Today, struggles over rights to water center on who owns water resources and determines how they get used and in what ways water futures are being envisioned and planned. Large-scale water infrastructures, privatization, and financialization have been remaking frameworks through which water has been approached and understood - namely water as more than resource, as a commons, and as a right…
ARTWORKS
ESSAYS
ANDREW ALAN JOHNSON
The politics of the natural world – the phrase evokes a struggle over resources and rights. It calls for us to examine the unequal ways in which rivers are diverted, the iniquities of extraction, soil degradation, and class hierarchy.
JEROME WHITINGTON
From the perspective of living river ecologies, a hydropower installation is an environmental disaster. Like all disasters, it unfolds along intersecting temporalities whose resonances and dissonances amplify across each other, and lull and crescendo in waves.
MICHAEL PRYKE
Water is not what it used to be. Increasingly, around the world, water is being mixed with private finance and practices often referred to as ‘financialization.’
MEERA KARUNANANTHAN & MARCELA OLIVERA
In March 2023, the UN 2030 Water Conference brought together international financial institutions, wealthy donor countries, philanthro-capitalist foundations, and private investment firms seeking new investment opportunities in water and water-related services.