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Ecological Urbanism and Water Sensitive Urban Design have a central contribution to make in protecting and caring for people, nature and water in cities but readings of Urban Political Ecology evidence how ecological metaphors in urban design can easily translate into discriminatory urban development processes. This paper posits that for UPE to become meaningful for urban design practice, it is necessary to move beyond a critique. Instead, the insights of UPE should be pro-actively mobilized to develop a new vision of water sensitivity. The paper therefore identifies ways in which the key learnings of the critical social sciences, namely UPE, can be mobilized to support Water Sensitive Urban Design practice. How can ecological urbanists imagine new, more politically astute, forms of water sensitive living, charting design processes that not just recognize but also actively question and challenge uneven socio-ecological dynamics? In answering this question, the goal of this article is to make use of critique from UPE to influence Ecological Urbanists' goals and activate their political alignment with agendas that prioritize social equity. In imagining a new form of WSUD, we tried as much as possible not to over-instrumentalize UPE by rejecting the suggestion that some UPE ‘lessons’ or ‘insights’ could simply be inserted into ecological urbanism. On a different direction, we argue for a different emphasis in WSUD that does not deny the causes of current environmental degradation, pollution and depletion but, on the contrary, actively takes issue with and challenges the extractive and exploitative roots of contemporary urbanization processes., Urban Design, Spatial Planning and Strategy

Efforts to measure and regulate groundwaters and irrigators are notoriously ineffective. The starting point of this article, therefore, is to question the continued faith in techno-managerial solutions to groundwater depletion. We discuss the potential of the conceptual vocabulary of 'care' to complement, refresh and expand ways of talking about and doing groundwater governance. Mobilizing a diverse range of examples from places where pressures on aquifers are particularly acute, we do this by exploring what care entails in everyday practices of groundwater use and management. We show that foregrounding care nuances and sometimes challenges stories of users unavoidably depleting aquifers when given the chance and means to do so. Irrigators may display concern about the longer-term sustainability of the aquifers on which their livelihoods depend, even when their own pumping practices are unsustainable. In spite of pressures to intensify and individualize, farmers sometimes do hold on to or creatively develop collective rules to fairly share groundwater and use it sustainably, complementing strategies to make do with what is available with investments in conservation and recharge. Attention to care, moreover, highlights the ongoing processes of tinkering that governing groundwater always entails. The ability to tinker hinges on intimate and often embodied knowledge of a watery place. Accepting the care involved in governing groundwater, our analysis therefore concludes, prompts a re-consideration of what is and who has water expertise, with important implications for the role of 'outside' experts. More than a new theory, we propose embracing care as an analytical sensibility, with the study of practices of care serving as one promising way to widen the conceptual and political space for understanding and doing human-groundwater relations.

The Netherlands has initiated a process of ‘policy boosterism’ that attempts to make Dutch urban water culture and its associated imaginary of water sensitivity fit for global export. This strategic shift depends on the collaboration of a mosaic of actors, private and non-private to promote knowledge sharing between countries. As this new dynamic emerges, urban design becomes strategic to create future visions for cities towards more sustainable relationships with water. One such vision stems from Water Sensitive Urban Design, an approach that borrows from ecological urbanism with the objective to restore water ecologies in cities. This article looks at how urban design knowledge from the Netherlands provides concepts to describe, evaluate and promote urban water as an enabler of sustainability globally. It also investigates how networks of actors from the Netherlands interact to make imaginations about Water Sensitive Cities globally mobile. This entails the packaging of a mobile water culture that, ultimately, can re-shape power relations. Considering that cities rely on privileged accesses to global networks to disseminate ideas, port cities are potential sites for ‘policy boosterism’. The port city of Rotterdam, for instance, is the model city in the concerted effort to promote Dutch urban water expertise (Goh, 2020) and, in the context of Indo-Dutch partnerships, a port city was chosen for an urban design initiative: Water as Leverage in Chennai. The project acts as mechanisms through which imaginations of urban water is packaged from the Netherlands for global export. Interestingly, the principal way in which this translation happens is through the creation of an imaginary/vision/framework of water sensitivity that is appealing and meets broad societal goals. In this context, design becomes a powerful tool through which these broad visions are made ‘fit for purpose’ and influence – or not – local ideas of urban landscapes., Urban Design, Spatial Planning and Strategy

De leiding en medewerkers van intergouvernementele organisaties die inveel van de meer dan 300 internationale stroomgebieden het water regulerenzijn meestal mannen. Waarom zijn er zo weinig vrouwen? En maakt het uit ofmannen of vrouwen aan het roer staan? Rozemarijn ter Horst, MargreetZwarteveen en Jenniver Sehring vertellen over hun nieuwe boek, “GenderDynamics in Transboundary Water Governance: Feminist Perspectives onWater Conflict and Cooperation” waarin zij, met bijdragen van andereauteurs, deze vragen en meer onderzoeken. Het boek bevat onder anderecasestudies over waterbeheer in de Brahmaputra, de Chu-Talas, de Donau,de Indus, de Jordaan, de Nijl, de Rijn, en de Zambezi, en onderzoek naar derol van gender in wetenschap, conflict en beleid.

This article provides a theoretical introduction to the Special Issue and briefly presents the various contributions. It starts with a general plea for inserting the analysis of groundwater and its gradual depletion into a broader critical analysis of 'development'; it does so in order to trace how particular forms of groundwater use and management are intrinsic to distinct – gendered and racialised – processes of differentiation and exploitation such as settler colonialism and capitalism. We go on to argue, however, that too much insistence on explaining empirical realities in terms of such structural processes has its limitations. It risks strengthening their overwhelming power and reconfirming the oppression and marginalisation that they create. We therefore suggest that methodological and ethnographic attention to practices may help identify less predictable and sometimes surprising trajectories of change. Our foregrounding of practices implies treating terms such as transformation and sustainability as fluid, the discussion of which needs to be anchored in the situated and always-specific practical work of using, accessing, caring for, sharing and knowing groundwater. Theoretical insights about how the world is patterned or structured then serve not as the framework in which to insert empirical findings, but as entry points for further analysis, reflection and conversation, fuelling forms of experimentation and joint learning about how to think and do transformations to groundwater sustainability.