Water Footprints and ‘Pozas’: Conversations about Practices and Knowledges of Water Efficiency

Guzmán, Carolina Domínguez; Verzijl, Andres; Zwarteveen, Margreet

doi:10.3390/w9010016

Cited by 24 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…Our proposal is inspired by scholars who suggest that perhaps there is no larger structure or totality that holds reality together. Rather than helping uncover or expose larger structures or totalities, therefore, they propose using ethnographic methods to trace the multiple ways in which realities or worlds are constituted and enacted, accepting that there may be clashes, convergences or overlaps between these worlds, making them more or less durable or mobile [3][4][5][6][7]. Gibson-Graham [7] refer to such an ethnographic approach as "weak theory and thick description"; it aims to move beyond readymade narratives or big theories to explain processes of change, to instead focus on people's multiple socioecological lived experiences, everyday practices and roles, complex agencies and emotional relations.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Attention to Sociotechnical Tinkering with Irrigation Infrastructure as a Way to Rethink Water Governance

Kemerink-Seyoum

Chitata

Guzmán

et al. 2019

Water

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Inspired by the proposal of political scientists and anthropologists to focus on “practice” as the smallest unit of analysis for understanding politics, as well as the renewed scholarly attention to materiality, this paper sets out to show that detailed ethnographic attention to processes and acts of sociotechnical tinkering provides a useful entry-point for understanding water governance. This is so methodologically, because infrastructural forms of tinkering are very visible, and therefore researchable, manifestations of agency and change in water governance. Attention to sociotechnical tinkering helps shift the basis for understanding water realities from official norms, designs and laws to everyday practices. This in turn allows questioning, rather than assuming, how expertise and agency are exercised and distributed in water governance, thereby also providing useful information for re-thinking water politics. In addition, by explicitly engaging with the contingency and capriciousness of actual water flows, a sociotechnical tinkering approach entails a much-needed re-appreciation of the materiality of water, infrastructure and other matter, a re-appreciation that extends to those who design, construct, operate and use water infrastructure.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Attention to Sociotechnical Tinkering with Irrigation Infrastructure as a Way to Rethink Water Governance

Kemerink-Seyoum

Chitata

Guzmán

et al. 2019

Water

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“…Based on a literature review, they argue that current water governance arrangements cover 'blue' water (surface and groundwater) only, and that 'green' (the water available to plants in the unsaturated soil increasingly appropriated for agricultural production at the cost of groundwater-dependent natural ecosystems) and atmospheric water also need to be included. Te Wierik et al make the connection that the new technologies of water harvesting risk creating new hydrosocial territories (after Boelens et al, 2016), raising questions about 'the conditions of access to and control of this water resource' (2019: 13), while Guzman et al (2017) point to the role of capital flows in sustaining techno-scientific advances that marginalise or replace local knowledge of these different waters.…”

Section: Reconceptualising Groundwater and Atmospheric Watermentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Evaporation has been critically scrutinised by a small number of water governance scholars who have seen it subjected to the efficiency imperative that motivates actors in global institutions such as the World Bank (Shah et al, 2018;Guzman et al, 2017;van der Kooij et al, 2017;World Bank, 2017;Boelens and Vos, 2012). Both bodies of work attend to processes of abstraction and commensuration for they see modernist water management paradigms and their underpinning logics as 'efforts to account for water as if it were the same everywhere, so that it can be compared across places and times' (Guzman et al, 2017: 10).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The politics of evaporation and the making of atmospheric territory in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin

Jackson

Head

2021

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

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Scholarship on the hydrosocial cycle has tended to overlook the atmospheric phase of the cycle. This paper identifies and conceptualises a politics of evaporation in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin. Evaporation is not a neutral hydrological concept to be understood, measured or acted on without an appreciation of the networks in which it originates, the geo-political circumstances that continue to shape its circulation, and its socio-spatial effects. The politics of evaporation is conceptualised here as a process of hydrosocial territorialisation in which atmospheric water came to be known as a force acting within a balanced hydrologic cycle, and ‘atmospheric territory’ was created. The scientific origins of evaporation show (i) how modernist hydrologic technologies and conventions that relied on containment and territorialisation to account for and control water led to the negative depiction of evaporation as a loss, and (ii) the historical depth of processes of abstraction and commensuration that are so influential in today’s regimes of water accounting and marketisation. The politics of evaporation is identified empirically in the controversy surrounding the management of the Menindee Lakes and the lower Darling River in New South Wales, where efforts to ‘save’ water according to the logic of efficiency have enrolled atmospheric water into a Basin-wide program to redistribute surface water. The lens of evaporation theorises a neglected aspect of the materiality of water that is particularly important to the dry, hot parts of the world. It challenges us to rethink the ‘cycle’ as well as the ‘hydro’, while providing further evidence of the value of thinking about territory in a material register as volumetric and not areal.

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“…What is optimal at one scale and for one actor or object may not be optimal for another. There is a particular need to account for the spatial and temporal characteristics of water footprints (Guzmán et al, 2017) and accordingly, handprints, compared to, for example, carbon footprints, which can be straightforwardly added up to global scale.…”

Section: Question 1: What Is Being Improved?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Giving Legs to Handprint Thinking: Foundations for Evaluating the Good We Do

et al. 2020

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In environmental management and sustainability there is an increasing interest in measurement and accounting of beneficial impact-as an incentive to action, as a communication tool, and to move toward a positive, constructive approach focused on opportunities rather than problems. One approach uses the metaphor of a "handprint," complementing the notion of environmental footprints, which have been widely adopted for impact measurement and accounting. We analyze this idea by establishing core principles of handprint thinking: Handprint encourages actions with positive impacts and connects to analyses of footprint reductions but adds value to them and addresses the issue of what action should be taken. We also identify five key questions that need to be addressed and decisions that need to be made in performing a (potentially quantitative) handprint assessment, related to scoping of the improvement to be made, how it is achieved, and how credit is assigned, taking into account constraints on action. A case study of the potential water footprint reduction of an average Finn demonstrates how handprint thinking can be a natural extension of footprint reduction analyses. We find that there is a diversity of possible handprint assessments that have the potential to encourage doing good. Their common foundation is "handprint thinking." Plain Language Summary The "handprint" has been suggested as a way of looking at the good we do, to complement the negative impacts captured by environmental "footprints." There are many ways we could try to assess a handprint, which capture different perspectives on the world, and the potential role of the handprint assessment in moving toward sustainability. This paper cuts down the definition of a handprint to three core principles and then discusses five questions that need to be considered and the decisions that need to be made in designing or evaluating a handprint assessment. A case study looks at how an average Finnish consumer can reduce the water footprint of the food they eat.

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Water Footprints and ‘Pozas’: Conversations about Practices and Knowledges of Water Efficiency

Cited by 24 publications

References 30 publications

Attention to Sociotechnical Tinkering with Irrigation Infrastructure as a Way to Rethink Water Governance

Attention to Sociotechnical Tinkering with Irrigation Infrastructure as a Way to Rethink Water Governance

The politics of evaporation and the making of atmospheric territory in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin

Giving Legs to Handprint Thinking: Foundations for Evaluating the Good We Do

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