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Introduction In this chapter, we explore how changing political visions, socio-cultural imaginaries and hydro-territorial configurations interact with shifting practices of water justice. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates comments that justice is what those in power consider just. Over the centuries, this statement has haunted any discussions and efforts to create a fairer society. Recent social-justice debate has extended to include the physical world as an integral component in structuring just/unjust socio-ecological relations. This chapter examines how hydro-territorial politics finds expression in the diverse actors’ confluences and encounters with spatial and political-geographical projects that compete, superimpose and align their territorialization strategies to strengthen their governance positions, ideologies and water-control claims. This continuously transforms the territory’s hydraulic grid, cultural reference frames, economic base structures and political relationships. Territorial struggles go beyond battles over natural resources per se, as they also involve conflicts over meaning, norms, knowledge, decision-making authority, representations and discourses. Policy actors commonly tend to present socio-natural, geopolitical territories as mere biophysical “nature” or legal-administrative “governance units,” portraying water problems and solutions as politically neutral, technical and managerial issues to be objectively managed through “rational water use” and “good governance” - a conscious or unconscious veil to legitimize deeply political choices sustaining specific political orders (Harris, 2009; Hommes et al., 2016; Perreault, 2014). Challenging such powerful conventions, we examine the contradictions, conflicts and societal responses generated by the configuration of hydrosocial territories (see Boelens et al., 2016; Swyngedouw and Williams, 2016); how water politics are ingrained in such socio-natural and techno-political arrangements, enhancing or challenging unequal distribution of resources and decision-making power in water governance (Boelens, 2015; Swyngedouw, 2015). Therefore, hydrosocial territories (imagined, planned or materialized) have contested functions, values and meanings as they define processes of inclusion and exclusion, development and marginalization, and the distribution of benefits and burdens that affect different groups of people in distinct but often deeply unequal manners. Taking the co-production of “nature and society” in twentieth-century Spain as our entry point, we seek to elucidate the relationship among transformations in and of “hydrosocial territory,” the state, and the contested modernization, and to tease out the multiple power relationships that enroll, transform and distribute water. In doing so, we seek to excavate how nature becomes political and, through this, how environmental reconfiguration parallels ongoing state transformation (Swyngedouw, 2014; cf. Carroll, 2012; Perreault et al., 2015).

Introduction Water is a resource that triggers profound conflicts and close collaboration, a source of deep injustices, and fierce struggles for life. In many regions of the world, rising demand and declining availability of adequate-quality water foster severe competition and ferocious clashes among different water uses and users. People also suffer from flooding; contamination caused by industry and mining; privatization of public water utilities; corruption; and displacement by large dam projects. Climate change intensifies most human-made water problems. In struggles for water security, the poor tend to lose (e.g. Crow et al., 2014; Escobar, 2006; Harvey, 1996; Perreault et al., 2011). Through exemplary cases, the chapters in this book show how new competitors - including megacities, mining, forestry, and agribusiness companies - demand and usurp a mounting share of available surface and groundwater resources (e.g., Donahue and Johnston, 1998; GRAIN, 2012). Water deprivation and water insecurity affect marginalized urban households, and rural smallholder families and communities. In many regions, this poses profound threats to environmental sustainability and local and national food security (e.g., Escobar, 2008; Mehta et al., 2012; Mena et al., 2016). Such proliferating problems of material and social “water injustices” provide the backdrop for this book. Distribution of access water rights and water-related decision-making is extremely skewed. Smallholder communities’ water-based livelihoods and rights in many countries of the global South are constantly threatened by bureaucratic administrations, market-driven policies, and top-down project intervention practices. Despite the fact that water injustices have existed throughout human history, water justice problems and related policy interventions have changed rapidly over recent decades (Zwarteveen and Boelens, 2014). For instance, rather than focusing on simply enlarging water flows through new hydraulic engineering projects, new perspectives focus on water saving and conservation (Vos and Marshall, 2017; Zwarteveen, 2015). New scientific fields and water professionals have entered the water policy-making and intervention worlds to accompany (increasingly high-tech) hydraulic engineering (Buscher and Fletcher, 2015; Goldman, 2007, 2011). Also, climate change threats and water-related disasters have changed science and policy debates and water funding projects related to issues such as “mitigation and adaptation,” flood control and drought prevention (Heynen et al., 2007; Lynch, 2012; Martínez-Alier, 2002). Further, global neoliberalism has assured that water development and governance are no longer seen as the exclusive realm of the state, with water knowledge and authority concentrated in powerful public agencies (Hommes et al., 2016; Loftus, 2009; Zwarteveen, 2015).

Introduction A vast and growing body of scholarly studies has shown how large-scale hydraulic and hydro-managerial projects, such as large dam and irrigation developments or market-environmentalist ecosystem payment schemes, have diverse socio-cultural and political-economic implications beyond merely altering water flows and raising socio-economic productivity. Concepts such as the hydrosocial cycle (Boelens, 2014; Linton and Budds, 2014), waterscapes (Baviskar, 2007; Budds and Hinojosa-Valencia, 2012; Swyngedouw, 1999) and water as socio-nature (Barnes and Alatout, 2012; Perreault, 2014) express connected insights about water being coproduced by social relations and in turn shaping these relations. The hydrosocial cycle, for instance, is described as a socio-natural process in which “water and society make and remake each other over space and time” cyclically (Linton and Budds, 2014: 170). Such coproduction of water and society is also reflected in the notion of waterscapes, conceptualized as socio-spatial configurations of water flows, artifacts, institutions and imaginaries embodying a particular world view (Budds and Hinojosa-Valencia, 2012; Zwarteveen 2015). However, these notions have so far largely focused on established hegemonic structures and discourses that drive and succeed from waterscape configurations. Less attention has been given to the multiplicity of diverging and overlapping hydrosocial territories that exist within one and the same space. To address this, we employ the hydrosocial territories approach, analyzing water territories not merely as materializations of dominant discourses and interests, but as multi-scalar networks in which water flows, hydraulic infrastructure, legal-administrative and financial systems, and socio-cultural institutions and practices are interactively produced, aligned, negotiated and contested (Boelens et al., 2016). Furthermore, combining the hydrosocial territories notion with Foucault’s governmentality approach highlights different forms of “government rationalities” and how they are entwined with hydraulic and hydro-managerial projects. We focus specifically on analyzing how ruling groups’ efforts to “conduct the conduct” of the governed (Foucault, 2008: 313) penetrate, operate through, and assimilate the rationality of the governed to advance neoliberal projects (Fletcher, 2010; Hommes et al., 2016; Zwarteveen and Boelens, 2014). Building on the work of Agnew (1994), Gupta and Ferguson (1992) and Elden (2010), we understand territories not as fixed spaces, but as spatially entrenched multi-scalar networks evolving from social interactions and practices, and materializations of these practices (see also Baletti, 2012; Brighenti, 2010). Social encounters and acts, including legal-administrative arrangements, technical reconfigurations and symbolic, cultural and political mechanisms of boundary-and place-making, actively produce territories.

This chapter discusses new science policy initiatives that involve water in terms of environmental representation: who represents, what is represented, for what purpose (equity, sustainability). One such initiative, of science and politics (and nature–society) as being distinct and distinguishable. The effect of this is that particular water “facts” (e.g., the water consumed per unit of land, or the crops produced per unit of water) appear as the (only or most) objective starting points for improving water management and governance; other “facts” and other possible ways of representing water come to be seen as less true or important. Typically modernist claims of neutrality and independenceWater Accounting, adheres, at least on paper, to a modernist treatment also make it difficult to recognize how water accounting representations, measurements, and calculations derive from specific epistemic and policy communities, whose members have specific concerns, are part of specific knowledge traditions, and pursue specific societal projects of betterment. Inspired by social studies of science, it is suggested that water accounting and other attempts to speak for water or represent the environment become more useful and honest when efforts are made to address, more explicitly, the entanglements between science and politics. This abandonment or relaxation of modernism includes embracing diversity, plurality, or multiplicity as well as acknowledging, accepting, and reconciling the existence of many different ways to engage with, relate to, and account for water—many different versions of water. It also includes replacing the aspirations of transcendence, integration (or universality, commensuration), and inclusion (consensus) with equally difficult to attain, but more modest and pragmatic, ideals of situatedness, translation (mediation), and contestation (or dissent).

Introduction In 2013, the first successful European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI), called “Right2Water,” collected 1.9 million signatures. This broad European civil-society initiative demanded that the European Commission implement the human right to water and sanitation in European legislation. The campaign was organized by the European Federation of Public Service Unions (EPSU) and supported by a large number of NGOs and water activists throughout Europe. The Right2Water movement campaigned against the European Commission’s intention to further privatize drinking water utilities in Europe, following the UK example. The European campaign faced a large diversity of contexts in each Member State of the European Union. The state of affairs regarding public or private governance of water utilities and those utilities’ performance differed per country. Moreover, awareness about the theme of “the human right to water” among the general public, grassroots federations, NGOs, and trade unions was also quite diverse. Water in Europe is subject to both European and national law and responsibility is shared between the European Union and Member States, making it a suitable issue for an ECI. The initiative aimed to shift the European Commission’s focus from their market orientation to a rights-based, people-oriented water-policy approach (Right2Water, 2016). The Right2Water campaign joined in the ongoing struggle for water justice that, in divergent ways, was framed and organized by many civil-society groups, and took a stance against profit-driven water companies with the slogan “Water is a public good; not a commodity!" It urged the European Commission that water services in Europe should not be liberalized. From April 2012 to September 2013, the ECI “Right2Water” collected signatures across Europe. In 13 countries, the number of signatures passed the EU threshold, which was set by the European Commission for making such peoples’ initiatives mandatory to be discussed by the European Commission (see Table 12.1); the first successful ECI ever. The ECI is a tool established by the Lisbon Treaty (EC, 2009) as a means to bring the European Union closer to its citizens. It gives people an opportunity to bring an issue to the European political agenda if they manage to collect over one million signatures in one year’s time, from at least seven countries, with a minimum for each country (EC, 2011).