Bridging the international political economy of water: social reproduction, governance and non-state actors

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Water governance has recently gained increasing political and academic attention. However, in many of these debates, it is often narrowly understood as a set of institutional arrangements, rather than as a contested political terrain. I argue that an international political economy (IPE) of water enables scholars to conceptualize water governance not as a thing, but rather as a set of social relations: dynamic rather than static, political rather than technical, and contested rather than consensual. Moreover, I show that a feminist social reproduction approach reveals how the struggle over water is gendered and racialized, making an epistemic shift and contributing to tracing the connection between everyday life and global capitalism. Through the review of five books recently published, I map the emerging field of the IPE of water as a fertile research agenda, and I argue that it should be addressed with an approach that is critical, relational, and feminist. The review article develops its analytical tools by showing: the connection between the local, national, and transnational scales; the changing role of business; and the extension of social reproduction theory to the study of nature, uncovering the intertwined dynamics of exploitation and expropriation.