King’s Water Annual Lecture

The King’s Water Activity Hub is proud to announce our 2016-2017 Annual Lecture, featuring Professor Margreet Zwarteveen from one of our partner institutions, UNESCO-IHE. The Annual Lecture will be held Wednesday 1 February 2017 from 4:30-6pm in the Pyramid Room (K4U.04) of the Strand Building, King’s College London. A drinks reception will follow.

King's Water Annual Lecture - King's Human Geo Seminar - Margreet Zwarteveen - 1 February

Localizing waters: Bringing global water policy science initiatives down to Earth

This seminar compares the waters performed by emerging policy science initiatives – most notably Water Accounting (WA) and the Water Footprint (WFP) – with other possible waters – such as those used to grow alfa alfa in Sudan for export to Saudia Arabia, or those to produce mangos on the desert coast of Peru for export to the Netherlands – to open up a discussion about the entangled who and what questions of environmental representation and knowledge. Inspired by feminist technoscience studies, I treat ‘global’ and ‘local’ waters in symmetrical terms by showing how all of them emerge from specific (or local) networks of people and practices, as part of particular traditions and languages (cultures) of care, control and calculation. Hence, rather than treating WA and WFP waters as ‘scientific’ (or universal) – and therefore as something that is separate(d) from traditions or politics – and others as ‘cultural’ – and therefore thick with local beliefs and superstitions – I use ethnographic methods to describe both as consisting of intricate entanglements of knowledge, politics and culture. I do this to virtually create a more or less level playing field where the different waters can enter into a conversation with each other. Is there something that those who developed and promote the WFP and WA waters can learn from Peruvian poza irrigators or entrepreneurial alfa alfa producers, and vice versa? And what, if anything, gets lost when one water logic becomes dominant? More generally, what does the existence of many different waters imply for attempts to know or govern water and use it more wisely – how to judge which water is best, fairest, truest or most efficient? I suggest that rather than efforts to commensurate differences in one overarching (global?) order or system of representation or measurement, there is merit in allowing many ways to engage with, relate to and account for water – many different versions of water – to co-exist. The implication is that aspirations of transcendence, integration and inclusion (consensus) that continue to guide policy science initiatives in water need to be replaced with the equally difficult to attain but more modest and pragmatic ideals of situatedness, translation (mediation) and contestation (or dissent).