"… And not a single injustice remains”: Hydro-territorial colonization and techno-political transformations in Spain

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)