De-colonizing groundwater governance? | SOAS University of London
Channel: SOAS University of London
Date: 03/03/2020

'De-colonizing groundwater governance? Learning from local initiatives to care for, share, or recharge aquifers' was a seminar given by Margreet Zwarteveen on the 27th of February 2020. Read more at http://bit.ly/32JgXVw

Moving away from the alarmist and managerial tone of most groundwater scholarship, I use this presentation for a plea to anchor the search for realizing transformations to groundwater sustainability in the comparative documentation of promising grass-roots initiatives around groundwater in places where pressures on the resource are particularly acute. Focusing on practices - of knowing, accessing and sharing - the proposed approach combines qualitative ethnographic methods with hydrogeological and engineering insights to enunciate and normatively assess the knowledges, technologies and institutions that characterize these grass-roots initiatives. This effort is inspired by theorizations of water as simultaneously social and natural, builds on recent critical scholarship on institutions, and has a particular sensitivity to how the distribution and use of groundwater is mediated by technologies.