Alex Loftus

The Power of Water: Developing Dialogues between Foucault and Gramsci:

This paper develops an exchange between two important strands of research within contemporary human geography. One concerns the matter of socionatures; the other concerns the operation and establishment of power within liberal, capitalist social formations. Through mobilising some of the recent writings on the political ecology of water, we seek to show how an engagement with Gramscian and Foucauldian work on power could be mutually beneficial for both areas of research. In so doing, we seek to mobilise some of the tensions, as well as the points of engagement, between Gramscian and Foucauldian approaches. Through opening up the ways in which water contributes to the survival of liberal capitalist formations and also to the production of distinctive subjectivities, this dialogue provides new inroads into the politics and praxis of everyday life.

Of liquid dreams: a political ecology of water privatization in Buenos Aires

The privatization of water and sanitation in Buenos Aires has been hailed by its neo-liberal proponents as an unprecedented success. This paper takes a deeper and more critical look than many of these accounts. It looks at political and economic changes within Argentina in order to explain the troubling findings regarding the performance of Aguas Argentinas, the private company that won the concession for most of Buenos Aires. The paper begins with a brief overview of the political and economic context in Argentina before describing the process involved in the water privatization in Buenos Aires. It then discusses the outcomes, including changes in coverage and charges to end users as well as impacts on labour and the environment. The paper describes how the promised reduction in water tariffs did not materialize (in fact the opposite occurred) and how agreed-upon targets for expanding sewerage connections and sewage treatment were not met. It also describes how the national government intervened to support the water company in conflicts with the regulatory agency and even by-passed the regulatory agency when the water company wanted to renegotiate the contract. Finally, the role of international financial institutions in this process is discussed.

Rethinking Political Ecologies of Water

Abstract The failure to provide a safe supply of clean drinking water to over one billion people in the world remains one of the most telling indictments of development policy and practice. A series of studies within political ecology has taken this dramatic failure as an entry point into broader questions around the operation of power in the contemporary world. From basic questions around who is to blame for this catastrophic failure, to broader questions around the consolidation of forms of rule, this work provides a crucial lens on broader social and environmental questions. This paper provides an overview of recent work on the political ecology of water as well as mobilising a series of case studies from the authors own research in Durban, South Africa.

Revitalizing the production of nature thesis A Gramscian turn

This paper revisits the central ontological claim in the production of nature thesis, Neil Smith’s proposition that labour is at the heart of the mutual co-production of nature and society. Surveying Smith’s work and others, we argue that there is a danger of losing the embodied, historically and geographically specific practices that are so central to the making of natures. Turning to the work of Antonio Gramsci, we find crucial resources that enable a historicized and geographically contextualized understanding of the making of natures.

Financializing Desalination: Rethinking the Returns of Big Infrastructure

Against the trend prevalent during the 1990s and 2000s, large-scale infrastructural projects have made a comeback in the water sector. Although sometimes framed as part of a broader sustainable transition, the return of big infrastructure is a much more complicated story in which finance has played a crucial role. In the following article, we explore this encounter between finance and water infrastructure using the case of Britains first experiment in desalination technologies, the Thames Water Desalination Plant (TWDP). On the surface, the plant appears to be a classic example of the successes of normative industrial ecology, in which sustainability challenges have been met with forward-thinking green innovations. However, the TWDP is utterly dependent on a byzantine financial model, which has shaped Thames Waters investment strategy over the last decade. This article returns to the fundamental question of whether London ever needed a desalination plant in the first place. Deploying an urban political ecology approach, we demonstrate how the plant is simultaneously an iconic illustration of ecological modernization and a fragile example of an infrastructure-heavy solution to the demands of financialization. Understanding the development of the TWDP requires a focus on the scalar interactions between flows of finance, waste, energy and water that are woven through the hydrosocial cycle of London.

Violent Geographical Abstractions

This paper historicises the emergence (and subsequent power) of geographical abstractions. Following Karl Marx in the Grundrisse, I argue that one of the central features of modern capitalist society is rule by abstractions. As both Derek Sayer and Henri Lefebvre argue, such abstractions enact forms of violence within the societies subjected to their rule. The three geographical abstractions I consider are space, nature, and scale. Whilst I argue that some forms of abstraction are transhistorical, my interest is more in how these transhistorical abstractions rub up against new forms specific to capitalist societies. In particular, following Alfred Sohn-Rethel, I am interested in the role played by the exchange abstraction in producing distinctive spatial relations, a commoditised nature, and new forms of scalar hierarchy. The paper sheds light on the utility of a historical–geographical materialist approach for situating the production of violent geographical abstractions and envisaging a world free from their domination.

Political Ecology I: Where is political ecology?

Political ecology has often defined itself against Eurocentric conceptions of the world. Nevertheless, recent contributions have questioned the ongoing reproduction of an Anglo-American mainstream against ‘other political ecologies’. Decentring Anglo-American political ecology has therefore forced a greater recognition of traditions that have developed under the same banner, albeit in different linguistic or national contexts. In addition, thinking more about the situatedness of knowledge claims has forced a deeper questioning of the Eurocentric and colonial production of political ecological research. In this report I begin by reviewing a range of political ecological traditions before going on to look at decolonial moves within the field. I conclude by considering how political ecologists might reframe their practice as one of relational comparison.

Political ecology II: Whither the state?

However conceptualised, the institutions and relations associated with the state are clearly crucial to political ecological research. Environmental policies are enacted through state institutions, and property rights over land and resources are enforced by the legal framework and monopoly power associated with the state form. Nevertheless, political ecologists have sometimes had an uneasy relationship with conceptualisations of the state, leading to recurring questions over the adequacy of political ecological theorisations. Over the last decade and a half such questions have led to a call for dialogues with political geography and, more recently, with critical geopolitics. In this second progress report, I review recent political ecological theorisations of the state, pointing to a set of shared concerns associated with the processes, relations and struggles through which states are brought into being and acquire certain effects. I will conclude with a note of caution when it comes to an uncritical dialogue with more abstract interpretations of state power.

Integrating what and for whom? Financialisation and the Thames Tideway Tunnel

The Thames Tideway Tunnel (TTT), often referred to as the Thames super sewer, is currently one of the largest infrastructure projects underway in any European city. Costing an estimated £4.2 billion, the sewer connects London’s Victorian sewerage network with the Thames Wastewater Treatment Works at Beckton. The latter facility has been described as the UK’s Water–Energy–Food nexus poster child, for its combination of desalination facilities, green energy generation and wastewater treatment. While physically connected to the Beckton plant, the TTT is, paradoxically, designed with an apparent disregard for the water–energy nexus. If the Beckton plant represents a nexus-based vision of integration – what Macrorie and Marvin (2016) refer to as Mode 2 Urban Integration – the TTT harks back to a view of urban integration carried from the Victorian era through to the present moment. What unites the two projects, and what undergirds the transformation of the hydrosocial cycle, is a financial model more focused on the extraction of rents from Thames Water’s consumers. Thames Water’s dismissal of genuinely integrated alternatives appears guided more by the financialisation of the urban integrated ideal than by what is needed to respond to London’s broader environmental needs. Contesting the project, therefore, will involve slicing through the various claims to integration, going beyond the many proposals for evidence-based alternatives, and capturing the transformations being wrought by finance’s entry into infrastructure provision.

Book review: Cultivating the Nile: The Everyday Politics of Water in Egypt

are deeply complicit in the planetary crisis Crutzen, Steffen and others are sounding the alarm about. That calls for more than introspection: it also demands action designed to entirely alter the disciplinary habits definitive of geography today. How one acts towards such an end I don’t know, but it will take more than the sort of mission statement recently issued by the American Anthropological Association (see ‘Changing the climate’ at http://www.aaanet.org/). Most of the chapters are short but dense with argument and references. There are some authors well-known to human geographers in the mix, such as Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers. Though almost all the chapters are written in a conventional way, Bronislaw Szerszynski’s epilogue deserves a special mention for being creative and mind-expanding in equal measure. A work of academic fiction, it sees the author playing the role of the extra-terrestrial Commission on Planetary Ages called to consider whether humans should be the onomatophore of a new geological epoch. I can also commend the several non-Anglophone authors for their written English: these chapters are every bit as readable as the others. Overall, I read this book with great pleasure (notwithstanding Bludhorn’s chastening analysis). I can recommend it very highly – though find it a little sad that the editors did not find a way to get someone from geography in the contributor list. However, as indicated above, there are some critical absences. First, if one does not know the basics about Anthropocene science this book does not help – there’s a degree of assumed knowledge. A second absence is a more careful editorial mapping of the current role played by the SSH in the ‘Anthroposcene’ – by which I mean the gamut of geoscientific papers, conferences, institutions, networks and nodes that have made the Anthropocene an idea to be reckoned with. Such a mapping would have allowed the editors to be forensic in identifying the different places where the SSH might usefully play the three roles identified above. Related to this, the editors and authors have a fairly narrow remit in this book insofar as geoscientific debates about the Anthropocene are but one aspect of larger changes in the world of global change science. A proper consideration of what Anthropocene science means for the SSH (and vice versa) needs to be mindful of these broader developments. It is also odd that no lessons are drawn from parallel developments in other fields of science. For instance, the behavioural and life sciences have had a big impact on parts of SSH over the last 20 years – sociologist Nick Rose’s research is a good example. What can be learnt from this for an exploration of how the SSH should react to the announcement of the Anthropocene? Finally, though ostensibly about the SSH, why no geoscientists as authors? Do they not have something to say about the roles and contributions the SSH should play, especially if there is to be a partnership with geoscience looking ahead? In sum, anyone interested in the Anthropocene can benefit from reading this stimulating collection of essays. It poses deep questions and provides an array of thought-provoking answers, even if readers are left pondering how to make sense of the SSH and geoscience moving forward together.