Groundwater’s role in groundwater-related conflicts

Abstract

“How did language come to be more trustworthy than matter?” (Barad 2003, 801) is also a provocative yet relevant question for critical geographies of water. By focusing on the social construction of water through discourses, laws and other human practices, the materiality of water in shaping society-nature relations often falls out of sight. However, in the last few years, more research has attempted to understand water as more than a human instrument that can be used strategically for political purposes. Here, some works have even conceptualized water as a non-human actor. In my research, I analyze groundwater conflicts in Europe. Impressed not only by the new perspectives from materialist works on aquifers but also by contributions from hydrogeology, I explore how groundwater shapes the conflicts’ objects, actors or scales in cases of contested groundwater use for municipal water supply and agricultural irrigation in Germany and Spain. I found, for example, how the low permeability of certain aquifers and consequent substantial time delays in social interactions with groundwater bring together conflicting parties from different decades. Also, groundwater’s invisibility creates a space for discursive reinterpretations about the causes and effects of the deterioration in the quality and quantity of groundwater bodies. Given these material specifics, it often proves to be challenging to determine the responsible actor for a specific problem, which in turn influences conflict dynamics. The proposed talk therefore aims to argue how new materialist and hydrogeologic perspectives can contribute to researching empirically the specifics of groundwater-related conflicts - that arguably differ from conflicts around, e.g., rivers or lakes.