The challenge to revert unsustainable trends:Uneven development and water degradation in the Rio de Janeiro Metropolitan Area

The search for water sustainability requires not only a combination of technical and managerial responses, but also firm action against socioeconomic injustices and political inequalities. The recognition of the politicised nature of water problems deserves particular attention in areas marred by long-term trends of environmental degradation and social exclusion. A case study of the Baixada Fluminense, an urbanised wetland in the Metropolitan Area of Rio de Janeiro, illustrates the challenge to reverse unsustainable practices in situations where water problems have been politically and electorally exploited. The research made use of an interdisciplinary approach to assess past and present initiatives that have attempted, but systematically failed, to restore river ecology and improve water services. The empirical results have important implications for water policy making and urban planning

Water balances in Palestine : numbers and political culture in the Middle East

Meeting: Carleton University / IDRC Workshop on Water in the Eastern Mediterranean, 29-30 Oct. 1998, Ottawa, ON, CAIn IDL-2799

Contingent spaces for smallholder participation in GlobalGAP: insights from Kenyan horticulture value chains

Private standards initiatives (PSIs) in agri‐food value chains raise questions of democratic governance and accountability relating to the voice and agency of those whom the standards are designed to benefit or whom they most affect. We employ the concept of ‘spaces for participation’ to analyse participation in a particular PSI, GlobalGAP, and assess how, and to what extent, it opens up a space for debate about what constitutes good practice in agri‐food chains and for whom. We draw on focus groups with smallholders, together with semi‐structured interviews and workshops held with actors at the national and international scales to examine PSIs operating in Kenyan export horticulture to examine good agricultural practice (GAP) standards. Our analysis suggests that despite public announcements that these initiatives promote the voice of the farmer, the direct participation of farmers is largely absent from these policy spaces at present. This is related to the way in which invitations to the spaces for participation are constructed, what is deemed to be appropriate subjects for discussion in PSIs as well as the practical challenges associated with the organisation of farmers across spatial scales. The spaces for participation are located largely at the international and national scales with few connections to the local scale. This paper contributes to an extension of value chain analysis that re‐asserts the importance of institutional context and how value chains are embedded in particular socio‐economic and political systems

Water worlds: Introduction to the special issue of <i>Social Studies of Science</i>

The use and management of the world’s freshwater has become a critical focus of scholarly engagement. In the introduction to this special issue on water worlds, we highlight two contributions that science and technology studies offers to recent conceptualizations of water relations. The first emphasizes the multiple ontologies of water, resulting from its varied enactments in different sociotechnical assemblages. The second underscores water as a substance that does not merely mediate relations between existing social groups, but constitutes a necessary material for the organization of life in late modernity. </jats:p

Rural Electrification as a “Bioterritorial” Technology

This essay tells the history of rural electrification during the New Deal in the United States as a technology of government. In this sense, it argues that rural electrification (the technologies that made it possible, the institutional apparatuses established for its management, and the discursive practices deployed in its actualization) helped construct, maintain, and solidify emerging notions of the “rural”—understood here as a specific territory-population nexus. The essay argues that even though this new conception of the rural had been in the making since the early years of the twentieth century, rural electrification became a technology of the New Deal regime inasmuch as it helped give the rural a conceptual rigor that turned it into a governable object. In the process, rural electrification (1) differentiated the concept of the rural from other concurrent, often interchangeable concepts like “country folks,” “farmers,” and “frontier dwellers,” and (2) constructed and articulated together technical apparatuses of electricity, an old/new category of rural space, and an old/new category of rural population. More specifically, rural electrification produced the rural population-territory nexus as a legible object of government.</jats:p

Negotiating Hydro-Scales, Forging States: Comparison of the Upper Tigris/Euphrates and Jordan River Basins

In this comparative study of two water basins in the Middle East, we examine the hydro-political construction of scale as central to state and nation building, and their territorial consolidation. We argue that scalar negotiations and constructions of freshwater became central to the very consolidation of both Turkey and Israel. The examples we offer also illustrate the usefulness of a performative approach to scale, benefiting from but moving beyond a politics of scale approach. The com- parative focus on hydro-scalar politics and performativities in relation to state and nation building offered a) lends to an enriched understanding of water politics in these two contested river basins, b) enables fuller understanding of how water becomes central to the processes by which nations, states, and territories are con- solidated in this region, and c) contributes to recent debates in political geography by demonstrating the value of scalar and performative approaches. Underscoring these linkages, the analysis differs from many works on water in the Middle East, contributes to studies of state and nation building as contested processes, and avoids the assumption of state or national scales as ontological pre-givens.Science, Faculty ofResources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES), Institute forReviewedFacult