Clark, C. 2025. Legal geographies of water: The spaces, places and narratives of human-water relations. Routledge. ISBN ISBN 9781032225968 (paperback, £49.70) / ISBN 9781032225975 (hardback, £152.00)/ ISBN (Ebook, £38.24), 282 p.
(URL: https://www.routledge.com/ )
Matteo Nicolini
University of Verona, Italy
To cite this review: Nicolini, M. 2026. Review of “Legal Geographies of Water: The Spaces, Places and Narratives of Human-Water Relations”, Routledge, by Cristy Clark, Water Alternatives https://www.water-alternatives.org/index.php/bor/767-clark
In the last few years, we have witnessed a growing interest in the legal-geographical nexus among lawyers, which have (at least as far as I am concerned) enthusiastically joined the conversation revolving around the space-place-law tangle. Not only has this dialogue pluralised the debate on legal geography as an interdisciplinary intellectual project, but the interweaving of different disciplines has also widened its scope, which now extends over an extremely differentiated set of topics with a ‘remarkable thematic breadth’ (Orzeck and Hae, 2020). Legal scholars have therefore started to approach the law as a social construct implicated in several processes of spatial ‘production’ and ‘construction’.
It is not a matter of reducing the legal to a mere geographical practice. Far from it. Something more is at stake here. The law matters because it contributes to producing ‘a concrete geography’ made up of ‘wordless words deposited on the surface of the Earth, in cities and fields’ (Besse, 2020; author’s translation). And also on water, as Cristy Clark vividly probes in her Legal Geographiers of Water: The Spaces, Places and Narratives of Human-Water Relations. The book is about the production of concrete geography – or, better, of several concrete legal geographies, as human-water relations vary across the earth. At its core lies the idea of the law playing an active role in shaping, producing, and arranging the spatiality of water resources: by gaining access to (and control) it, legal frameworks fundamentally restructure the aforementioned human-water relationships and constitute new legal geographies.
What is relevant in Clark’s predicament is not the production of a variety of legal geographies of waters per se – as said, these undeniably vary diatopically and diachronically –; rather, what matters is how they are actually produced. As the book correctly argues, the legal neoliberal approach rearranges human-water relations, triggering a profound reconfiguration of concrete water legal geographies. The consequences of this socio-legal restructuring (not to say reengineering) are twofold. On the one hand, neoliberal legal water governance aims to abstract (that is, dis-embed) water from its socio-environmental context, turning it into an economic resource; on the other, these legal rearrangements profoundly alter already existing human-water relations. The aim is, again, to extract monetary (and financial) values from it, deepening social inequalities and causing a huge impact on the right of access to, and use of, this precious natural resource, upon which our very existence evidently depends. As a consequence, the law is used to extricate water from the concrete legal geographies that it has contributed to coproducing.
To this extent, Legal Geographiers of Water is a timely contribution to the legal-geographical conversation because it challenges the idea that, through the law, water can become servient to neoliberal governance policies. And Clark fittingly does so by applying legal-geographical approaches to water governance. In both theoretical and methodological terms, legal geography is indeed well-equipped for assessing the neoliberal use of law as a spatial practice – a spatial practice, I add, that, for decades, has been making several efforts to code water by turning it into a marketable asset. As she rightly assumes throughout the book, the legal-geographical approach discloses how water is a decidedly ‘uncooperative commodity’ (Bakker, 2024) that opposes its own dis-embeddedness and abstraction for the sake of market’s expediency.
The book invites readers to explore the connections between the law, the embeddedness of water, and the cultural contexts that bear the spatial consequences of its neoliberal regulation. The legal geographical perspective demystifies conventional regulatory frameworks (especially when they slyly conceal water’s uncooperative materiality by commodifying it). At the same time, it reveals how water’s ability inspires ‘’alterative relationships’ through ‘more fluid and responsive legal frameworks that can recognise [the] multiple values’, as well as the ‘plurality of human-waters relations’ that make up waters’ concrete legalities and geographies (Clark, 2025).
The book undertakes a perambulation through several empirical case studies à la recherche of how water’s ‘material properties’ defy (often ironically) the neoliberal legal approach to its governance with its related negative externalities and socio-ecological concerns. Cristy Clarks leads us through the earlier experiments with neoliberal water governance in Chile and England in the 1980s, the privatisation of Waterworks and Sewerage Systems in Manila, the global water justice movement in Bolivia and South Africa, and the strategic use of the human rights discourse, which is deployed to entrench an individualistic right to water-as-a commodity from which financial gains can be extracted. This perambulation also reflects a narrative of resistance to the full enforcement of ‘neoliberal water’ affecting the concrete geography (and materiality) of both water and communities. It is also a story of embedded spatial inequalities that are reinforced through diversified ‘formal’ infrastructure networks for the elites and ‘informal’ water supplies for the poor.
Perhaps most intriguing of all, the book shows us a way out from the ‘modernistic’ and ‘Western-related’ ontology of water. Clark reappraises the idea that its agency (as well as of several other water beings through human history and across civilisations) is still capable of securing our concrete human-water relations. Holy wells, watery entities, and rivers with legal personhood are all sources of meaningful legal geographies (or, in Clark’s words, of ‘multiple words’ and ‘fractiverse’) because, within them, there is still a thriving ‘interaction between the materiality of water and the cultural or spiritual frameworks of humans’ (Clark, 2025).
The ontological turn that Legal Geographiers of Water suggests reminds me of the process of spatial production I elsewhere termed as ‘counter legal geographies’, which reveals the role played by ideology in the production of space (Nicolini, 2022). Particularly when it comes to the enriching contribution of Indigenous legal geographies (such as the Te Awa Tupua in New Zealand), counter legal geographies examine spatial production to display the potential of geographies of resistance to free places from power – or, at least to reveal the ideologically motivated production of neoliberal legal spaces. If neoliberal water governance assigns its own ‘preferred’ meanings to water as an inert and marketable commodity, counter legal geographies of water challenge them by disclosing their being legal expressions of financial and social domination. These legal patterns of water governance are defied in post-colonial environments, where legal frameworks allow the resurgence of pre-colonial legal spatial settlements, of which Te Awa Tupua, examined in the book, is a fitting example. The ontological turn advocated by Clark precisely lies in this concrete understanding of the legal-spatial-spiritual nexus.
This book will prove an interesting and worthwhile read for anyone engaged in water resources governance. But it is a relevant contribution to legal geographical studies. The idea of revitalising water’s living qualities as situated legal geographies stirs up the law and opens it up to an unceasing conversation with the concrete geographies that lie out there in our world.
References
Orzeck R., Hae L. (2020). Restructuring legal geography. Progress in Human Geography, 44(5):832–851, 832.
Besse, J.-M. (2020). La nécessité du paysage. Marseille: Éditions Parenthèses
Bakker, K.J. (2004). An Uncooperative Commodity. Privatizing Water in England and Wales. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Clark, C. (2025). Legal Geographiers of Water: The Spaces, Places and Narratives of Human-Water Relations. Abingdon and New York, Routledge.
Nicolini, M. (2022). Legal Geography. Comparative Law and Production of Space. Cham, Springer.