HYDROUS '08

Dear Readers. Today I give some update and documentation on Hydrous '08, which was an STS and arts event that I held with several fantastic colleagues in Rotterdam this August.  The event was sponsored by a Dissemination grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, in association with my research project "In the Web and on the Ground: Global Circulation and Local Achievements of a Prospective Shift in Water Governance".  Hydrous '08 was developed in response to and in an effort to join forces with a growing community of artists, scientists, curators and writers who are developing creative strategies to address environmental practices. Hydrous asks how Science and Technology Studies (STS) research practice might intersect with with these efforts?

STS scholars move beyond traditional scholarly formats in multiple ways, sometimes attempting to intervene in policy discussions and/or the development of new technologies. Yet in engaging society in these ways, we continue to use the research article and book formats as our expository scholarly medium. So while the efficacy of STS interventions continues to reach beyond the academy, the exposition of scholarly insights remains within it. To the extent that the expository capacities of STS scholarship remains relevant today, there are good reasons to hope that new modes of expression are possible that might further texture our social relations beyond academy. It is clear that the problematic field of water resource management is providing an occasion for the emergence of a new breed of activist artists who are already using the tools of science and engineering to make works that problematize environmental practices or propose solutions to environmental problems.

A few examples of this from the U.S. context are the 2006 WATER WORKS Exhibition curated by Patricia Watts and Amy Lipton from ECOARTSPACE in California http://www.ecoartspace.org/. The show gathered together artists who work collaboratively with scientists, environmentalists, conservationists and government agencies to create studio works such as photography, multi-media collage, and sculpture, that can be presented and sold in galleries. A similar format has been pursued by the recent “Feedback” show at the Eyebeam experimental arts and technology lab in New York http://eyebeam.org/. The piece “Drink Pee, Drink Pee” by Britta Riley and Rebecca Bray, maps the path of urine through the water cycle, starting with a toilet and ending with a water fountain, much like a 3-d diagram of the paradox of waste disposal. The EXITART gallery space, also in New York, has recently developed new program in (social environmental aesthetics) that is devoted solely to addressing issues of the environment by assembling artists, activists, scientists and scholars to address environmental issues through presentations of visual art. They also have panels and a lecture series that will communicate international activities concerning environmental and social activism. , performances http://www.exitart.org/site/pub/main/index.html.

When looking at these programs and the works that they curate, what one notices is an incidental absence of voice on the part of critical social science scholars. Hydrous is an attempt to point to a potential space in a field of bourgeoning practices, where science and technology studies and arts communities might work together to address contemporary social relations of water governance. Let me be more specific about this potential space. What we find thriving in the emergent curatorial practices I just mentioned, are potent practices at the intersection of science, technology development and the arts. I believe that that intersection could look very different with the inclusion of STS scholarship, precisely insofar as STS scholarship takes the practices of science and technology development as objects of inquiry that are delicately woven with what would otherwise be considered exogenous matters of concern, such as the dynamics of markets, policy discourses, and legislative conventions. In other words, the STS of environmental practices is not equal to environmental science and technology, because it entails a deliberate and critical preoccupation with the economic, political, and communicative dimensions of science and technology.

The social relations of water today hi-light the urgency of these STS preoccupations, insofar as their dynamics entail not only scientific and technical content but also crucially the interpenetration of markets, the cultural movements that sustain them, and the political struggles that animate them. I believe that to elucidate these interpenetrations is a marker of STS scholarship which differentiates it from operational scientific and technological, and even artistic know- how. Hydrous asks “how might the preoccupations of STS scholarly practice bring to fruition its collaborative relations with environmental arts?” Our program at Hydrous '08,  I hope, can be considered a first baby step in posing that question in ways that will be meaningful to many. Think of it as a moment of opening, finding spaces of contact to become strange and more multiply involved.

In our FIRST PANEL we listened to three scholars whose work on water governance provides multiple angels from which to think through STS preoccupations with water governance. Beginning our first panel was Wiebe Bijker, a person who has lived a deep and textured history, both personal and professional, in the field of water governance. He is professor 

of Technology & Society at the University of Maastricht and a former president of the society for social studies of science. Political and normative issues have been central in his research. His most recent work relates to issues of vulnerability in technological cultures.

We also heard presentations of current research from two young STS scholars whose work is international in scope.

Andrea Ballestero has degrees in Law from Universidad Autónoma de Centro América in Costa Rica, a Masters in Environmental Law from Universidad para la Cooperación Internacional in Costa Rica, a Masters in Environmental Policy from the University of Michigan, and three years of course work in cultural anthropology at the University of California-Irvine. She works on Latin American environmental policies, international environmental law, micro-economics as applied to natural resources, principles of hydrology, the anthropology of neo-liberalism.

We also had with us Saravanan V. Subramanian - he is a Senior Researcher

at the Center for Development Research in Bonn Germany. Before joining the center Saravanan worked with non-governmental organisations and research institutions in India.  He has worked on irrigation systems, watershed management, ur

ban drinking water and international river basins. He also conducts analyses of institutions, integrated water management, and complex adaptive social systems.

Our second panel at Hydrous ‘08 featured folks who are working largely with moving images and sound. This emphasis reflects a haunch that existing collaborative relations between the social sciences and the filmic arts might offer up an intriguing space for the development of new expository and expressive practices. Cinematic social science has a powerful history, in part because of the expository capacities of film. Yet it is also a problematic history – both politically and aesthetically - which makes it a fruitful ground worthy of new experiments. We wanted to go head-first into that ground as a first moment in what I hope will become a more variegated trajectory of collaboration between STS and the arts.

Our second panel included presentations by four folks whose work looks at water governance through cinematic media. Starting us off was Paige Miller, a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Louisiana State University. As a research collaborator with the World Science Project she is working with a group of researchers in Louisiana, India, and Africa to understand

 the impact of technology on global development, specifically gender differences in the scientific careers of researchers in Kerala, India. Paige has also worked with the Army Corps of Engineers Performance Evaluation Task Force (IPET), following Hurricane Katrina, and is currently serving as an ethnographer assisting in efforts to estimate the rate of return of residents to the city of New Orleans.  

Following Paige was Joshka Wessels, the director of Sapiens Productions and an applied anthropologist. She has written a phd thesis entitled "Traditional Water Management in Syria; the potential for renovating qanats". In addition, she has also directed/produced two television documentaries; "Marooned" and "Tunnel Vision". She also directs/produces a community video program on Child-Centre Approaches to HIV/AIDS (CCATH) in Uganda and Kenya for Health Link Worldwide. Joshka's 

education includes a PhD in Human Geography from the Amsterdam Institute for Global Issues and Development Studies (AGIDS), in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Prior to her PhD work, she received an MA in Visual Anthropology from the University of Leiden (located in Amsterdam, The Netherlands). She was also a broadcast trainee at the Veronica Broadcasting Company in Hilversum, The Netherlands.

I also screened clips from my new documentary about dialectical dynamics that emerge within the globalization of concern for water resources problems and the logic of anthropological reasoning as a means to understand it – entitled “In the Web and On the Ground”. 

We ended the session with a contribution by Alice Agnus, who is an artist inspire by rethinking concepts

 and perceptions of landscape and human relationships to the land. Over the last six years she has been creating a body of art work exploring concepts of proximity and remoteness, technology and presence, against the lived experience and local knowledge of a place. Alice is also the a co-director of Proboscis, an artist led studio located in London, which researches, develops and facilitates innovation across disciplines. www.proboscis.org.uk.

Last but certainly not least, Paul Wouters, the Director of the Virtual Knowledge Studios in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, did us the great service of synthesizing insights from the two panels over the course of the evening.  One of his many important insights was that the efforts   

of social studies of science to experiment with new forms of documentation and expression are importantly about pressing needs to create alternative modes of experience and expression on the part of social researchers in their engagements with the worlds that they study. 

Hydrous '08 was a fantastic event in my view, and was attended by about 80 folks.  I want to extend thanks to our caterer Monique Bruin, to Dj Morsanek our event composer, the V2 Production Crew - Anne Nigten, Michel van Dartel, Joris va Ballegooijen, Wilco Tuinman, Richard Bierhuizen, and Minolt. A heartfelt thanks also to Meredith and Randy Anderson, really good spuds who help out in myriad ways and make all events a delight.

My hope is that everyone met at least one new interesting person with whom to continue conversation and pursue collaborative work, Sisse Finken from the University of Oslo and I have got got our eyes on Hydrous '10 in Japan - so do stay tuned....

hejhej!

HYDROUS - STS & the ARTS Read Shifts in Governance

Dear Readers. Today I want to announce an event I'm organizing in Rotterdam on August 21, 2008. H Y D R O U S is a side even held in conjunction with the bi-annal meetings of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) and the European Association for Social Science and Technology. HYDROUS is conceived as an occasion for sharing the ideas and techniques of scholars and artists working at the intersection of STS and water governance. Our aim is to gather together and contribute to the formation of what is now a nascent zone of sts research and artistic practice. The event is free and open to 4S/EASST participants and the public. Hydrous will be held in the performance spaces of V2 - Institute for Unstable Media, Rotterdam central. Further details will be distributed in and around the main EASST conference venue and the city of Rotterdam. Inquiries may be directed to Katie Vann [katie.vann@vks.knaw.nl]

Katie

Transnational Water Governance and Infrastructures of Recognition: the UN IWRM Assessment

Hi Folks,

Following on my previous comments about the UN IWRM assessment efforts, today I want to mention briefly an aspect of the political rationality of IWRM as a particular transnational water governance model that anchors the UN’s current assessment efforts. Thereafter I will move to a consideration of the UNs assessment framework and techniques. I consider ‘political rationality’, in the sense used by Nicolas Rose, as “a kind of intellectual machinery or apparatus for rendering reality thinkable in such a way that it is amenable to political programming” (Rose, 1996:42; Rose and Miller, 1992; Miller and Rose, 1990.)

IWRM is likewise a bundle of ‘principles’ that should inform conduct in such a way as to ameliorate the world’s water crisis. The 1st World Water Development Report (WWDR1) (UN and WWAP, 2003) in fact concluded that “governance issues form the central obstruction to sound and equitable water sharing and management worldwide” (see UN and WWAP, 2006:12), and since then more and more attention has been given to ‘governance’ – and IWRM in particular. Within the UN’s current assessment efforts, ‘water ‘governance’ is continues to be configured within a constellation of other variables that the UN has come to regard as relevant to the world’s water crisis. Although IWRM has not attained the status of International treaty, it nevertheless remains a normative force that is used to exert pressure on governments. It is formalized in national commitments to reach the MDG’s, it is endorsed among others by the UN and the World Bank, and it thus informs donor conditionality and the generalized legitimacy of nations states in the eyes of the mysterious ‘international community’. In these senses, IWRM is perhaps best understood as a ‘program and set of green guidelines’, which exerts international pressure on governments, even as they are resisted and modified (Gupta 1998: 295).

Constituent to IWRM are the ‘Dublin Principles’ , which were developed in at the International Conference on Water and the Environment (ICWE, 1992), and ultimately embodied in Chapter 18 of Agenda 21 (1992). Readers familiar with contemporary ‘water wars’ may have come across references to IWRM through the figure of the Global Water Partnership, which has been interpreted as a “big business lobby organization” that promotes “the privatization and export of water resources and services through close links with global water corporations and financial institutions” (Barlow and Clarke, 2002: 157).

As a way of getting closer to IWRM as a particular political rationality, I want to point out two of its interlocking features– its globalism and what I will call its ‘postcolonial axiom’. I want to suggest that the IWRM policy movement has actually engaged and synthesized the two in the formation of a distinctive political rationality. On one hand, it has been situated as a global ambition in the sense that it has become associated with efforts to bring about particular forms of conduct across the planet. That the IWRM movement is globalist in this sense is evidenced in the visibility and urgency that it has come to have in multiple international networks and fora, and in the position that it has come to have as a line item in formal transnational agreements such as the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation. That the forms of conduct which the IWRM movement has sought to globalize would be particular forms of conduct (and not just any old form of conduct) is evidenced in the way in which IWRM has been framed as an alternative to existing (‘conventional’, ‘traditional’, ‘top-down’) forms of conduct in the water management sector, which are presumed to be prevalent and which are sought to be overcome or corrected. A series of properties drawn from the vernaculars of ‘governance’ (decentralization, empowerment, participation, and so on) is often invoked to identify IWRM as a constellation of properties that can be meaningfully differentiated from the administrative conventions that are deemed problematic. And the idea that IWRM represents some kind of change, that it names some shift to an alternative form of conduct, underpins its very presence as a goal to which signatories to international agreements should aspire. Whatever this shift entails, it should be sought across nations.

The IWRM movement has oriented to the world’s water crisis as an exercise in ‘scaling up’ a set of principles such that they come to inform conduct situated in the infinite ‘locals’ that constitute the globe. In its globalist aspect the IWRM movement seeks not only to give rise to forms of conduct, but also to reproduce particular forms of conduct across territories. Such an orientation undergirds the very idea that ‘local’ IWRM implementations could be assessed, and informs the meta-normative presumption that local instances of can be represented as instances of IWRM in the aggregate. As we will see, however, its globalism creates knowledge dilemmas for the IWRM movement, because in keeping with its anti-’traditional’ character, the IWRM movement has also entailed what we might call a ‘postcolonial axiom’ – an apriori recognition that difference or heterogeneity would necessarily attend any instantiation, or ‘implementation’ of IWRM ‘on the ground’. Although any instance of IWRM implementation would entail some aspect of a series of properties drawn from the vernaculars of ‘governance’ (decentralization, empowerment, participation, and so on), heterogeneity is expected and encouraged with respect to which of those properties is reproduced, and indeed what form any such properties would take were they found to be reproduced.

Nevertheless, ostensibly meaningful societal practices – not least those associated with the paradigm of ‘governance’ itself - have attended the centrist and globalist strategies that the IWRM movement has already exhibited, and here I have in mind the formalization of commitments through international agreements to implement IWRM. So, if the UN does not look to see if IWRM practices are actually being sought or brought about by its signatories, the very process of UN treaties and conventions runs the risk of losing all legitimacy. In the shadow of that possibility, and in the face of its stated commitment to diversity, the UN must initiate practices of standardization and accounting that, however dilemmatic, must be carried through. This creates knowledge dilemmas for the UN, because it begs the question of which properties of ‘local’ IWRM practices can indeed be recognized through the kind of coarse-grained classifications that are required by assessment in the aggregative mode. The situation invites us to consider in detail the precise techniques by which the status of IWRM progress is being inscribed under the rubric of the current UN efforts, the discussion to which I turn in the next section.

It is fortuitous for this analysis that the 2nd World Water Development Report (UN and WWAP, 2006) provided a prospective description of the indicators scheme that the UN would use for CSD16 reporting, because it presents the broad ‘indicator scheme’ in which ‘governance’ is put into relations with other indicators of the world water crisis. WWDR2 is the primary data source for this section. The two figures below show the indicators scheme that is provided in the WWDR2: It is a canvass upon which the UN draws the variables of the current water crisis, relates them as interacting phenomena, and classifies them as objects about which data can be generated.

The assessment framework is organized by a series of ‘challenge areas’, each of which is related in its own way to ‘water’. Among the challenge areas are ‘settlements’, ‘resources’, ‘health’, and so on (see far left column of Figures 1 and 2. Each challenge area is characterized as having some set of ‘indicators’ (see column two). Indicators associated with ‘settlements’, for example, are ‘index of performance of water utilities’, ‘urban water and sanitation governance index’, and ‘slum profile in human settlements’. ‘Governance’ appears as a specific ‘challenge area’, and is associated with two indicators: ‘access to information, participation and justice’ and ‘progress toward implementing IWRM’.

From the standpoint of Conca’s discussion of the meta-normative orientation of ‘knowledge stabilization’, here I want to point out that each indicator is characterized as having what is called a ‘DPSIR Aspect’ and a ‘Status’. The ‘D-P-S-I-R Framework of Analysis’ was originally developed by the European Environmental Agency. It characterizes indicators in terms of where their corresponding variables fall in a chain of cause-effect relationships. The elements of the causal chain (D, P, S, I, and R) are defined respectively as follows.

Driving forces – Basic sectoral trends, the underlying factors, root causes affecting the development of society, the economy and environmental conditions.

Pressure – Human activities directly influencing water resources supply, quantity or quality, or water use; the immediate stress agents or proximate causes.

State – Current conditions and trends; situation or status of the resource or the sector vis-à-vis water at the present time.

Impact – the effects of a changed water-related conditions on human and natural systems; physical and economic losses due to deteriorating water conditions; the effective consequence of the altered state of the resource or its use.

Response – the reaction, or efforts of society—all levels—to change undesirable conditions, to solve the problems that have developed or to counter the stress and impacts imposed on human systems; coping mechanisms as reflected in changes in policies and institutions, production practices or human behaviour. (Source: UN and WWAP, 2006: 35-36)

In addition to their definitions, the DPSIR elements are conceived as a circular chain: inputs (d) converted into outputs (P), converted into inputs (S), and so on. In this way the DPSIR framework of Analysis classifies indicators and provides guiding principles for configuring functional-causal relations between the variables that are differently captured by them. It suggests the seeds of a meta-normative presumption of knowledge stabilization.

One naturally wonders, how the challenge area ‘governance’ fits within this functional-causal configuration of relationships? That question will structure our discussion next time.

Hej hej!

Transnational Water Governance and Infrastructures of Recognition: the UN IWRM Assessment

Transnational Water Governance and Infrastructures of Recognition


The United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD16) to assess the state of water governance practices across nations. Nearly two hundred nation states committed to the water governance principles outlined in Chapter 18 of Agenda 21 (1992) and further formalized in Resolution 2 of the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation that was written during the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002. The international policy formation ‘Integrated Water Resources Management’ (IWRM) has emerged as a central anchoring device for the construction of the indicators that the UN will utilize to measure adherence to those commitments on a worldwide scale. “Integrated Water Resources Management’ is the formation that anchors the UN’s current assessment efforts, not only because it has come to be promoted by an increasingly growing network of IWRM culture brokers, but also because it is formalized in both Agenda 21 and the WSSD Plan of Implementation. Mentioned explicitly in paragraphs 26 and 66, WSSD’s Plan of Implementation cites IWRM as one of the key components for achieving sustainable development. The Global Water Partnership maintains that 193 countries agreed to this plan of implementation. An official list of attendees is included on pages 74-76 of the UN Report (WSSD, 2002. For a history of IWRM from an engineering perspective, see Mizanur and Varis 2005. For a treatment of IWRM in the context of international regime theory, see Conca, 2006. IWRM thus serves a standard of conduct to which nation states are held accountable.

In his recent book, Governing Water (MIT, 2006) Ken Conca has writes an extensive commentary on the character of IWRM as a transnational governance formation. Conca suggests that, “IWRM has become a far-reaching cognitive construct and rhetorical device, penetrating important water governance nodes such as the World Bank and creating its own home in settings such as the Global Water Partnership. Yet the water governance paradigm advanced by these developments has also proven brittle and easily fractured when it is confronted with highly contentious questions of valuation and participation. The tensions between water as a human right and water as a marketized good have refused to sit still for knowledge stabilization in the service of normative consensus. Efforts to operationalize or even define suitable participatory mechanisms for making IWRM real have met a similar fate. As a result, the most important institutional mechanisms for networking of experts – which include global water conferences, authoritative blueprint documents, and elite global commissions – have become, not the de facto elements of a techno-rational governance, but important battlegrounds in the continued airing of these controversies.” (Conca, 2006:376).

I agree with Conca’s reading of IWRM’s heterogeneity. Yet because IWRM is formally embedded in international guidelines, its heterogeneity urges us to raise questions about its future as a transnational water governance movement: will it be subject to a processes of knowledge stabilization and thus move into the direction of an emergent regime form?

It is from the standpoint of this question that it is worthwhile to consider those on-going social efforts which in fact seek to establish epistemological frames through which the existence of IWRM practices are recognized as such – frames through which knowledge of IWRM is stabilized in the face of its heterogeneities. Indeed, scholars of the socialities of science and technology teach us that precisely because knowledge stabilization is a contingent and active process of construction, the possibilities for knowledge stabilization are not a function of the degrees of heterogeneity on the part of those objects about which knowledge is being stabilized. The UN’s current CSD16 reporting process is an interesting site of such processes of construction, because they involve inscription practices which do some work toward holding the social still; toward stabilizing for the purposes of knowledge and comparison a wide range of its heterogeneities. Such inscription practices have been theorized by scholars such as Bruno Latour and Nick Rose as moments in the construction of ‘centers of calculation’, so crucial to the practices of governmentality; they are important sites of knowledge stabilization. In a series of subsequent blog entries, I will pursue a conversation that focuses on a consideration of these inscription practices that invite us to entertain the possibility that IWRM is an international regime under construction.