Worldwide, rivers face challenges due to human and climatic pressures. Floods, droughts, pollution, damming and hydropeaking are only a few examples of these pressures, and influence the way rivers flow. Climate change adaptation projects increase the incentive to domesticate rivers, often legitimised through expert views on (future) vulnerability and risk. This emerging river imaginary dominates current debates in many rivers in our world. River imaginaries reflect spatially bound hydrosocial territories in which multiple actors on multiple scales from multiples sectors operate to reach varying objectives. They include water flows, ecological systems, climate conditions, hydraulic infrastructure, financial means, institutional arrangements, legal frameworks and information/knowledge hubs. In the context of climate change adaptation, river imaginaries are strongly dependent on the extent to which climate change is expected to influence rivers through a mixture of probable, possible, desirable or preferable versions of a (future) river. As such, knowledge-structures of future making are scrutinised in this research by emphasising on the role of change, the role of futures and the role of experts. This presentation aims to elucidate how river imaginaries have influenced river management under climate change adaptation that resulted in large infrastructural projects. Through a study of the Meuse river, a concrete case of a imaginary came into being in the Dutch-Belgian Border-Meuse trajectory. Moreover, preliminary result from adaptation projects in the marshlands of the lower Magdalena in Colombia strengthen the dominate imaginary of technocratic and ecocentric approaches to climate change adaptation where an expert view on local knowledge dominates.

Worldwide, rivers face challenges due to human and climatic pressures. Floods, droughts, pollution, damming and hydropeaking are only a few examples of these pressures, and influence the way rivers flow. Climate change adaptation projects increase the incentive to domesticate rivers, often legitimised through expert views on (future) vulnerability and risk. This emerging river imaginary dominates current debates in many rivers in our world. River imaginaries reflect spatially bound hydrosocial territories in which multiple actors on multiple scales from multiples sectors operate to reach varying objectives. They include water flows, ecological systems, climate conditions, hydraulic infrastructure, financial means, institutional arrangements, legal frameworks and information/knowledge hubs. In the context of climate change adaptation, river imaginaries are strongly dependent on the extent to which climate change is expected to influence rivers through a mixture of probable, possible, desirable or preferable versions of a (future) river. As such, knowledge-structures of future making are scrutinised in this research by emphasising on the role of change, the role of futures and the role of experts. This presentation aims to elucidate how river imaginaries have influenced river management under climate change adaptation that resulted in large infrastructural projects. Through a study of the Meuse river, a concrete case of a imaginary came into being in the Dutch-Belgian Border-Meuse trajectory. Moreover, preliminary result from adaptation projects in the marshlands of the lower Magdalena in Colombia strengthen the dominate imaginary of technocratic and ecocentric approaches to climate change adaptation where an expert view on local knowledge dominates.

“Individual Presentation Submission”

TITLE
THE POLITICAL ECOLOGY OF WATER-ENERGY-FOOD NEXUS IN POSTMINING RUSTENBURG

ABSTRACT
Within two decades, the Rustenburg landscape of communal grazing lands and agricultural production of sunflowers, tobacco and citrus has become dominated by smelters, tailings storage facilities and poor air quality. Low-income and indigent settlements have expanded around mining shafts where basic services (water and energy) and food have become difficult to produce and access. This urban footprint extends to the very fence line of the Kgaswane Mountain Reserve and the UNESCO declared Magaliesberg Biosphere Reserve, increasing infrastructural demands for potable water and larger traffic volumes, and compromising biodiversity and natural water sources as they introduce alien invasive plants in their gardens. Furthermore, the natural water of the Magaliesberg has become much sought after by city people from Gauteng and the mine-affected communities. The increasing need for holy water for cleansing rituals and pools for baptisms has not kept up with spatial development plans. In the Covid-19 landscape mental health and the healing force of natural areas are so sought after that people will risk their lives and trespass onto private property. This paper reflects on these issues from the vantage point of the political ecology analysis, focusing on the effects of platinum-group-metals mining, the urban footprint, and climate change on water, energy and food in the western platinum belt.

KEY WORDS:
Postmining, WEF, Rustenburg

Worldwide, rivers face challenges due to human and climatic pressures. Floods, droughts, pollution, damming and hydropeaking are only a few examples of these pressures and influence the way rivers are managed. We invite river-experts, river-managers and river-researchers for an open discussion to understand how different river imaginaries shape river management under climate change. We build our understanding of river imaginaries on the concepts of sociotechnical imaginaries and hydrosocial territories, as this allows us to include control and power dynamics in a set space. River imaginaries are therefore described as ‘the wished-for patterns regarding rivers and riparian zones, held by diverse epistemic communities’. The goal of the session is to discuss and enrich our understanding of how rivers are perceived, known and (thus) managed while discussing how river imaginaries have ‘travelled’ in several geographies going beyond North and South dichotomies.
The session format is twofold. We kick off this session with an introduction of river imaginaries in India and Colombia after which we facilitate an exploratory discussion. We virtually travel the world and invite participants to share river imaginaries. In the subsequent session, we present more detailed case study examples in Asia, Europe and South-America. Based on the examples, we reflect on the imaginaries found by using four archetypes: rivers as eco societies, rivers as territories, rivers as subjects and rivers as movements. We intend to jointly explore whether any of these lenses provide useful archetypes to deepen our understanding of how rivers can be known under multiple interpretations of reality.

River imaginaries reflect spatially bound hydrosocial territories in which multiple actors on multiple scales from multiples sectors operate to reach varying objectives. They include water flows, ecological systems, climate conditions and hydraulic infrastructure, financial means, institutional arrangements, legal frameworks and information/knowledge hubs. We kick off our session with imaginaries found in three rivers in India: the Mahanadi, the Warna river and the Cauvery river and one rivers in Colombia: the Cauca river.

Individual Presentation Submission

There is growing evidence and awareness that the impact of climate change is exacerbated by gender and other social inequalities (IPCC, 2017). However, research on the topic is yet to be translated into policies which tend to focus on technocratic solutions to the biophysical impacts of climate change (Alston & Whittenbury, 2013). This paper contributes to climate change studies with an investigation of how climate change and environmental risks intersect with other forms of systemic exclusion to produce differentiated impacts on diversely situated women and girls. It does so by applying a Feminist Political Ecology (FPE) approach to analyse the everyday politics of water practices in urban India. The paper highlights how intersectional FPE is useful to analyse the gendered consequences of water scarcity and flooding differ across class, caste, age, and religion. It provides a thorough review of the topic and identifies gaps in FPE research in urban India and Global South. The findings reflect that while a growing body of literature on urban India is attentive to how water infrastructures are shaped by social and spatial inequalities with some attention to gender, much of this work focuses on mega-cities (such as Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Calcutta), overlooking the situation faced by ‘ordinary cities’ in India and the Global South. Moreover, while intersectionality has been tackled by recent literature, the focus is generally on prime-age poor women from rural areas, informal settlements, or settlement colonies. The paper focuses on the need to study everyday struggles to access water across different age groups, living in both middle-class and poor areas to understand how inequalities in water infrastructure are produced relationally and have changed over time.

The cartesian dualism that has structured human-nature relations for centuries has reinforced the idea that humans and nature are distinctly separate, and as such, the exploitation of nature in the name of profit and “development” has hardly been questioned. However, this paper argues, in the context of Cape Town, that crises such as the recent drought and impending “Day Zero” can create possibilities for fundamentally and creatively reformulating these relations. Through ethnographic work done on the activist group the PHA Campaign, this paper explores the ways in which the drought has enabled a politics around the Cape Flats Aquifer (CFA) and therefore the Philippi Horticultural Area (PHA) that could protect these natural resources, rather than impending “paving over the aquifer”. This paper further considers how the PHA Campaign has aimed to “make the invisible, visible” and thereby giving the aquifer a voice in the technoscientific conversations around “Day Zero” by developing more inclusive forms of “Sensemaking” (Ballestero, 2019). In conclusion, this paper will provide an analysis of the work done by the PHA Campaign and consider some of the lessons that can be extracted from a radical form of ecopolitics in a neoliberal city such as Cape Town.

The cartesian dualism that has structured human-nature relations for centuries has reinforced the idea that humans and nature are distinctly separate, and as such, the exploitation of nature in the name of profit and “development” has hardly been questioned. However, this paper argues, in the context of Cape Town, that crises such as the recent drought and impending “Day Zero” can create possibilities for fundamentally and creatively reformulating these relations. Through ethnographic work done on the activist group the PHA Campaign, this paper explores the ways in which the drought has enabled a politics around the Cape Flats Aquifer (CFA) and therefore the Philippi Horticultural Area (PHA) that could protect these natural resources, rather than impending “paving over the aquifer”. This paper further considers how the PHA Campaign has aimed to “make the invisible, visible” and thereby giving the aquifer a voice in the technoscientific conversations around “Day Zero” by developing more inclusive forms of “Sensemaking” (Ballestero, 2019). In conclusion, this paper will provide an analysis of the work done by the PHA Campaign and consider some of the lessons that can be extracted from a radical form of ecopolitics in a neoliberal city such as Cape Town.