Making Water Work: Intermediating between Regional Strategy and Local Practice

Since the early 1990s there has been a proliferation of calls for integrated water resource management as a strategy for sustainable water management. While literatures have examined the extent to which institutions can adapt to management defined by hydrological zones, the significance of other sociotechnical spaces to sustainable water management has been overlooked in these debates. In this paper, having demonstrated the hybridity of the hydrological cycle, we argue that more attention needs to be given to the interaction between regional, network, and fluid spatialities in sustainable water management. More specifically, we examine the fluid work of intermediaries in between regional and network spaces in the translation of regional strategies into local practice. We conclude by looking at the implications of understanding the relationship between regions, networks, and fluids for water governance specifically and environmental governance more generally.

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