Search for: All records

What does it entail to foreground water flourishing as a stance toward the Anthropocene? During an exercise at the Anthropocene Campus Melbourne, about twenty participants individually drew images of ‘water flourishing’ leading, with only one or two exceptions of Edenic representations, to a wall of images depicting no humans. That small experience reproduced a larger cultural and environmental management configuration: people-less water flourishing. If we face such constraints in imagining, representing, and enacting hydroflourishing, we remain stuck in familiar loops either of: 1) elemental thinking that excludes the human; or 2) anthropocenic thinking that too often addresses the human primarily as destroyer. How do we imagine our being with water in different ways? How do we move away from pervasive narratives of water crisis without, at the same time, romancing water? Feminist, decolonial, and Indigenous approaches to water and its cultural politics ask us to consider the elemental not only in substance, but also in rights regimes and in the project of flourishing. In this paper, we present examples of water flourishing projects and impasses from three sites: Kathmandu, Nepal; Perth, Australia; and the Florida Everglades, United States. All show both the problems and the promise of co-centering the human and nonhuman in their interdependent relations when it comes to water flourishing. 

Abstract Over the past two decades, scholars have invoked E. P. Thompson's and James Scott's concept of a “moral economy” to explain how people mobilize notions of justice to make claims to water. We draw together 20 years of literature to assess the state‐of‐the‐art present in research on moral economies for water. We trace the historical foundations of the moral economies concept and its relevance to water; define the three basic components of a moral economy for water—(1) shared understandings of justice, (2) normative economic practices, (3) social pressure mechanisms—and provide examples of how they manifest globally. We then discuss how moral economies for water can cycle through four basic states—balanced struggle, intensified reaction, mass revolt, and collapse and dissolution—at different scales. We also explore the implications of the moral economies framework for key areas of current research on water: water sharing, water commons, water markets, and biocultural outcomes, and discuss the ways in which the moral economies framework dovetails with recent advances in water research, especially the economics of water and development. We argue that the moral economies framework is a powerful explanatory tool for understanding the relationships between ideas of water justice, economic behaviors, and mechanisms of social enforcement that complements other methodological approaches and theoretical perspectives. We envision moral economies for water as a field that can facilitate a range of norm‐based analyses of economic behavior and water justice, including across scales—from local to global—and in broad, integrative, multiscalar, and cross‐disciplinary ways. This article is categorized under:Human Water > Water GovernanceHuman Water > Value of WaterHuman Water > Rights to Water