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Paper short abstract

How do people relate to the past when the future seems increasingly uncertain? Focusing on a river basin in northcentral Japan, I show how hydrological experts tasked with climate adaptation projects have generated new understandings of local environmental histories.

Paper long abstract

How do people relate to the past in an era when the future seems increasingly uncertain? This paper explores this question by drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with hydrological experts who are working on a project of climate adaptation across a river basin in northcentral Japan. In recent years, the growing intensity and frequency of rainstorms have led the Japanese state to declare a shift in its strategy for flood control away from the conventional approach centered on building large-scale infrastructures. Often called ryūiki chisui, or “watershed-scale flood control,” a key feature of this new policy framework is an expanded view of who ought to bear the work of flood control. Rather than relying solely on hydrological experts, the initiative calls on a wider range of actors to “collaborate” in the effort of disaster risk reduction, whether farmers, real estate agents, or beyond.

I argue that this response to future risks generates new understandings of local environmental histories in at least two ways. On one level, local historical memory has become mobilized as a major resource for the project’s collaborative ethos. Hydrological experts often invoke local actors’ knowledge about past waters as a means to highlight their intimacy with place and urge their participation in the initiative. On another level, this deployment of local histories is making visible a premise about the past embedded within the project. While its claim to the novelty of collaboration assumes that previous practices of flood management drew largely on expertise of the state, the historical fragments summoned through the initiative expose how the state never had full control over this work. By tracing the experts’ encounters with these histories, I show how contemporary anxieties about the future do not simply fuel aspirations to develop new solutions. Such anxieties also prompt reflections on what technocratic expertise has been about in the first place.