Reimagining the governance of water from the ground up: On the ‘worlding-practices’ of grassroots movements building alternative ‘water worlds’

Abstract

This paper speaks to the uneven scholarly attention gone into tracing dominant forms of water governance as opposed to practices crafting alternative human-water relations on the ground. Through the case of an Indian-based network mobilising to transform how we understand rainfed regions as rain-dependent socio-ecologies, I theorise their action ‘with care’, a commitment to think-with grassroots movements as actors capable of bringing new worlds into being. Describing their activities as worlding-practices, I explore how the network confronts the invisibilities inscribed by the current paradigm reducing water to irrigation by defining alternative metrological tools that recentre the governance of water from the perspective of the rainfall. Tinkering with the variables of the constituted metrology, the network utilises an atlas, a formula, and an acronym to enact a different rainfed sociality into being, creating visibilities and cares for neglected things. Through the story of a grassroots group and their strategies of mobilisation, this account contributes to debates on how to pluralise water governance, suggesting that reimagining its practices requires taking seriously the performativity of grassroots knowledges. Building alliances between research and activism as e/affective world-building partners becomes key to co-theorise liveable human-water relations and caring socio-ecologies at large.