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A Future History of Water
Based on fieldwork among state officials, NGOs, politicians, and activists in Costa Rica and Brazil, A Future History of Water traces the unspectacular work necessary to make water access a human right and a human right something different from a commodity. Andrea Ballestero shows how these ephemeral distinctions are made through four technolegal devices—formula, index, list and pact. She argues that what is at stake in these devices is not the making of a distinct future but what counts as the future in the first place. A Future History of Water is an ethnographically rich and conceptually charged journey into ant-filled water meters, fantastical water taxonomies, promises captured on slips of paper, and statistical maneuvers that dissolve the human of human rights. Ultimately, Ballestero demonstrates what happens when instead of trying to fix its meaning, we make water’s changing form the precondition of our analyses.
- GenresEnvironmentEconomics
248 pages, Hardcover
Published June 21, 2019
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137 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 30, 2021
I'm trying to submit something I wrote on this book for publication, but if that doesn't get anywhere, I will publish it fully here.
Much of this book focuses on contestations (in Costa Rica and Brazil) over whether water should be a commodity or a human right, and Ballestero examines four 'devices' that are involved in trying to produce such distinctions: the formula (specifically an accounting equation for pricing water), index (Costa Rica's consumer price index), list (a taxonomy used by obstructionist Costa Rican libertarians against water as a public good), and pacts (public promise-making rituals deployed to counter corruption and the 'drought industry' in Brazil). A lot of this tension between water as a human right vs. a commodity comes from an observation Marx made that “the very Eden of... innate rights” is found within “[t]he sphere of circulation or commodity exchange.” Radha D’Souza in her book What's Wrong With Rights puts it this way: “The modern concept of rights owes its birth to that moment when land was transformed into a commodity and hundreds of thousands of people were evicted from the place they called their ‘homeland’.” A podcast I occasionally listen to called The Magnificast had a really great episode on D'Souza's book.
Much of this book focuses on contestations (in Costa Rica and Brazil) over whether water should be a commodity or a human right, and Ballestero examines four 'devices' that are involved in trying to produce such distinctions: the formula (specifically an accounting equation for pricing water), index (Costa Rica's consumer price index), list (a taxonomy used by obstructionist Costa Rican libertarians against water as a public good), and pacts (public promise-making rituals deployed to counter corruption and the 'drought industry' in Brazil). A lot of this tension between water as a human right vs. a commodity comes from an observation Marx made that “the very Eden of... innate rights” is found within “[t]he sphere of circulation or commodity exchange.” Radha D’Souza in her book What's Wrong With Rights puts it this way: “The modern concept of rights owes its birth to that moment when land was transformed into a commodity and hundreds of thousands of people were evicted from the place they called their ‘homeland’.” A podcast I occasionally listen to called The Magnificast had a really great episode on D'Souza's book.
January 31, 2020
Great book, all the stories, the details
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews