Dam the river: Ontological exclusion in global and Brazilian Integrated Water Resources Management

Abstract

Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) has been widely adopted as a norm that promises to increase equality and sustainability of water governance through participatory decision-making. After decades of policy implementation, however, inequalities in outcomes and large-scale water-related disasters raise questions about the ability of IWRM to deliver on its promises. This article explores these questions by putting the history of IWRM at the global scale in conversation with the national scale of water governance in Brazil and the local scale of the Rio Doce, the site of the largest single environmental disaster in Brazilian history. This conversation highlights truncated practices of inclusion in which participation of diverse actors is possible only within an account of water as a resource system. Mobilizing recent debates about the Ontological Turn in social sciences and humanities, we argue that the appeal to inclusion in IWRM masks ontological exclusion in which participation is dependent on an ontology of water as a resource system. The case of the Rio Doce shows how promises of equality and sustainability through inclusion fail in the light of rendering local ontologies invisible or illegitimate for governance. In framing IWRM as a site of ontological inequality, groundwork is laid for a renewed promise of participation.