Overview

This book deepens our understanding of humanity’s diverse relationships with water and the law, providing a critical assessment of this relationship, and charting the course towards a more sustainable and just water future. By using legal geography, this book pays particular attention to the place-based inter-relationships between water, people, and law (both formal and informal) and to the ways that law both constitutes and is constituted by the relationship between people and place. Starting in the 1980s, Chapter 2 investigates the early commodification of water through the liberalisation of rural water markets in Chile and the urban water supply and sanitation systems of England and Wales. Chapter 3 then examines the global expansion of neoliberal water governance in the 1990s, starting with donor-driven reforms in the global south and particularly Manila in the Philippines. Chapters 4 and 5 document both the grassroots response to these neoliberal water reforms and the inherent tensions in the attempts of the early 2000s to reconcile the recognition of a human right to water with the ongoing rollout of market mechanisms, both in the domestic context of South Africa and within the United Nations human rights system. Moving forward again, Chapter 6 examines the recent intensification of neoliberal water governance through financialisation and considers its specific impacts in Detroit and Flint, Michigan. Chapter 7 then considers the renewed global emphasis on living waters and Indigenous ontologies of water by examining the new legislative arrangements for the Whanganui River in Aotearoa, New Zealand. The book concludes in Chapter 8 by highlighting the stories of hope that can be found in many of the case studies explored in the book and in emerging examples from around the world. This book is essential reading for students and scholars interested in water law, security, and justice from across a wide range of disciplines, including environmental studies, law, geography, human rights, and political ecology.

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9781032225968

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Reviews

Cristy Clark’s groundbreaking book Legal Geographies of Water is a long-awaited and much-needed treatise on the relationship between law, people, and place, in the context of what is arguably the Earth’s most precious resource, water. It is impossible to thoughtfully approach critical concerns or opportunities arising from the growing global water crisis without paying careful attention to the closely entangled and locally embedded relationships of communities and territories. Yet the fields, methods, and approaches of law and geography have rarely been consciously brought together in water research. Clark’s new book confidently fills this gap, and I am equally confident that it will become the seminal analysis of legal geographies of water. This book is essential reading for teachers, scholars and practitioners of environmental and resources law, and the growing cohort of interdisciplinary and critical thinkers interested in the hydro-social world. Legal Geographies of Water is sophisticated in its conceptual depth, exploring the ‘pluriverse’ of water realities to uncover more radical, more just, and more diverse, alternative water realities. In doing so, the book deepens our understanding of humanity’s diverse relationships with water and the law and argues that addressing the water crisis requires a fundamental re-conceptualisation of human-water relationships through legal frameworks that recognise water’s material agency and relational nature. But this is not just ‘pie in the sky’ musing about an unreachable watery utopia. Clark uses several carefully constructed and materially distinct empirical case studies to explore her thoughts ‘on the ground’, which transcend space and time across four continents, and draw on her situated knowledge and reflexive positionality. This is difficult and determined research work, made possible by Clark’s obviously strong, reciprocal, research collaborations throughout the globe, allowing her to so skilfully cross the staunch yet unnecessary boundaries of disciplines, jurisdictions, and ontologies. Through Clark’s fluid research method, Legal Geographies of Water is a book that quenches the intellectual thirst, reflecting the very materiality of water, as something that flows, connects, and sustains us. Dr Elizabeth Macpherson, Professor of Law, Rutherford Discovery Fellow, University of Canterbury, Aotearoa New Zealand

Author Information

Cristy Clark is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Business, Government and Law at the University of Canberra, Australia. Her research focuses on legal geography, the commons, and the intersection of human rights and the environment – particularly including water and climate justice. She is the co-author of The Lawful Forest: A Critical History of Property, Protest and Spatial Justice (2022).

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