Emerging Currents in the Political Ecology of Water

The ravages and disruptions of anthropogenic climate change have sparked renewed interest in water and its social worlds. This review paper examines four key emerging directions in political ecologies of water: legal geographies of water, Indigenous scholarship considering water as a relational agent, geographies of everyday and infrastructural water practices, and the growing literature on hydrosocial territories and waterscapes. This work builds on earlier attention in the field to themes of privatization, urbanization, and infrastructure, but broadens its analysis to water's articulations into the manifold hydrosocial worlds through which it flows. Recent political ecological research has thus shifted from the relationship between the state and capital to diffuse its focus throughout the networks through which water comes to be known, produced, enacted, and consumed. I close by suggesting fruitful future avenues for research: namely, theorizing the political ecology of water across Global North-Global South and urban-rural divides, and investigating the ways that both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic strategies of water governance travel between hydrosocial contexts.