Hydrosocial Cycle Research Articles

Scale as a Key Factor for Sustainable Water Management in Northwest Honduras

INTRODUCTIONSustainable water management (an organizational mode that preserves the renewability of the resource and equitable access to it) in less developed countries is fast becoming one of the greatest environmental of the twenty-first century (UNICEF and WHO 2011). The United Nations Human Rights Council recently passed a global resolution (Resolution 64/292) declaring and clean drinking water and a basic human right (cf. Bakker 2007; Mirosa and Harris 2011; UN 2010), and calling on states and international agencies to supply financial resources, technology transfer, and capacity building to provide for safe and accessible water and sanitation. Meanwhile, in Honduras, government agencies charged with overseeing water and sanitation have largely failed to meet the demands of growing metropolitan areas (Balthasar 2011). Private sector participation in water and sanitation services in periurban regions of the country has also experienced significant and setbacks (Phumpiu and Gustafsson 2009). Community-based interventions in rural sectors by outside development organizations seeking to design treatment and delivery of potable water have also been largely ineffective (Fogelberg 2010). Even self-organized efforts by communities in different residential contexts have been unsustainable (Casey 2005). Why are communities in Honduras struggling to obtain safe and clean water?In this article, we take a holistic look at the social, economic, ecological, and engineered contexts of gravity-fed water systems in the Palmarejo Valley, a predominantly rural sector in northwest Honduras, with the greater goal of identifying key barriers to long-term sustainability of water provisioning. In doing so, we apply a systems-based perspective employing a grounded-theory and mixed-methods approach to cultural analysis (e.g., Billgreen and Holmen 2008; Loker 2003; Wells et al. 2014), which allows us to view water management as a socioecological system (Bennett 1976) that couples human behaviors and perceptions with the biophysical environment. This perspective resembles what geographers and other social scientists increasingly refer to as the hydrosocial cycle (Linton 2014; Sultana and Loftus 2012; Swyngedouw 2009), which attends to the social nature of [hydrological] flows as well as the agential role played by water, while highlighting the dialectical and relational processes through which water and society interrelate (Linton and Budds 2013:1). After describing the household and community contexts of water management systems in Honduras, we present the results of our emerging work in the Palmarejo Valley, where we have conducted interviews with valley residents and community leaders, mapped cultural and environmental features using GPS, and performed water quality tests to measure levels and isolate sources of heavy metals and bacterial contamination.We have observed that community-based approaches commonly employed in development projects in this region may not be appropriate in all contexts due, in part, to the at which they operate. While the utility of the concept of has been debated (Leitner and Miller 2007; Marston et al. 2005; Moore 2008), we find it useful in our research for characterizing the sociospatial constructs that actors develop and deploy in different political and economic contexts to influence how individuals, organizations, and institutions manage resources (see Herod 2011; e.g., Goodman et al. 2008). Here, our emphasis is not on spatial categories, per se, but on the social processes that constitute them (Marston 2000) and the connections that link them (Latour 1993). The social construction of can thus be seen as a material expression of power relations (MacKinnon 2010). Water, in particular, is increasingly subject to scale challenges (Cash et al. 2006), because it moves across social and natural landscapes-or waterscapes (Budds and Hinojosa 2012)-that crosscut multiple scales (Norman et al. …

Drinking and Waste Water Price Specificity Formation Process in the Republic of Armenia

In the article represented specificity`s price formation process strength of technical activity hydro social cycle in the Republic of Armenia.Analysis of drinking water consumption is done with respect to three groups: standpoint of interest domestic farms, especially in industry and farmers.Industry included all subjects of services and products maker in economy, which is not included in domestic farms or agriculture fields. Appear from industry field include for example: nitrogenous factory, power generation company, banks holding, railways, hospitals and the others.Drinking water supply and waste water derivations services have six important technical directions in hydro social cycle: water intake, drinking water conditioning, drinking water distribution, waste water collecting, waste water reconditioning and derivations:Here are calculated unit cost, overhead and cross costs for each process fabrication, and corresponding its we create hypothetical named average unit cost, as well as average overhead and cross costs.In the article we analyse, that we can improve water supply options in the domestic farms, industry and agriculture fields.

The debut of ‘modern water’ in early 20th century Mexico City: the Xochimilco potable waterworks

In September 1910, during the Centennial celebration of Mexico's independence, Mexico City witnessed the inauguration of the Xochimilco Potable Waters Supply Works, marking the debut of ‘modern water’ in the capital. This was a shift from the traditional notion of water as a heterogeneous element expressive of diverse geographies and histories – waters, that is – to an understanding of water as a placeless, timeless natural substance. The transition to modern water and hydraulic control could never be a completed process. Rather, it would continue to evolve in tension with the great diversity of hydraulic histories and geographies of Mexico City. Different from most studies that analyze the Xochimilco system in the context of modernity, we see it as also a fundamentally visual phenomenon, an interaction among technologies of construction, representation, and access. This includes the architecture, its photographic representation, as well as an 1884 study that set forth the concept of ‘potable waters’ and argued a case for creating a modern network to deliver it. The Xochimilco works promised a flow as stable as its delivery system and as permanent as its photographic record. Drawing from Science and Technology Studies, recent work on the hydrosocial cycle, visual geography, and art history, we explore these waterworks' technologies as a novel but unstable confluence of objects, narratives, people, and places. For all the apparent durability of this network, the Xochimilco springs would run dry by the early 1930s. Instead of seeing water, we now see a collection of historical artifacts in the landscape and the archive.

Exploring the urban hydrosocial cycle in tourist environments

This contribution attempts to examine first how different theoretical and methodological perspectives from Geography and environmental sciences explore water flows and their physical and social dimensions in the city, as well as their changes in response to the emerging urban complexities and challenges. Using in particular the framework provided by Urban Political Ecology, I look at how the physical and social dimensions of water flows unfold and influence the urbanization process and, in turn, are influenced by urbanization. In the second part, attention is paid to urban coastal areas of the Mediterranean as candidate laboratories of analysis under urban political ecology since they are subject to rapid processes of social environmental change in which water plays a fundamental part. Case studies included to examine physical and social dimensions of water flows include heritage towns (Venice) and mass tourism resorts (Benidorm).

Down with the flow: public debates shaping the risk framing of artificial groundwater recharge

Securing high-quality potable water is a key challenge for all societies. The question is not only about water availability and quality determined by hydrological, chemical, and biological factors, or technologies and monetary assets, but also about various cultural, social, and political factors that together constitute so-called hydro-social cycles. We focus on risk communication and management, in connection with the debates on planning and construction of an artificial groundwater recharge system in the Virttaankangas esker, aiming to provide potable water for the region of Turku, southwest Finland. Based on print media coverage, online debate, and comments on the environmental impact assessment report, we identify key themes and framings of risk debates and discuss which elements of the hydro-social cycle are prone to be highlighted or omitted. Our results show how different framings of risks and benefits are represented with regard to geography, time span, causative agents, impact types, those exposed, alternative management options, and uncertainties involved. Representations created both by traditional print media and new social media polarise the debate. The adoption of the concept of the hydro-social cycle in planning and communication processes may help in understanding and alleviating polarisation.

Circulations and transformations of energy and water in Abu Dhabi’s hydrosocial cycle

Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates is a rapidly developing state reliant on modern water production and distribution systems to support its economic growth and urban development. Whilst often conceptualized as a rentier state, its urban water sector has undergone major economic restructuring over the last decade, resulting in an increasingly important role for the private sector in developing new supplies. These supplies primarily comprise desalination and recycled wastewater, which require substantial capital investment, complex technology and energy supplies. This paper examines the production of water in Abu Dhabi, showing how the transformation and circulation of water have created new landscapes that bear little resemblance to the arid physical environment of the Arabian peninsula, and new patterns of water consumption that are increasingly divergent from traditional careful management. It demonstrates the central role of the energy sector in driving the production and circulation of water – for instance, by powering desalination plants, providing the investment capital for these complex facilities, subsidizing operations and consumer tariffs, and by negotiating access with neighbouring states. The paper argues that Abu Dhabi’s hydrosocial cycle cannot be understood in isolation of a consideration of energy, and, consequently, that the infeasibility of isolating water from wider physical, economic and social influences in complex contexts challenges previous approaches to the relationship between water and state power.

Modern water and its discontents: a history of hydrosocial renewal

AbstractWater planning and management in the 20th century were characterized by a particular way of understanding and relating to water that may be described in terms of ‘modern water’. Essentially, modern water is a way of knowing, accounting for, and representing water apart from its social context. Modern water replaced a wealth of different waters whose essence was defined by the social circumstances in which they occurred, rather than by the compound of oxygen and hydrogen to which all waters may be reduced. This paper traces the history of modern water and describes its current retreat in the face of circumstances that call for the resocialization of waters. Several examples of this resocialization are given, including a new way of representing hydrosocial relations known as the ‘hydrosocial cycle’, the campaign for the human right to water and emerging practices in water engineering and water management. WIREs Water 2014, 1:111–120. doi: 10.1002/wat2.1009This article is categorized under: Human Water > Rights to Water Human Water > Water Governance Human Water > Water as Imagined and Represented

The hydrosocial cycle: Defining and mobilizing a relational-dialectical approach to water

The relationship between water and society has come to the forefront of critical inquiry in recent years, attracting significant scholarly and popular interest. As the state hydraulic paradigm gives way to modes of water governance, there is a need to recognize, reflect and represent water’s broader social dimensions. In this article, we advance the concept of the hydrosocial cycle as a means of theorizing and analyzing water-society relations. The hydrosocial cycle is based on the concept of the hydrologic cycle, but modifies it in important ways. While the hydrologic cycle has the effect of separating water from its social context, the hydrosocial cycle deliberately attends to water’s social and political nature. We employ a relational-dialectical approach to conceptualize the hydrosocial cycle as a socio-natural process by which water and society make and remake each other over space and time. We argue that unravelling this historical and geographical process of making and remaking offers analytical insights into the social construction and production of water, the ways by which it is made known, and the power relations that are embedded in hydrosocial change. We contend that the hydrosocial cycle comprises a process of co-constitution as well as material circulation. Existing work within the political ecology tradition considers the co-constitution of water and power, particularly in relation to processes of capital accumulation. We propose the hydrosocial cycle as an analytical tool for investigating hydrosocial relations and as a broader framework for undertaking critical political ecologies of water.

Tool-power: Water infrastructure as wellsprings of state power

This article examines the role of water infrastructure in the production of state power, and advances an understanding of nonhumans as power brokers. While state power is increasingly understood as the effect of material practices and processes, I draw on the idea that objects are ‘force-full’ to argue that infrastructure helped cement federal state power in Tijuana over the twentieth century, and simultaneously limited the spaces of stateness in surprising ways. To support my argument, I examine three sets of water infrastructure in Tijuana, Mexico. First, I examine the key constitutional edicts, laws, and treaties that enabled bureaucratic development and staked territorial claims on water during Mexico’s liberal era (1876–1911) and post-revolutionary period. Second, I trace the development of Tijuana’s flood control and potable water conveyance networks, designed and built between the 1960s and the 1980s, which enabled rapid urban growth but ultimately cultivated dependency on a distant, state engineered water source. Finally, I show how the ordinary infrastructures of water supply—such as barrels, cisterns, and buckets, common tools in Tijuana homes—both coexist with and limit state power, resulting in variegated geographies of institutional authority, punctuated by alternative spaces of rule. Together, these infrastructures form the ‘hydrosocial cycle’ of Tijuana, which I use to illustrate the uneven spatiality of state power. In conclusion, I draw on insights from object-oriented philosophy and science and technology studies to move past the anthropocentric notion of infrastructure as ‘power tools’—handy implements used by humans to exercise dominion—toward tool-power: the idea that objects-in-themselves are wellsprings of power.

The challenges of rescaling South African water resources management: Catchment Management Agencies and interbasin transfers

Summary The implementation of Catchment Management Agencies (CMAs) was supposed to be the cornerstone of the rescaling process of the South African water reform policy. Yet, less than 10 years after the adoption of the National Water Act, the process was suspended for 4 years and by 2012 only two CMAs had been established. Combining approaches in geography and political science, this paper investigates the reasons for the delays in CMAs’ implementation in South Africa. It shows that the construction of interbasin transfers (IBTs) since the 1950s by the apartheid regime and nowadays the power struggles between CMAs and the Department of Water Affairs (DWA) are two of the main obstacles to the creation of CMAs planned by the 1998 National Water Act (NWA). Finally, the paper advocates taking the “hydrosocial cycle” as an analytical framework for designing new institutional arrangements that will include both rectifying the legacy of the past (the specific role of DWA) and acknowledging legitimate local interests.

Canal irrigation and the hydrosocial cycle: The morphogenesis of contested water control in the Tungabhadra Left Bank Canal, South India

Using South Indian large-scale surface irrigation as a case, this paper combines emerging interdisciplinary conceptualisation in resource geography of the hydrological cycle as a hydrosocial cycle with Archer’s theorisation of society’s structure-agency dynamics as a morphogenetic cycle. Characteristic of large scale canal irrigation are a pronounced spatiality of social process, and a strongly cyclical nature of social interaction around water through seasonality and rotational supply, framed by irrigation infrastructure that is both grid and subject of water resources management practices. This allows an investigation of how human agency as the animator of structural elaboration reproduces and transforms a hybrid and multi-scale water control system, thus establishing a ‘hydromorphogenetic’ cycle of unequal irrigation water distribution. The detailed account of irrigation practice provides caution against simplified interpretations of dam+canals based irrigation as abodes of green revolution capitalist farming, and of the objectives of neoliberal irrigation reform policy. It is, lastly, suggested that the hydrosocial relations focus produces new insights and questions for irrigation studies, but that complexity and emergence rather than hybridity are the key analytical challenges.

Much Ado About Minimum Flows… Unpacking indicators to reveal water politics

This article critically explores the discourses and practices involved in the definition, promotion, design and use of indicators to manage water resources. It analyzes the manner indicators contribute to shape specific hydrosocial cycles, i.e. specific combinations of water, power and financial flows. The objective pursued is to reveal the politics of water that is made otherwise invisible by the use of indicators. Indeed, while indicators are the product of specific compromises, of particular combinations of negotiated norms and scientifically produced nature, the paper highlights their ability to erase history and naturalize rationales. These issues are investigated through an empirical analysis of a specific indicator, the “Minimum Flow Requirements” (MFR) and its associated biophysical models, developed and used in the South-West of France. The discussion focuses on the underlying assumptions and ensuing framings of the water scarcity problem in the Garonne system over more than two centuries and describes how the system has been lately represented and managed through the use of the MFR. The MFR is shown to be an instrument regulating power and financial relations of heterogeneous actors. It has actively contributed to naturalize water scarcity, despite the contingency of its construction. Finally, it has helped contain the environmental opposition to the management of water in southwestern France.

Cultural politics and the hydrosocial cycle: Water, power and identity in the Andean highlands

This paper explores interactions among water, power and cultural politics in the Andes. It analyzes the hydrosocial cycle as the political–ecological production of a time- and place-specific socionature, enrolling and co-patterning the social, the natural and the supernatural to reflect dominant interests and power.A case analysis locates community water control practices in Mollepata, Peru, in the broader historical setting of Andean water empires. To see how local worldviews, water flows and water control practices are interwoven, it unravels the ‘meta’ behind the ‘physical’, examining contemporary expressions of the ancient ‘hydrocosmological cycle’ that intimately interconnects the cyclical dynamics of hydrology, agro-ecology, human lifetime and cosmology. Herein, bonds among mountain deities, Mother Earth and humans are fundamental to guide water flows through this world, the world above and the world below.Next, the paper analyzes the ‘political’ behind metaphysical patterning of water flows. Since ancient times, elites have striven to reinforce subjugation over Andean peoples by creating ‘convenient histories’ and ‘socionatural order’, connecting local water practices and worldviews to supralocal schemes of belonging, thereby deploying overlapping governmental rationalities.Continued in contemporary, globalizing water politics and ‘governmentalities’, efforts to establish, demystify or transform frames of ‘water order’ are at the heart of water struggles. Here, dominant conceptual and cultural-political frameworks naturalize the strategic positioning of humans and nonhumans in hydrosocial patterns that support water hierarchies and legitimize particular distribution, extraction and control practices, as if these were entirely natural. Hydrosocial cycles are, however, importantly mediated by counter-forces and alternative water truths.

The co-production of science and waterscapes: The case of the Seine and the Rhône Rivers, France

This article deals with the production of water science and its practical use in water management in France between 1960 and 2000, first at national scale, and then focusing on the Rhône and the Seine river basins. It uses the hydrosocial cycle concept to account for the way in which the course of water and that of human affairs were intertwined. It provides examples of co-production of water science and social order in specific places where scientists contributed to redefining what water was and how it should be managed – a practice which had longstanding effects on those waterscapes. It shows how categorisation played an important role in this process. Moreover, it argues that waterscapes also shaped science, and not just exclusively the other way round, because waterscapes offered research opportunities that differed according to disciplines.

Dis/Articulations and the Hydrosocial Cycle: Postapartheid Geographies of Agrarian Change in the Ceres Valley, South Africa

This paper analyzes the role of the hydrosocial cycle in producing and sustaining uneven geographies of capitalist agriculture in the Ceres Valley, a major center of South Africa's high-value deciduous fruit industry I explore ways in which the mobilization, appropriation, and transformation of water resources become intertwined with and reinforce the radicalized capitalist relations that have characterized the local political economy of export fruit production since the 19th century These relations have solidified over time as they have been able to adapt to shifting political–economic and political–ecological dynamics. Focusing on the postapartheid period, I examine how white agrarian capital has been able to maintain and even strengthen its dominance over the regional economy despite the dramatic shuffling of political and economic priorities. I pay particular attention to how the fatal combination of the liberalization of agricultural markets and the financialization of water supply becomes articulated through interconnected sociospatial processes of dispossession, devaluation, and disinvestment. I argue that questions of access to and control over the hydrosocial cycle not only reveal how marginalized and radicalized social actors—farm workers, small-scale farmers, township residents—become differentially articulated with and disarticulated from existing and emerging circuits of capital accumulation. It also opens promising analytical and political avenues through which to illuminate and confront uneven geographies of capitalist development in ways that highlight the linked sociospatial processes of production and social reproduction.

Mixing waters: The reuse of agricultural drainage water in Egypt

Non-conventional sources of water are becoming increasingly important around the world as pressures mount on limited freshwater supplies. In Egypt, the reuse of agricultural drainage water provides an integral supplement to the water supply. Government pumping stations and farmers’ small diesel pumps lift water up from drainage ditches and direct it back into the irrigation canals for reuse in agriculture, increasing the country’s available water resources by 20%. Given the saline and often polluted nature of drainage water, however, the recycling of this water impacts the quality of water flowing through Egypt’s irrigation network. This paper uses the hydrosocial cycle as a framework to explore how drainage water reuse shapes the quality and quantity of Egypt’s water in space and time, with profound consequences for farmers who rely on that water for their livelihoods. Through close analysis of the case of drainage water reuse, the paper expands on theorizations of the hydrosocial cycle by articulating the relations of power embedded within the cycle. It draws attention, first, to the significance of everyday practice in shaping where the water goes and what it becomes. Second, it highlights the multiple factors that influence people’s control over water. Thus, the paper concludes, we have to look to a variety of human and non-human agencies and relationships to understand how authority is refracted in and through the hydrosocial cycle.

La demanda, evaluación y asignación del agua en el contexto de escasez: un análisis del ciclo hidrosocial del valle del río La Ligua, Chile

This paper examines the development of export-oriented agriculture and the allocation of water resources for irrigation in La Ligua river basin in Chile's Norte Chico. The paper uses a theoretical framework within the political ecology tradition in order to approach questions of demand, evaluation and allocation of water resources, and related issues, and to show how they are shaped by social power relations. The paper highlights in particular how a hydrological assessment was used to respond to rapid and uncontrolled groundwater exploitation, which ultimately produced unequal outcomes among different farmers. The paper concludes that, to better understand issues around the allocation of water resources, the concept of the hydrosocial cycle is more useful than that of the hydrological cycle

Unintended effects of technology on climate change adaptation: an historical analysis of water conflicts below Andean Glaciers

Climate change adaptation measures can generate long-term unintended consequences, as this paper demonstrates through an empirical case study of water conflicts at Lake Parón in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca mountain range. This decade-long struggle culminated in 2008 when a coalition of local groups (stakeholders) from the Cruz de Mayo and Caraz communities in the Callejón de Huaylas seized control of the Lake Parón reservoir from a private multinational corporation, Duke Energy. This clash over Parón’s water in the Llullán and Santa River watersheds emerged much earlier than climatic-hydrologic models had predicted, and it occurred, this paper argues, largely because of previously successful climate adaptation measures. The drainage tunnel and floodgates originally installed at Parón in the 1980s to prevent a climate-related outburst flood led to unintended or perverse outcomes because these technological artifacts subsequently allowed a diversity of stakeholders—including rural subsistence farmers, urban residents, national park officials, tourism promoters, the state energy company Electroperú, and Duke Energy—to manage water differently depending on their priorities and the existing governance structures. Neoliberal reforms that altered state-society-environment relations in Peru played a key role in these changing stakeholder power dynamics that were reflected in the management of water infrastructure at Parón. Examining this water conflict that emerged from the unintended effects of climate adaptation demonstrates not only how technology and society are mutually constitutive, but also why the politics of technologies must be considered more carefully in the analysis of social-ecological systems, hydro-social cycles, and climate change adaptation.

Modificações Institucionais na Política de Águas Brasileira: Como Se Constrói Um Espaço de Gestão?

O artigo traz uma construção teórica, conceitual e metodológica para a compreensão da espacialidade da nova política de águas brasileira, caracterizada pela inovação institucional. O ponto de partida do trabalho é um questionamento quanto à efetividade da nova proposta de política do setor (datada de 1997) e também quanto ao recorte espacial que a geografia tradicionalmente utiliza para abordar o problema, ou seja, a bacia hidrográfica. Partindo da premissa básica de que a disciplina possui instrumentos para a compreensão do tema ainda não utilizados em todo o seu potencial, o artigo traça um caminho de análise para tentar responder à pergunta-título, bem como explicar a efetividade ou não da nova política de águas brasileiras em uma dada área. Para isso, o problema é decomposto, analisando-se separadamente a questão da gestão, da água e, por fim, da gestão territorial da água. Questões como descentralização, participação social, elaboração de ciclos hidrossociais e de objetos híbridos são levantadas, ainda que não aprofundadas, na tentativa de concatenar uma narrativa coerente para explicar a água enquanto objeto de tensões políticas. Conclui-se pela necessidade de conceber espaços de gestão, como novos territórios formados a partir da sobreposição de diferentes superfícies de regulação que incidem sobre a água.

Review of River Basin Trajectories: Societies, Environments and Development by François Molle and Philippus WesterRiver Basin Trajectories: Societies, Environments and DevelopmentCABI978-1-84593-538-2$161.50

This book is volume 8 in the Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture series, but its scope is in no way limited to agriculture. The series editor, David Molden, sets the tone for this volume by reminding readers of water’s role in the UN’s Millennium Development Goals MDGs . The MDGs were designed to eliminate income poverty, hunger, maternal and child mortality, disease, inadequate shelter, gender inequality, and environmental degradation, and to improve global partnership http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/ . The goals were adopted in 2000 and are set to be achieved in 2015, i.e., only five years from now http://www.undp.org/mdg/basics.shtml . It is almost certain that none of these goals can be achieved by the deadline, and it is highly unlikely that they will be achieved in the near future. Nevertheless, it is good to keep them in front of us and to keep working toward their accomplishment. Of course water is intrinsic to a number of these goals. Thus, managing water in order to provide access to the billions of people who still live without a safe source of this precious resource is crucial. River Basin Trajectories, edited by F. Molle and P. Wester, comprises 12 chapters. The editors have assembled a cluster of experts 27, including themselves who are known for their contributions in the water resources subject area to write the chapters. In chapter 1, the editors highlight human influence on watersheds. They argue that the hydrological cycle is not an independent entity; it is intertwined with the socioeconomic cycle, thus creating a hydro-social cycle. The human relationship with water, and vice versa, has not always been positive. Humans have had to deal, for example, with extreme events, such as droughts, floods, and water quality degradation. On the other hand, water resources have not always been developed and managed well. Indeed abuse and misuse of water resources is widespread throughout the world. The unambiguous link to and dependency on water have directly influenced society and have prompted an ongoing set of institutional changes. From the perspective of integrated water resources management, the watershed is the geographical unit from which everything else branches out. This ranges from surface and groundwater interaction to water quantity and quality manage-