More-than-human water governance A participatory experiment

Abstract

This project is an intervention into the politics of allocating water during times of urgent water depletion. It begins from an understanding that other-than-humans are critical to the making of waterworlds. As a contribution to imagining other, more ethical modes of ordering freshwater distribution in the Anthropocene, the research proposes that water lives shared with the non-humans be placed at the heart of water governance concerns. The research is a work within the environmental humanities and borrows insights largely from co-productionist reworkings of participation, multi-species studies, and posthuman feminist work on water. This is discussed within the pressing eco-political context of freshwater access in South Tarawa, the atoll capital of the Pacific Ocean nation of the Republic of Kiribati. Using participation as an analytical device through which claims for more-than-human water agency can be pursued, the thesis experiments with new models for reworking existing governance practices. Ethnographic accounts of multi-being water interactions in South Tarawa provide the conceptual and political resources for opening up new possibilities for understanding, enacting and ordering water. Ultimately, this project shows that the problematisation of notions of participation, participants, and subjects of collective concern, offers generative ways of understanding and responding to damaged waterworlds.