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Paper short abstract

Drought and climate crisis are often framed as a matter of the future. We argue that studying shifting climatic regimes exposes the continuity in the hydro-geographies of white-minority regimes, and how natural and man-made infrastructures function within this in contemporary South Africa

Paper long abstract

The climate crisis, and specifically its hydrological manifestations, are often framed as a matter of the future, as tracking intensifying, albeit nonlinear, drought becomes a dominant analytic. This paper argues, drawing on ethnographic research across South Africa, that studying shifting climatic regimes exposes the invisibilised hydro-geographies of white-minority regimes and how natural and man-made infrastructures function within them. We analyse this as a case of ‘environing infrastructure’ (Rippa), thus drawing attention to the role of infrastructure in creating environments as enclosures.

Water insecurity and inequality have long been folded into the dominant historiography of colonial dispossession in South Africa, as forced and later legalised removals enabled white settlers to reside on riverbanks and productive water courses, giving rise to white-owned agricultural production. The geographies and unevenness of waterscapes that were visceral during the colonial period and through the apartheid era, however, shifted with the democratic regime in 1994. The post-apartheid state, charged by the National Water Act of 1998, sought to undo histories of hydrological dispossession, chiefly by developing the national water grid to spaces historically unserved. This shift, while lauded, depoliticised the uneven hydro-geographies nationally, and deterritorialised water through its infrastructuralisation.

The paper teases out how anthropological particularity can speak to a situated politics in facing water insecurity and inequality and highlights how a scalar and temporal lens offers an opportunity to reframe historical, current, and future hydro-infrastructures within climate change and increasingly drying landscapes.