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Liquid Futures: Water Management Systems And Anticipated Environments, Sayd Randle, Jessica Barnes

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Climate change and its impact on hydrological dynamics have become key topics of concern among water managers and policy makers in many parts of the world. Yet while practitioners often frame adaptation to a climate-changed future as a novel issue, ideas about future environments have long influenced systems of water management. Reviewing ethnographic and historical accounts of waterscapes across the globe, this article examines the relationship between imagined environmental futures and the policies, practices, infrastructures of water management and legal frameworks. We show, first, how conflicting ideas about environmental stasis and perturbation have been built into water networks across space …