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Paper short abstract

Focusing on historical and anthropological research on the Simeto river in Eastern Sicily, this paper explores how water scarcity in Mediterranean wet landscapes emerges from both climate change and colonial histories of "improvement".

Paper long abstract

The Simeto river valley, in Eastern Sicily, epitomizes the socioecological crisis affecting Mediterranean wet landscapes. Since the beginning of the 20th century, state-led processes of modernization have turned the river into infrastructure, extracting, channeling, and piping water for irrigation and hydropower. Nowadays, with the intensifying climate crisis, water rarely reaches the sea, leaving landscapes parched and communities struggling with both water scarcity and flash floods. As a local herder told me, "The Simeto is a river where sometimes there's water and sometimes there isn't"—a statement that captures climate-induced rapid change and uncertainty.

Based on historical and ethnographic research conducted since 2023, this paper explores how small-scale farmers deal with such uncertainty and respond to drought by implementing adaptive practices that are marginal to and challenge large-scale programs of water management. Where agroindustry treats drought as a problem requiring large-scale technical solutions, these farmers engage it as "matter of concern" (Latour 2008) by implementing practices of care towards the environment as a totality.

By illustrating different examples, this paper reveals how drought emerges not merely from climate change but from colonial histories of "improvement" that privatized water and imposed extractive infrastructures. The contrast between hegemonic and marginal forms of water management illuminates different dwelling possibilities: the former preventing socioecological relationships from unfolding, the latter cultivating correspondence between human and more-than-human worlds. I argue that attending to marginal practices reveals alternative pathways for living with—rather than against—increasingly dry and uncertain times.