Groundwater Sustainability project (T2GS).

people learn and obtain knowledge about fluctuating water levels and qualities.<fnref n="2" /> As we show in more detail below, technologies also co-determine how water is distributed (the rules of use). In writing about and sharing our findings, in the pluralizing and feminist spirit of the project, we try treating different knowledges and technologies in horizontal ways, avoiding the a priori judgment of some as intrinsically better or advanced and others as backward or primitive. In particular, the often-used distinction between scientific knowledges and local or indigenous knowledges is one we treat with caution. After all, all knowledges come from somewhere and are based on specific experiences [38,42]. The term *bricolage* (or tinkering) is an important conceptual-methodological device to help do this. It expresses that actual practices of using and governing water often consist of technologies, knowledges and institutions that are patched together and always in-the-making, instead of fixed and rationally or scientifically designed [43–45]. A

bricolage lens allows to see the flexible adaptations and hybridizations that make groundwater governance arrangements work in particular contexts. These are never innocent, but laden with meaning and imbued with power relations. Indeed, power and meaning weave through our three themes, helping to understand how change happens, and how it is shaped to benefit some and not others [44].

In what follows, we use inspiring material from the literature to further explain and illustrate our approach in each of the three categories: knowledges, technologies and institutions.

## Knowledges, technologies and institutions

### Knowledges

In this first category, we are interested in how local communities appreciate, know and deal with fluctuating qualities and quantities in their everyday dealings with groundwater. Such knowledge may be the result of generations of accumulated experience and observation by

<footnote n="2">² See Chitata, in the Supplementary material.</footnote>
those whose lives depend on using groundwater [46], and often forms part of wider cosmologies — ways of being in and making sense of the world [47]. Creative ways of knowing groundwater for instance include the innovative ‘water towers’ that young farmers in Algeria use to establish whether or not they can irrigate [48], as well as the participatory groundwater assessment and recharge methods developed by ACWADAM in Maharashtra [49]. The pozas used by mango farmers on the desert coast of Peru likewise provide an example of their intimate knowledge about assessing and dealing with water scarcity and fluctuating availabilities; knowledge that is embedded in ways of farming and living [46,50**]. In Ghana, embodied ways of knowing served as a useful tool for understanding groundwater governance for irrigation during the dry season [51].<fnref n="3" /> Place-specific practices of assessing groundwater quantities and qualities may differ from accepted temporal or spatial boundaries used in scientific assessments [62], or even challenge those practices or technologies widely heralded as sustainable, for instance relating to conservation agriculture [52]. Knowledges of farmers often form part of very specific ways of dealing with the ecological and climatological characteristics of their fields and plots; they demonstrate how they are adapted and attuned to micro-specificities. This contrasts with the pressures of ‘modern’ agriculture to specialize and homogenize [53].

In documenting and assessing groundwater knowledges we are interested in finding out how prevailing technical and scientific understandings of groundwater can be complemented, or perhaps challenged, by other ways of knowing groundwaters and aquifers. Tracing the resonances, gaps and frictions between different knowledges constitutes an important starting point for doing this. We mobilize insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS) [54–58] to help treating the knowledges embedded in the experiences and routines of groundwater users as equally legitimate as the understandings of engineers, agronomists and hydrogeologists. An important lesson from STS is that which and whose knowledge travels, gains authority or prevails in making decisions is not just a question of accuracy, but also one of politics, history and culture [59,37,60,61].<fnref n="4" /> In Chile, for instance, the state water resources agency used a supposedly scientific

hydrological assessment done in response to concerns of overexploitation of an aquifer to underpin water allocation decisions in accordance with its own interests, further endorsing existing unequal patterns of resource use [62]. In Peru, mining companies dismissed indicators used by local residents to appreciate water quality, labeling these as vernacular or anecdotal. Mining companies instead put forward their own quantitative technical assessments [63]. Groundwater's invisibility, and the overall difficulty of accurately assessing the dynamics of flows and stocks, creates a lot of room for such disagreements. Indeed discussions about (ways to measure) availabilities and qualities often themselves become part of contested claims and power struggles [37].

Critically examining and, where needed, challenging forms of segregation and hierarchy in knowing groundwater — such as those between natural sciences and social sciences; between knowledge originating in the majority world and that coming from the minority world; between experts and practitioners — is a necessary component of the pluralization we strive for, as is the cultivation of critical awareness about how claims of scientific objectivity or neutrality may themselves be expressions of power [64]. Here it is important to appreciate that practical assessments of availabilities, both by scientists and by users, often combine — range and hybridize — different knowledges and ways of knowing. It is, for instance, interesting how hydrogeologists may call in the help of dowsers when prospecting for water [65].

## Technologies

Technologies for measuring, accessing, distributing or recharging groundwater form the material expression and articulation of, but also co-shape, society-water interactions. Technologies-in-use often represent a palimpsest of accumulated experience [66], with technologies — pumps and wells — often also providing people with a means to assess (fluctuations in) groundwater levels.<fnref n="5" /> Building on a long tradition of scholarship about how technologies are social, cultural and political [67], and in line with the larger argument of the paper on the pluralization of groundwater scholarship, we examine how particular (combinations of) technological artefacts and infrastructures make some forms of knowing, access, care, organization and distribution possible, and others more difficult. Particular technologies may go accompanied, or be associated with, particular institutions and cosmologies. For instance, in Morocco shallow wells were associated with a (slow) world of parsimony and water scarcity, whereas deep tube-wells are associated with a (quick) world of abundance [68,69**]. More generally, in

<footnote n="3">³ Also see the narratives of Dominguez et al. (Peru), Saidani (Algeria), Peterson et al. (USA), Aslekar et al. (India), Bossenbroek et al. (Morocco), Dajani (Syria), de Bont et al. (Tanzania) and Chitata (Zimbabwe) included in the Supplementary material for examples of ‘local’ groundwater knowledges.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ See Peterson et al. (Supplementary material) who explore links between groundwater pollution, unsustainable agricultural practices, and public health in California. Farmworkers built networks with activists, administrative and scientific groups to advocate for clean drinking water. Also see Olmos Herrera (Supplementary material) for a case study of the Atacama Desert, where large-scale mining not only alters water flows, but also challenges the cosmovisión of local communities with devastating ecological effects.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ In the Zimbabwe narrative in the Supplementary material, Chitata et al. show how people can assess groundwater levels by the sounds and vibrations of their pumps.</footnote>
irrigation the shift to groundwater use often happens through a shift from collective surface canal irrigation systems to individually owned and used tubewells. In canal irrigation systems, water flows can easily be seen, changed and contested. With a shift to individual tubewells, pumps and underground pipes, flows become invisible, making it harder to discuss how water is distributed, cared for and shared [63].<fnref n="6" /> This process of technology-driven individualization of water use and management neatly matches popular ideologies of privatization and *laissez-faire* economics [64,17,71] which inform idea (s) of farming as profit-maximizing entrepreneurialism. Because one person's use of tubewells reduces availability of groundwater for others, the technology also reorganizes the distribution of water [70**]. The fact that only those with means can afford to invest in drilling deeper tubewells may mean that they become 'water lords'. For the less well-to-do, water sources may become contaminated and wells may run dry.<fnref n="7" /> Technology and ideology together make the attribution of responsibilities for such unequal distributions of water [72] and for the depletion of groundwater difficult, as these are both invisible (and naturalized) and ascribed to the workings of anonymous markets and multiple (non-specified) users or polluters. Ironically reinforcing this is the phenomenon that many devices (e.g. industrial tube-wells, pumps, drip irrigation systems and engines) used in groundwater are associated with progress, themselves having become the symbols of more modern ways of farming and living.

In this way, tracing how the access to, and distribution of, groundwater is mediated by technologies and critically re-visiting the normative associations that surround (ed) their development, promotion and use allows exposing and questioning the power asymmetries and processes of marginalization they reproduce or bring into being [73]. How this happens is often full of surprises and contingencies, as technologies are seldom as ‘fixed’ as they may seem. Individuals and communities often display creativity in (re)crafting and (re)designing technologies and infrastructural configurations through *bricolage*. In the process, they re-distribute and re-define water as well as power in subtle ways [74,75,43,76*,77**,72,78].<fnref n="8" />

In addition to technologies for accessing and distributing groundwater, technologies for the managed recharge of aquifers are particularly interesting as these seem to

provide promising examples of collective forms of care that promote the circularity of water.<fnref n="9" /> They are often based on reviving age-old community practices. Whether these indeed represent forms of water stewardship and solidarity cannot be assumed, but needs careful investigation [79].

## Institutions

Our third avenue of inquiry is about understanding how the rules and norms that shape practices of accessing, sharing and caring for groundwater emerge or change, often in interaction with socio-environmental histories,<fnref n="10" /> technologies and political-ecological contexts. Pluralization entails learning from these multiple, imbricated, and constantly in-the-making institutions. Although many agree that groundwater should be treated as a common pool resource (with multiple individuals being able to access and use it and, in the process, reducing the quantity or quality available to others), this is made difficult as the boundaries of the resource are often not precisely known. The fact that most groundwater is accessed through individually owned tubewells (with water rights often being based on land rights) makes groundwater governance *de facto* a combination of private ownership within a larger open access regime. The resulting institutional puzzle becomes even more complex because of how groundwater and surface water are interconnected, with the two often being regulated by different norms, technologies and laws [16]. Such connections may entail issues with local communities that are not using groundwater themselves but are harmed by its overexploitation by others. Hence, the springs or rivers they make use of may dry up, or there may be damage to wetlands or pastures.

This complexity makes the existence of successful institutions for caring for, and sharing of, groundwater something that is remarkable. Institutional theorizing about the commons has indeed often mobilized groundwater examples [80]. These show the endurance and flexibility of groundwater institutions. Examples for instance show how groundwater institutions build on institutions to manage surface water, as in the emblematic Huerta de Valencia irrigation system in Spain. Here, irrigators integrated groundwater and treated waste water with surface water flows over the past thirty years [81]. We build on

<footnote n="9">⁹ See Saidani; Dominguez *et al.*, Kulkarni *et al.*, and Aslekar *et al.*, (Supplementary material). Newly established smallholders in Algeria's Sahara and agribusinesses in Peru increasingly use secular recharge infrastructure adapted from nearby communities. However, this has led to water inequities with the very communities who invented these technologies. In Maharashtra, India, a local community designs rules and develops infrastructure to recharge and share groundwater.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ See Kulkarni *et al.* (Supplementary material). Women farmers in a village in Maharashtra explain how wider state-promoted trajectories of agricultural intensification, associated with new technologies and crops, have made farming and groundwater increasingly unsustainable. These women have few, if any, means to resist or change this.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ See Chitata *et al.* (Supplementary material). In Zimbabwe, more ‘efficient’ irrigation infrastructure, designed by engineers, interrupted the relation of irrigators with groundwater with potential negative effects on how the community will protect groundwater.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ The Supplementary materials provide some narratives that illustrate this: Peterson *et al.*, Bossenbroek *et al.*, Dajani, Olmos-Herrera.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ See de Bont *et al.* (Supplementary material) who highlight how in Tanzania, know-how from artisanal mining kickstarted the emerging groundwater economy.</footnote>
theorizations of groundwater institutions as emblematic examples of how common property resources can or should be managed, as these help shift the emphasis from individual to collective interests and from short-term gains to longer-term sustainability. Yet, we also complement and sometimes challenge existing theorizations with those that pay more attention to power and politics [44,47] and highlight ‘the commons’ as something relational, that is, alive and socially constructed [82]. Norms and rules-in-use emerge in the interplay between what are often considered distinct ‘formal’ and ‘informal’, ‘customary’ and ‘state-sanctioned’ arrangements, and they are animated by power relations [83]. They are often embedded in wider social relations [84],<fnref n="11" /> cosmologies or moral-ecological rationalities that have historically evolved and are only partly the result of conscious design processes.

## Conclusions

Transformations to groundwater sustainability in agriculture are unlikely to happen when governments continue promoting forms of agricultural intensification that systematically undervalue people and ecosystems. A systematic, feminist and anti-colonial critique of such exploitative and destructive ways of farming is therefore a necessary starting point in attempts to do groundwater governance differently. Such a critique highlights the ways in which the historical, social, and infrastructural practices in various places are moulded by racial, capitalist and colonial legacies. It comes with a questioning of the science that supports such water-intensive and exploitative farming models. Critique is not enough, however. Imagining and doing groundwater differently also requires pluralizing the conceptual vocabularies to make sense of, imagine and engage with groundwater.

Initiatives of people who come together to jointly access, share and care for groundwater — often going against pressures to overextract — form an important source of inspiration here. Documenting and understanding such initiatives forces attention away from the design of government efforts to regulate and control the pumping behaviour of individuals, towards the appreciation of and support for collective caring, recharging and sharing efforts around aquifers. Bringing into focus the many flexible adaptations and collaborations which people involved in such efforts engage in and experiment with to live and deal with fluctuating availabilities and qualities of groundwater in dynamic market contexts, draws attention to hitherto underexplored ways of knowing, accessing and sharing it. It also helps creating sensitivity

to the mundane work that goes into restoring, sustaining, or improving aquifers, and provides a strong reminder of how part of the motivation for engaging in such work stems from historical attachments to territories and people.

Documenting and assessing the knowledges, technologies and institutions that characterize community initiatives around groundwater forms the basis for creating new groundwater conversations and learnings. Important questions here are how and whether they provide inspirations for broader transformations to groundwater sustainability, and how the actions of communities in one place can be made useful elsewhere. Comparisons across heterogeneous communities sometimes require difficult translations and simplifications. To avoid getting trapped in one single language, we suggest nurturing and thinking with differences, learning from each other's idioms so that no one remains the same as they were at the beginning. Also, in tracing patterns across initiatives and distilling lessons for transformations to sustainability, it is important to remain attentive to the fact that water is a deeply contested resource, the governance of which is always thick with politics [37]. This also means that actual governance arrangements for groundwater, even when community-based and characterized by care for the aquifer and for each other, will often be negotiated, necessitating suboptimal compromises that may not be to everyone's full satisfaction.

## Conflict of interest statement

Nothing declared.

## Appendix A. Supplementary data

Supplementary material related to this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2021.03.004.

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