Issue 2

ABSTRACT: In recent years, Uzbekistan has embarked on an expansive agricultural modernisation programme, cast under the banner of the 'Green Economy'. Within the agriculture sector, this has entailed an overhaul of the former cotton-centred production model in favour of high-value crops and vertically integrated clusters that are irrigated using the most up-to-date technologies. This paper argues that such a process entails 'hydrosocial re-territorialisation', which is characterised by a shift from horizontal, socially mediated surface-flow interdependencies to vertical and individualised groundwater access. Using the case of the pseudonymised village 'Dostlik' in Samarkand Province, the paper looks at local manifestations of Uzbekistan’s current hydro-agrarian overhaul, arguing that hydrosocial re-territorialisation – by facilitating water grabbing – becomes the locus of agrarian change, experienced as 'slow violence' by rural residents. The effects are felt most acutely by scattered, informal homestead farmers who must continually dig deeper wells to irrigate their plots.

KEYWORDS: Political ecology of water, hydrosocial territories, slow violence, Green Economy, homestead farmers, Uzbekistan

ABSTRACT: Istanbul is Turkey’s economic and cultural capital. With a population approaching 16 million, it uses resources, particularly water, from far beyond its borders. The city’s persistent water scarcity, exacerbated by its exponential growth, has necessitated large-scale infrastructural interventions, including interbasin water transfer projects such as the Great Melen Project (GMP). This project, the nation’s second largest water transfer scheme, entailed the displacement of numerous rural communities via urgent expropriation decisions by the government – a procedure designed for use only in extreme circumstances such as war or natural disasters. This study investigates the social ramifications of this project, focusing on the 2014 evacuation of Ortaköy village in the basin. Through in-depth interviews with diverse stakeholders, particularly former residents, the researchers examine the project’s impact on local people’s lives and livelihoods. The project has been hailed as a technological and engineering marvel; however, the findings demonstrate how readily the Melen region is being sacrificed for the sake of the nation’s economic growth ideals. These are embodied in an idealised ‘modernisation’ narrative that justifies prioritisation of the needs of Istanbul as the country’s economic and cultural engine and thereby produces consent among the villagers.

KEYWORDS: Interbasin water transfers, political ecology, environmental justice, Istanbul, Great Melen Project, Turkey

ABSTRACT: Seasonal rivers in East Africa’s drylands have become destabilised by climatic disruption and landscape changes. Despite widespread adaptation practices and interventions, recurrent droughts and floods continue to damage the agropastoral livelihoods dependent on these rivers. Few studies have explored how destabilising rainfall, river flows and adaptations have transformed hydrosocial relations among agropastoralists living near seasonal rivers. This paper reports on a case study in the Tiva River Basin in Kenya, exploring how agropastoralists have experienced changing river flows, rainfall and adaptation processes over the past 75 years. Based on storytelling workshops and a survey, we find that river flows and rainfall have been experienced as increasingly unpredictable and damaging. Water’s perceived role has shifted from being rhythmic and regenerative to being an erosive force and scarce resource to be captured and mobilised. Adaptation has materialised in multiple forms, each of which has, and continues to, reshape reshape the ways in which water is perceived and used. This requires attention from adaptation research with regard to policy and practice in agropastoral drylands. First, public hydraulic infrastructures inscribe norms for capturing and controlling water, while the limits of their functionality are layered into existing arrangements for accessing water. Second, the spread of private irrigation along seasonal rivers supports adaptation, but is only accessible for a small group and leads to inequalities in water access and adaptive capacities. Third, many agropastoralists pursue bottom-up adaptive practices to retain water, but face various hindrances in sustaining their efforts.

KEYWORDS: Dryland, seasonal river, water, agropastoralist, adaptation, Kenya

ABSTRACT: This article examines how Dutch water utilities implement and justify disconnection policies under the conflicting imperatives of cost recovery and the human right to water. Based on 12 semi-structured interviews and discourse analysis, it identifies 3 dominant narratives – technocratic, socially engaged, and human rights-based; it then maps these along two dimensions: the framing of water and the interpretation of non-payment. Despite operating within a uniform legal framework, utilities interpret and apply practices differently, reflecting variations in organisational contexts and discursive understandings of responsibility and vulnerability. The analysis shows how actors engage in discursive manoeuvring, using strategic ambiguity to reconcile regulatory obligations with social concerns. These findings challenge assumptions of technocratic neutrality and demonstrate how discretion and institutional discourse shape regulatory practice. The study contributes to regulatory governance debates by showing how formal compliance can coexists with informal adaptation in the provision of essential services.

KEYWORDS: Discursive institutionalism, human right to water, policy implementation, regulatory governance, water disconnections, the Netherlands

ABSTRACT: Water is a vital but underexplored dimension of older women’s leisure. While aquatic activity is often framed through health promotion or 'active ageing' discourses, such framings can obscure the complex entanglements of embodiment, gender, environment and social life. This paper presents findings from a scoping review of 36 peer reviewed studies that examined older women’s engagements with water across diverse contexts and activities including swimming, aqua aerobics, surfing, rowing and wild swimming. Four clusters of meaning emerged: water as supporting physical and mental well-being; water as a medium for identity and agency; water as a site of belonging, memory and spirituality; and water as context for social connection and mutual support. These practices illuminate water’s role not only as a therapeutic resource but also as an agentic, affective and political force. By foregrounding older women’s watery leisure, we highlight tensions of safety and autonomy and of inclusion and exclusion, and we call for a hydrological turn in gerontology that is attentive to joy, risk and belonging.

KEYWORDS: Water, older women, scoping review, embodiment, water-based leisure

ABSTRACT: Between 2012 and 2020 in Syria, water was weaponised, but the manner of its weaponisation was constrained by the material and infrastructural characteristics of the country’s water system. Weaponisation took the form of infrastructure targeting, flow manipulation and access denial; at the same time, forms of interaction were structured by interdependence and material constraints. Drawing on geospatial analysis, remote sensing and interview-based data, this article develops the concept of hydro-coercive negotiation to explain how access to water emerges through the interaction of asymmetrical power relations, coercive pressure and infrastructural interdependence. The findings identify four overlapping configurations through which actors engage in temporary and reversible forms of coordination; these are: mutual dependency, resource-based exchange, truce-based arrangements, and civilian solidarity. These dynamics challenge binary interpretations of water as a source of either conflict or cooperation, highlighting instead its role as a sociotechnical system that simultaneously produces coercion, constraint and negotiated interdependence.

KEYWORDS: Water weaponisation, Hydro-Coercive Negotiation, hydropolitics, hydrocoercion, water governance, Syria

ABSTRACT: Since Elinor Ostrom was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2009, research on the commons, and particularly on water commons, has expanded significantly in volume and theoretical diversity. This paper offers a scoping review of 61 'water commons' studies to identify theoretical strands and ways in which water commons are currently operationalised and problematised. First, the review reflects on the evolution of water commons research from the Ostromian – that is, more institutional – approach, towards one that is more critical, relational and social constructivist. The paper shows that recent contributions have the potential for both constituting an inflection point and expanding the Ostromian tradition. Second, the review identifies four interconnected ways of operationalising water commons, that is, as a resource, an organisation, a community and a process. It highlights a shift away from purely resource- and right-centric understandings towards more complex sociopolitical conceptualisations. Also, water commons are predominantly framed as responses to market- and state-driven governance failures, though warnings against romanticisation remind us of their limits in addressing large-scale challenges and internal power asymmetries. The analysis further identifies two major debates – on the role of the state and on the relationship between rights-based approaches and relational commons governance – and two emerging threads concerning commons endurance under external pressures and the ambivalent role of social movements. Overall, the review enriches our understanding of the literature on water commons beyond the ‘institutional vs. critical studies’ dichotomy, and sheds new light on the diverse ways in which scholars have empirically worked with, and on, water commons.

KEYWORDS: Water, commons, Ostrom, critical theory, commoning, definitions, governance

ABSTRACT: This paper provides a review of the literature on peri-urban water (in)security in India. Articles were selected using a mix of a Google Scholar search and snowball sampling. The literature is dominated by the experience of peri-urban water insecurity in a few large cities that grew in response to the neoliberal expansion policies of the early 1990s. Peri-urban water insecurity is experienced in a variety of ways including: weakened access to water commons such as lakes, tanks, ponds and wetlands; increasing competition for groundwater; the physical flow of water from peri-urban spaces to urban centres; uneven access to safe drinking water; and declining water quality. Social and power relationships mediate how residents of peri-urban spaces experience changing access to water sources. A wide variety of approaches to improved peri-urban water security have been put forward by actors such as academics, NGOs, corporations and civil society groups. A gender and intersectionality lens should be used in further research that focuses on the peri-urban dynamics of water insecurity around smaller towns and urban centres.

KEYWORDS: Peri-urban, political ecology, urbanisation, water security, India

ABSTRACT: River basin organisations are frequently portrayed as technically grounded and politically neutral instruments of water governance, but this framing conceals the contested social and political processes through which they are constituted and transformed. This article reviews the hundred-year trajectory of Spain’s confederaciones hidrográficas – established in 1926 and among the oldest RBOs in the world – through three analytical threads: 1) vertical governance (the central state versus peripheral regional powers), 2) horizontal governance (social participation), and 3) shifting ideological projects. Drawing on critical institutionalist and political ecology perspectives across four periods of institutional reconfiguration, the analysis shows that each one of those components has been variously interpreted, diluted, instrumentalised, or contested across radically different political regimes. Crucially, while the first three periods were organised around the hydraulic mission as a shared political project, the fourth reorients the confederaciones hidrográficas towards the European Union’s Water Framework Directive. This illustrates a decoupling between an institution’s continuity and its political purpose. Meanwhile, social participation has oscillated between irrigation associations having genuine autonomy, their authoritarian subordination, and procedural formalism that achieves no substantive redistribution of decision-making power to a broader range of social actors. Basin unity, though technically legitimised, has been persistently contested by provincial, regional, and sectoral interests. The centralisation-decentralisation balance has proven no less volatile, reflecting broader disputes over territorial organisation rather than water-related governance needs. These findings challenge the narrative of the confederaciones hidrográficas as a pioneering and exemplary model and contribute to debates on the institutional plasticity of river basin organisations – understood as their capacity to accommodate divergent political projects while preserving formal institutional continuity. Ultimately, they underscore that the performance of basin organisations cannot be understood in isolation from the historically specific power configurations and hydro-social conflicts in which they are embedded. These socio-political relations must be rendered visible, and governance arrangements must not only incorporate broader participation but actively challenge entrenched power asymmetries.

KEYWORDS: River basin organisations, water governance, water management, social participation, basin unity, hydrographic confederations, Spain

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