Abstract
Andrea Ballestero’s A Future History of Water is a finely crafted ethnography addressing the broad question of how people make a difference in the world. The book makes contributions to scholarly work on water as well as wider debates on materialism, care and politics in the social sciences. This text follows water to less expected places, ‘sites that could not be found in National Geographic’ (p. 186), to examine the economic, regulatory and social processes that determine water access, availability and responsibility. Drawing on extensive field work in Costa Rica and Brazil over the last twenty years, the ethnography reflects the global shift from privatization to financialization of water by focusing on the everyday practices of water practitioners ‘in cubicles, community meetings, and Excel files’ as they attempt to realize water as a human right within a market framework (p. 5). Drawing on feminist studies of science and anthropology of finance, Ballestero’s book shifts the conceptual frameworks of recent work in anthropology and geographies of water in important new directions by focussing on financial, legal and political logics, and their possibilities for careful, tactical change.
The book invites us to consider how the meanings of water are defined relationally through abstract bureaucratic and technical decisions. Ballestero opens by noting that despite the formal similarities between rights and commodities, the status of water as one or the other is hotly debated. This theme runs throughout the individual chapters, and the author uses it to speak to the larger question of how distinctions between categories, like science and nature or politics and technology, are enacted in practice. Ballestero’s fieldwork finds economists, lawyers and activists disentangling these categories through their everyday work. In response to questions about the future of water, respondents discuss technical, tactical modifications with material consequences.
Ballestero introduces the concept of ‘devices’ to frame the different instruments her interlocutors use ‘for organising and channelling technopolitical work’ (p. 9). ‘Device’ simultaneously references semiotics/linguistics (device as a poetic metaphor), technical/material (device as a gadget) and governance (device as power/knowledge dispositif or apparatus). Developing the relationship between signifying and material bodies from feminist studies of science, the author suggests devices are a crucial contemporary ethnographic object akin to ‘necklaces and arm shells’, adding that ‘If these devices are practices in the world, they also affect the world by creating new categories’ (pp. 10–11). Rather than take devices as representative of a larger story, such as ‘welfare in Costa Rica’, the author’s analysis stays close to the form and use of the device to notice effects of small changes, as other studies might do with a particular technology. This attention to small everyday changes connects to larger ideas about politics and agency where ‘fundamental questions are being answered quietly by devices like this’ (p. 8). The book analyses four examples of devices involved in the pricing, governance, and care of water—formula, index, list, pact.
The first two chapters focus on how water is distinguished as human right or commodity in the work and ideas of government water regulators. Without legal provision, the humanitarian status of water provision in Costa Rica requires the country’s decentralized community-managed water distribution organizations to be non-profit and the status of water as a human right depends on a mathematical calculation. The backdrop to the first chapter, ‘Formula’, is the proposed (but abandoned) shift in the water regulation formula in Costa Rica from an ‘accounting’ approach with flexibility for individual utilities, to an ‘economics’ approach where the acceptable rate of return is fixed nationally. This would destroy the carefully worked out equilibrium that regulators work so hard to maintain. If the production costs shown in community water supply accounts rise, then water prices set by the community organizations should also rise. If production costs do not rise, an unjustified profit is created, and water has become a commodity. Ballestero’s close reading of these technical practices shows the ways that relations between categories such as ‘society’ and ‘market’ are enacted with real effects on our financial and humanitarian worlds.
Moving from the regulatory to parliamentary politics, chapter 3, ‘List’, opens with a water taxonomy produced by Libertarian congressional representatives—‘Rivers, rivers where women do laundry, lakes, reservoirs, aquifers, channelled water, ocean water, freshwater, brackish water, water used for irrigation, ice cubes, clouds, waste water’ (p. 136). The list, compiled by the author from parliamentary debates, is evidence of the Libertarian Party strategy which successfully prevented water from becoming a human right in Costa Rica. Closer to Haraway than Latour, the author uses this situation to suggest that attention to materiality can be connected to political projects of many kinds and weaves this into a larger caution against an overliteral new materialism and an argument for attention to material and semiotic devices rather than ‘the materiality of any particular resource’.
The book’s last section, ‘Pact’, moves from Costa Rica to the very different political climate of North-East Brazil. Ballestero focuses on an innovative political initiative to create collective care for water through ‘collective public declarations of responsibility for water at a local level.’ Noting that concrete, physical, infrastructures have been the vehicle for patronage, corruption and exclusion in Brazil’s North-East, Ballestero focuses on something less obviously material—care. This follows the overall line of the book’s feminist influence, cultivating appreciation for everyday practices, rather than spectacular interventions. Appropriately, the material-semiotic focus of this chapter is the humble post-it note, an integral part of the process of promising water responsibility the pact involves. Valued for their mobility, post-it notes allow different ideas to be gathered and co-located, while retaining individual identity. Ballestero uses the role of post-it notes in the pact to suggest an alternative process-focussed politics that works within histories for incremental progressive change.
A Future History of Water braids a wide range of topics and detailed analyses into a compelling set of arguments. The author’s length of time in the field, in the discipline and in working with these ideas shine in a lucid and light-touch ability to speak to specific questions while simultaneously engaging larger debates. As the title suggests, the situations the author analyses have uncertain future effects; the interest is in processes, not outcomes. Suggesting how we might value things that are not obviously productive or efficient, Ballestero orients this work from a practice of wonder, to find the mystery in the mundane. This is exciting new work on water in ‘unlikely places’, that avoids easy answers. The book is essential reading for water scholars and practitioners, and valuable for those interested in ethnographies of technical practices, regulation and finance. More broadly, anyone concerned with new developments in anthropology and social science will have much to gain.