The geopolitics of water conflict and cooperation in the Euphrates-Tigris River Basin

Alexandra Turgul
College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State University; Corvallis; caplana@oregonstate.edu

ABSTRACT: This article examines the geopolitics of water conflict and cooperation in the Euphrates-Tigris River Basin from 1948 to 2023. Drawing on a newly constructed database of water-related interactions, it traces how hydropolitical interactions have been shaped by multi-scalar dynamics involving state, non-state and transnational actors. Conflict and cooperation in the basin often co-exist. Interstate cooperation has persisted at the technical level even as high-level cooperation has been stalled during periods of broader political instability; similarly, even during periods without interstate conflict, high-intensity water conflict has persisted at a more local scale as armed groups embroiled in regional conflicts utilised water as a weapon of war. The last two decades, however, have also seen broadened participation in water governance due to increasing involvement of NGOs and civil society initiatives. The analysis offered in this paper highlights the importance of taking a multi-scalar approach to the study of water conflict and cooperation and the role of geopolitics in shaping hydropolitics.

KEYWORDS: Hydropolitics, transboundary water, conflict and cooperation, Euphrates-Tigris, Middle East

Viewpoint − Water efficiency gains won’t resolve datacentres’ contested future

Sameer H. Shah
School of Environmental & Forest Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, United States of America; shs89@uw.edu

Nicole J. Wilson
Department of Environment and Geography, and the Centre for Earth Observation Science, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada; nicole.j.wilson@umanitoba.ca

Cassandra L. Workman
Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina Greensboro, Greensboro, United States of America; clworkma@uncg.edu

ABSTRACT: Datacentres are increasingly being built to service artificial intelligence (AI) – and large volumes of water are often required to power and cool these facilities. Today, public opposition against new datacentre development is sharply increasing in the United States, with local water insecurity concerns – including institutional distrust, ecosystem risks, and escalating utility rates – featuring prominently. The scientific community participates in these debates by quantifying datacentres’ volumetric water use – what we call "assessment-driven" research. Our viewpoint argues that such assessments can inadvertently produce an information ecosystem in which water overuse becomes framed as a resource management problem to be solved with more efficient water-use technology. To us, this will not be sufficient to overcome opposition – and could, paradoxically, inflame existing tensions. This is because the "water problem" is an existential one for local communities, not a techno-managerial one. Water access shapes the futures of local communities, their perceived character, and the lives people want for themselves – and water use, including more efficient use, by these industrial facilities can enable the very kinds of existential changes that are often the bases of local resistance movements. Assessing who (if anyone) benefits from the water used for AI can challenge existing managerial approaches that often separate co-constitutive water-society relationships and assume efficiency improvements will, at least partly, quell public opposition.

KEYWORDS: Datacentres, artificial intelligence, resistance, water security, United States of America

Viewpoint – The case for reconciling water principles with treaty practices in crafting a comprehensive Nile River Basin Treaty

Berhanu Abegaz
Department of Economics, William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA, USA; bxabeg@wm.edu

ABSTRACT: The Nile River Basin (NRB) is home to a long-standing dispute with colonial roots. A comprehensive agreement on water allocation and joint basin management has so far eluded its eleven riparians. How might the states reconcile downstream dependence on existing uses with upstream development needs? Principles of equitable and reasonable utilization and prevention of significant harm are indispensable, but they leave open important operational questions. Agreements on other transboundary rivers offer instructive, although imperfect, examples of fixed deliveries, percentage formulas, seasonal schedules, drought adjustments, joint commissions, and dispute procedures. This Viewpoint argues that the disagreement is ultimately about power and legality rather than hydrology. A positive path to treaty engagement is for (i) Ethiopia to articulate a coherent national water strategy and a model treaty proposal; (ii) all riparians to recognize that negotiated allocation, alongside dam operation and basin management, belongs on the agenda; (iii) the parties to draw jointly on international watercourse principles and, just as importantly, relevant treaty practices; and (iv) the basin states to develop reciprocal arrangements for sediment management, water use, and watershed protection. A phased agreement would protect vital existing uses while creating tangible opportunities for equitable upstream development.

KEYWORDS: Nile River Basin, watercourse conventions, water treaties, Ethiopia, Egypt, Sudan

Cycles of technopolitical transformation and (de)politicisation in water infrastructure: Insights from the Atatürk Dam

Aybike Alkan
Independent Researcher, Berlin, Germany; aybike.alkn@gmail.com

Arda Bilgen
Middle East Centre, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK; a.bilgen@lse.ac.uk

ABSTRACT: Large dams are often portrayed as technical achievements that advance economic development, energy production and regional integration, yet they also embody political struggles over expertise, authority and development priorities. This article examines the Atatürk Dam, Turkey’s largest hydraulic infrastructure project, as a technopolitical intervention rather than merely an engineering structure. It asks how technical expertise, institutional arrangements and technopolitical strategies have shaped the dam’s governance, and how processes of politicisation and depoliticisation have influenced the framing of its hydrosocial, hydropolitical and politico-ecological implications. Drawing on archival sources, interviews and documentary analysis, the article argues that the governance of the Atatürk Dam did not move from technical design to political controversy in a linear trajectory; rather, it evolved through recurrent and co-constitutive processes of politicisation and depoliticisation, as competing actors continuously contested expertise, institutional authority and scalar governance. In doing so, the article reconceptualises politicisation and depoliticisation as intertwined technopolitical processes and demonstrates how large-scale water infrastructures both materialise and mediate political conflict.

KEYWORDS: Atatürk Dam, depoliticisation, politicisation, technopolitics, water infrastructure, Turkey

Community-based participatory research and Indigenous Knowledge: A pathway to climate-resilient and transformative water governance

Amanda Shankland
Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; ashankla@torontomu.ca

Carolyn Johns
Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; cjohns@torontomu.ca

Kelly Fran Davis
University of Waterloo, Brock University, St. Catherine’s, Ontario, Canada; kdavis@brocku.ca

Kelsy Chan
Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; kelsychan@torontomu.ca

Julia Baird
Brock University, St. Catharine’s, Ontario, Canada; jbaird@brocku.ca

ABSTRACT: This critical reflection explores how community-based participatory research (CBPR) can serve as both a methodological and political foundation for transforming water and climate governance. Beginning with an overview of CBPR, the paper emphasises its capacity to centre community needs, redistribute power, and foster resilience through participatory governance. Rather than viewing CBPR solely through the lens of research ethics or engagement, we argue that it enables deeper structural transformation by challenging exclusionary governance systems and amplifying community-defined priorities. We examine how CBPR contributes to water and climate governance by integrating relational place-based knowledge and enabling more adaptive and equitable policy responses. Central to this approach is the recognition of Indigenous Knowledges (IK) not as supplementary to effective governance, but as foundational. By unsettling dominant epistemologies and exposing power asymmetries, CBPR facilitates the inclusion of IK and other marginalised knowledge systems in governance reform. The paper further engages with Indigenous research approaches and decolonial methodologies that inform CBPR, highlighting their role in cultivating relational accountability and shared authority. Situating CBPR within broader debates on knowledge justice and decolonial governance, we also address tensions such as institutional resistance, issues of scale, and the risk of co-optation. Ultimately, we present CBPR as a critical research approach and governance practice that supports climate-resilient, justice-oriented, and community-led policy transformation.

KEYWORDS: Community-based participatory research, Indigenous Knowledge, policy, water, climate, justice

Why does Florida’s Aquifer continue to decline despite regulations aimed at preserving it: An institutional analysis and way forward

Douglas J. Merrey
Independent Consultant on Natural Resources Management, Gainesville, Florida, USA; dougmerrey@gmail.com

ABSTRACT: Globally, aquifers underpin food security and domestic water supplies, yet many are severely threatened by over-extraction and pollution. In the southeastern United States, the Floridan Aquifer System is the primary source of water for drinking and other uses, especially in Florida. The system is distinctive because in Florida alone, it includes roughly 1100 artesian springs and extensive underwater caverns. Despite clear evidence that the aquifer and springs are seriously impaired, and despite legal and regulatory requirements for sustainable use, the state continues to issue consumptive-use permits and allow pollution to worsen. Why does this continue? After reviewing evidence of aquifer and spring deterioration, this paper analyses the legal and institutional framework governing Florida’s water resources. It argues that Florida has adopted a centralized regulatory system dominated by large-scale water users, creating little incentive to prioritize conservation. The paper concludes with recommendations for reform, while recognizing the obstacles such reforms would face. Without radical governance reforms, Florida is likely to face an existential challenge as development priorities collide with the decline of the Floridan Aquifer System.

KEYWORDS: Aquifer, groundwater governance, springs, Floridan Aquifer System, nitrates, Florida, USA

Paradigmatic dimension of water access denial in Mumbai: Examining the 'Water for All' policy

Paroma Wagle
Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning, Virginia Tech, Arlington, VA, USA; paroma@vt.edu

ABSTRACT: Mumbai’s 2022 'Water for All' policy contravenes the 2010 United Nations General Assembly recognition of the human right to water as well as UN Sustainable Development Goal 6. The rationale underlying this contravention is rooted in requirements of what we refer to in this paper as the 'centralised infrastructure paradigm' to which Mumbai’s municipal authorities subscribe. This paradigm places sole emphasis on large, centralised equipment and systems, while what we call here the 'UN institutional paradigm of the human rights to water' – drawn from formal UN documents – provides a conceptual framework, practical guidelines and policy analysis tools for positioning the human right to water at the centre of the policies and practices that govern the water distribution sector. The paper underscores the need in the Global South to replace the dominant urban water distribution concepts of 'water connections' and 'dwellings' with a focus on 'water access' and 'human beings'. It provides a paradigmatic explanation for the chronic denial of water access to Mumbai’s slumdwellers. Based on an analysis of formal documents, academic literature, and data from interviews with experts, officials and activists, the paper suggests a new paradigmatic perspective for further research on water sector policies; it also encourages policymakers and activists to become sensitised to the covert and overt influences of different paradigms on policies.

KEYWORDS: Water policy, water access, human rights, paradigms, infrastructure, Mumbai, India

Forces at play – Hydrosocial infrastructuring and the making of the modern Rhine

Nils Mühlenbrock
Chair of Sociology of Technology and Organization (STO), Institute of Sociology, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany; nmuehlenbrock@soziologie.rwth-aachen.de

Roger Häußling
Chair of Sociology of Technology and Organization (STO), Institute of Sociology, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany; rhaeussling@soziologie.rwth-aachen.de

Tim Franke
Chair of Sociology of Technology and Organization (STO), Institute of Sociology, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany; tfranke@soziologie.rwth-aachen.de

ABSTRACT: Rivers like the Rhine are embedded in complex hydrosocial entanglements. They serve as vital, though often latent, infrastructures that provide essential services and resources and underpin a wide array of situated sociomaterial practices. Yet their close relationship with societies is marked by a profound duality, as indicated by the increasing frequency of flood events and droughts. This article introduces a sociological account of rivers as hydrosocial infrastructures, that acknowledges heterogeneity, materiality and fluidity, alongside technical rationality and issues of control. Drawing on Bennett’s "thing-materialism", the paper develops a theoretically grounded, process-sociological heuristic that reconceives "thing-power" as a relational capacity and systematises (hydrosocial) infrastructuring across six dimensions. Applying this framework to the historical case of the Rhine rectification in the 18th and 19th centuries enables a deconstruction of the engineering work as the product of a heterogeneous assemblage, while highlighting the multifaceted forces at play in the river’s gradual transformation into a hydrosocial infrastructure. The paper shows how the Rhine’s "modern" infrastructural character emerges from long-standing transformations that inscribe particular ontologies, values, expectations and relations to nature into the river’s form – patterns that remain embedded within ongoing sociomaterial processes. While emerging from hydrosocial inquiry, the framework offers a perspective that may extend to other sociomaterial contexts that are shaped by infrastructured relations.

KEYWORDS: Infrastructure, hydrosocial, thing-power, modern water, sociology of water, Rhine straightening

The unique Brazilian model of water privatisation: An exploration of the processes shaping a financialised oligopoly

Gustavo do Amaral Loureiro
King’s College London, Rio Branco Chair (2025-2026), London, United Kingdom / Núcleo de Estudos Atores e Agendas de Política Externa (NEAAPE) – UERJ / Centro Interinstitucional de Análise de Políticas Sociais (CIAPSoc) – UFMG; gus.amaral7@gmail.com

João Paulo Nicolini Gabriel
King’s College London, London, United Kingdom; joaopaulo.nicolinigabriel@gmail.com

Bárbara Furtado Barra
University of Greenwich, London, United Kingdom / René Rachou Institute, Fiocruz Minas, Belo Horizonte, Brazil; bbarra@aluno.fiocruz.br

Alex Moura de Souza Aguiar
King’s College London, Rio Branco Chair (2025-2026), London, United Kingdom / SMARH-UFMG, Belo Horizonte, Brazil; alex.aguiar@kcl.ac.uk

Alex Loftus
King’s College London, London, United Kingdom; alex.loftus@kcl.ac.uk

Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos
King’s Brazil Institute, King’s College London, London, United Kingdom; andreza.souza_santos@kcl.ac.uk

Léo Heller
King’s College London, Rio Branco Chair (2025-2026), London, United Kingdom / René Rachou Institute, Fiocruz Minas, Belo Horizonte, Brazil; leo.heller@fiocruz.br

ABSTRACT: With the global rate of water privatisation either slowing or going into reverse, the water and sanitation sector in Brazil stands as an outlier. This paper develops an in-depth analysis of the Brazilian model, arguing that the privatisation of water services represents not simply a transfer of ownership but a process of profound sectoral re-engineering. The theoretical framework combines a Marxist approach to political economy with a neoinstitutionalist analysis. Empirical content is drawn from legislation, documents on regulatory standards, concession contracts, official reports, auction documents, and financial prospectuses. The paper’s findings reveal three structural features: the rapid expansion of privatisation, the oligopolisation of service provision, and the increasing financialisation of operating firms’ ownership structures. These structural features have emerged in a context of political de-risking and disenfranchisement of social movements. The paper goes on to analyse five drivers of the privatisation process: the influence of international finance, regulatory stability as a de-risking strategy, the influence of interest groups, a neoliberal shift in Brazilian politics, and the federal government’s role as anchor and guarantor of privatisation. The paper concludes by questioning whether the Brazilian experiment will catalyse a new wave of water privatisation worldwide or whether it will come to be viewed as another chapter in the failure of neoliberal policies more broadly. Taken together, the findings situate the Brazilian case within broader debates around the reform of public services under financialised capitalism.

KEYWORDS: Water and sanitation, privatisation, financialisation, oligopolisation, Brazil

New water for a thirsty land: Sociomaterial bricolage of treated wastewater irrigation on Gozo, Malta

Georges Gabriel
Independent Researcher, Brussels, george2gabriel@gmail.com

Luna Sylverans
Independent Researcher, Antwerp, lunasylverans@live.be

Edoardo de Paola
Independent Researcher, Brussels, edoardo.depaola@gmail.com

Maarten Loopmans
KU Leuven, Leuven, maarten.loopmans@kuleuven.be

ABSTRACT: This paper examines the sociomaterial bricolage that emerged on the island of Gozo, Malta, following the introduction of treated wastewater for irrigation, commonly branded as 'New Water'. Drawing on an actor-centred sociomaterial bricolage approach, the study investigates how farmers adapted infrastructures and institutions in response to the opportunities, constraints and inequalities created by the new-water system. Based on qualitative fieldwork involving interviews with farmers, Water Services Corporation employees, and local officials, the analysis compares four water dispensers that are each operating under different conditions of water availability and pressure. The findings show that infrastructural and institutional adaptations are closely intertwined and are shaped by material conditions. At water-abundant ‘head-ender’ locations near the beginning of the water distribution canal, farmers developed arrangements enabling simultaneous water sharing, while water scarcity and unreliable supply at tail-ender locations encouraged forms of time sharing and stricter coordination. These adaptations also generated new tensions that prompted interventions at broader system-level scales. The study demonstrates how sociomaterial bricolage is multiscalar and path dependent, with successive adaptations responding to the consequences of earlier interventions; it also highlights the importance of anticipating such dynamics when designing equitable wastewater reuse systems.

KEYWORDS: Sociomaterial bricolage, circularity, wastewater reuse, irrigation, Malta

De- and re-infrastructuring the Rhône Delta: Ecological restoration and industrial legacies in the Camargue

Antoine Brochet
Université Grenoble-Alpes, UMR PACTE, UMR IGE, Grenoble, France; antoine.brochet@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr

Joana Guerrin
INRAE, UMR G-EAU, Université de Montpellier, Montpellier, France; joana.guerrin@inrae.fr

ABSTRACT: This article examines the transformation of inherited hydraulic infrastructures through the case of the former saltworks of the Camargue, in France’s Rhône Delta. There, an ecological restoration project – subsequently framed as a Nature-based Solution – has restored hydrological connectivity while discontinuing the maintenance of former industrial seafront dykes. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork conducted between 2021 and 2023, combining semi-structured interviews, observation and document analysis, the article examines the social and political consequences of this transformation. The project is conceptualised by the authors as a process of de- and re-infrastructuring that reconfigures hydrosocial territories and their historically sedimented hydrosocial heritages. The analysis shows how infrastructural transformation reshapes social practices, ecological relations, power relations and perceptions of risk, and how it can generate conflicts over historically constituted relationships between water, infrastructures and territorial practices. The article argues that such transformations can produce forms of hydrosocial misrecognition when historically constituted socio-ecological relations, situated knowledge and territorial practices are insufficiently recognised. More broadly, it shows that Nature-based Solutions, often presented as consensual and depoliticised, can themselves become sites of conflict over how territories should be inhabited, protected and transformed.

KEYWORDS: Hydrosocial territory, de- and re-infrastructuring, Nature-based Solutions, hydrosocial misrecognition, Rhône Delta