Envisioning a sustainable future for water

The water sector has a major leadership role to play in addressing the global water crisis. How can it make the radical shifts in approach that are needed? This paper highlights the reality that the management of water, and the ways in which water flows are directed, reflects social relations of power, not just between human groups, but also between humankind and the non-human world. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic research with indigenous communities and other water users in river catchments around the world, it considers alternate cultural worldviews that encourage more sustainable beliefs and practices, and asks how larger societies might make imaginative use of these in contemporary and future engagements with water. In a thought experiment intended to reposition human–non-human relations, it proposes a concept of ‘re-imagined communities’ advocating more collaborative forms of conviviality – living together – with other species. Opening the door to ideas about pan-species democracy, it calls for decision-making processes in which a wide range of expertise is brought together to exchange knowledge, with an explicit and practical remit to ‘speak for’ and promote the needs and interests of the non-human inhabitants of the ecosystems on which all living kinds depend. HIGHLIGHTS The current water crisis has arisen from assumptions that development is reliant upon growth, and from a dualistic worldview that separates culture and nature, and human and non-human worlds.; The control and management of water reflects unequal relations of power between human groups, and between human and non-human beings. While some efforts are being made to be more inclusive of human ‘stakeholders’, societies continue to externalise the costs of their activities to non-human species and environments.; There is a need for radical reform in how large societies think about and engage with non-human beings and ecosystems. Some useful examples are provided by culturally diverse ways of envisioning human–non-human relations in more holistic and egalitarian terms, which lead naturally to more sustainable beliefs, values, and practices.; A concept of ‘re-imagined communities’ seeks to challenge nature–culture dualism and to relocate humankind within ecosystems shared with and composed by other living kinds. It encourages a more convivial positionality that entails working with, rather than acting upon, the non-human world.; The paper explores ideas about pan-species democracy, in which academic, local, and other forms of knowledge and expertise are exchanged, with an explicit remit to ‘speak for’ and promote the needs and interests of other species and ecosystems in decision-making processes relating to water.