The Biopolitics of Water ― Governance, Scarcity and Populations

Biopolitics refers to a form of politics concerned with the administering and regulating the conditions of life at the aggregated level of populations. This book provides a biopolitical perspective on water governance and its effects. Drawing on the work of Foucault, it explores how notions of scarcity are used in strategies of governance and how such governance differentiates between different populations. Furthermore, the author investigates what such biopolitical regulation means for people’s lifestyles and the way they understand themselves and their moral responsibilities as humans,individuals and citizens.

The book begins by investigating the global water agenda with particular emphasis on its focus on water for basic needs, and provides different examples of hydromentalities around the world. It also presents rich empirical details of one local case in South Africa. By carefully exploring water users water ‘stories’, the book provides new perspectives on the relationship between water and power. Additionally, it offers an innovative methodological framework through which we can study the workings of governance more generally, and water governance specifically. It thereby contributes to the scholarship on water governance in relation to how water governance and technologies are part of producing subjectivities, notions of life and lifestyles and, more specifically, in terms of how the global water agenda can work so as to produce, or further entrench, distinctions between different lives and lifestyles. Ultimately, such differences between individual and populations produced as an effect of water governance are assessed in relation to social sustainability.