- Convenors:
-
Rinan Shah
(Shiv Nadar Institute of Eminence and (Incoming) Queen Mary University of London)
Jeremy Schmidt (Queen Mary University of London)
Dhaval Joshi (Queen Mary University of London)
- Format:
- Panel
Format/Structure
The panel will feature 4-5 papers. Authors have 15 minutes to present, followed by a moderated discussion. The papers can be works in progress.
Long Abstract
Complex water challenges have led to calls for novel approaches to address, govern and manage water for decades. Often, however, proposed solutions reinforce existing power relations that separate surface and groundwater flows, rather than opening towards just futures. Recognising that waters flow in multiple ways above and below ground, between the visible and the invisible, critical water scholars are increasingly calling for work that challenges their separation through technical, institutional and regulatory frameworks.
Practices of groundwater knowledge production are closely coupled with contestations and plural representations of the subterranean. Distinctions of above/below, terra/subterranean sought in modern, techno-managerial approaches to water governance shape social relations, and are often embedded in broader discursive framings ‘separating’ aquifers and watersheds, defining ‘user communities’ in relation to surface or groundwater but not both, and advancing these prescriptions through programmes and policies. Troubling the radical separations of surface and groundwater is key to achieving justice and equity in water distribution and access, across the different epistemic practices through which waters are known and related to.
The panel seeks papers that critically engage with the practices of groundwater knowledge production and associated techno-politics of groundwater governance strategies. We are interested in cases spanning agrarian and urban contexts, from arid and alpine contexts to temperate and tropical environments, and across diverse infrastructures affecting surface and groundwater flows. We recognise water challenges are configured in multiple ways, through considerations of power, property, ecosystem management, offset markets, critical minerals, and land management (among others). As such, we invite papers that speculate on how water/ground differences can be used to challenge power relations and political ecologies of extraction. Drawing together interdisciplinary contributions to analyse and unpack the politics of groundwater governance, this panel attempts to show ways to recognize diverse origins for just and equitable multiple futures.
Accepted papers
Presentation short abstract
Examines how colonial transportation in nineteenth-century Assam redefined the relationship between land and water, reshaping hydrological knowledge and mobility regimes.
Presentation long abstract
In nineteenth-century Assam, colonial interventions in transportation profoundly reconfigured the relationship between land and water. The British administration’s emphasis on constructing and repairing pre-colonial road networks introduced new logics of connectivity that increasingly marginalized riverine mobility, which had long been integral to indigenous systems of exchange and communication. The subsequent introduction of steamboats on the Brahmaputra and its tributaries marked another decisive shift in the region’s transportation framework. Operating alongside traditional native boats (nao), these steam vessels facilitated the expansion of colonial trade and extraction, integrating Assam more closely into imperial commercial circuits while simultaneously transforming local economic structures, labour relations, and social hierarchies.
This paper examines how such infrastructural and technological transformations produced not only material changes but also epistemic separations between surface and subterranean waters. Drawing from archival records, administrative reports, and local accounts, it traces how road-making projects and navigational surveys reframed hydrological landscapes as obstacles to be crossed rather than as interconnected systems of flow. By situating Assam’s transportation history within the broader politics of hydrological governance and through comparative insights from other colonial provinces such as Odisha and Bihar, this paper argues that colonial mobility regimes reinforced the conceptual and administrative divisions of land and water, shaping the contours of postcolonial infrastructures and environmental management in enduring ways.
Presentation short abstract
This paper discusses the implementation of California's Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. It shows how science establishes scarcity in a way that allows the legal redefinition of groundwater from an open-access commons to the property of individual landowners.
Presentation long abstract
This paper assesses the efforts of a local water agency in California's Cuyama Valley to make groundwater visible in ways that enable its management. In contrast to surface water, groundwater has always been an open access resource with little regulation In California, which has favored industrial capitalist agriculture. Facing a crisis of depletion in the 2000s, the state government passed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), which charges local agencies with creating and enacting plans for regulating its extraction.
I track this process in the Valley of Cuyama, home to massive industrial carrot farms that have been mining the groundwater for 50 years and a small and scattered population. The mantra "management is measurement" guides the efforts of local agencies to make groundwater visible through scientific research involving well reports, satellite imagery, geological assays, streamflow and precipitation gauges, etc. This paper highlights what is not visible in this process: how this science joins with water law to establish scarcity and redefine an open-access commons as the property of individual landowners.
Presentation short abstract
This paper explores how photography can render groundwater governance visible by tracing the surface signs of subsurface extraction. Through the concept of "mosaic evidence", I consider how photographic images index the invisible politics of California’s depleting aquifers.
Presentation long abstract
"Indexing the Invisible" examines the visual and epistemic challenges of photographing climate change and aquifer depletion in California’s Central Valley, where decades of agricultural extraction have caused the earth to subside by more than twenty feet. Drawing on fieldwork from the small farming town of Corcoran, I develop the concept of "mosaic evidence" to describe how multiple, fragmentary visual traces can collectively index seemingly-invisible hydrosocial processes. While aquifers are materially real, they resist direct representation, and must be constructed semiotically through surface signs of cracks, landscapes, labor, and infrastructure. The camera becomes a tool for tracing the causal residues of extraction, where photography’s indexicality allows the invisible to be known through its effects rather than its presence. Situating this inquiry at the intersection of political ecology, media studies, and visual anthropology, I argue that the act of photographing subsidence mirrors the very problem of representation it seeks to solve, by making the invisible visible through signs of loss. Yet by assembling diverse images and temporalities, "mosaic evidence" offers a counter-practice that rearticulates the relation between visibility and proof. This paper thus proposes a visual anthropology of groundwater that interrogates the separations of above and below, showing how environmental images both reflect and reconfigure the governance regimes through which waters—and their absences—are made legible.
Presentation short abstract
Although surface-water dominance, rooted in the Centralised Piped Water Supply model, shapes urban water governance, cities extensively rely on invisible groundwater for daily needs. This dependence is not temporary or transitory but adaptive, demanding groundwater’s formal recognition in policy.
Presentation long abstract
This paper critically examines the surface-water–dominated discourse of urban water supply and argues that its hegemony originates in the technocratic model of the Centralised Piped Water Supply (CPWS) system. Rooted in Chadwick’s sanitary reform ideas, this model evolved in Europe, was transplanted through colonial regimes across the global South, and remains the default paradigm of urban water management. The CPWS imaginary—built around distant sources, long-distance conveyance, centralised treatment, and piped distribution—structurally privileges large surface water reservoirs. Over more than a century and a half, this model has accumulated an entrenched professional, institutional, and technological legacy that reinforces the perceived superiority and reliability of surface water while marginalising decentralised groundwater.
However, this dominance is increasingly challenged in practice. Analysis of water use patterns in Mumbai, Kolkata, and Chennai reveals a growing reliance on groundwater, facilitated by borewell drilling and point-of-use water treatment technologies. Alongside piped supply, residents use wells, borewells, and handpumps or purchase tanker and packaged drinking water—most of which is groundwater. Household surveys indicate that 62% households in Kolkata and 92% in Chennai, across socio-economic groups, rely on groundwater for part of their domestic water needs. Despite a more than a century-old state-led expansion of surface-water-fed CPWS systems, groundwater use remains substantial and often comparable to CPWS.
The paper argues that groundwater dependence should not be viewed as temporary and transitory but as an adaptive advantage amid rising demand and climatic uncertainty. Recognising groundwater’s centrality requires a shift in policy discourse and its formal integration into urban water governance.
Presentation short abstract
Using a socio-technical and feminist political ecology lens, this paper examines how land tenure, caste, and gender shape the invisible architectures through which groundwater is known, accessed, and governed in Nepal’s Terai.
Presentation long abstract
Groundwater governance in Nepal’s eastern Terai is marked by deep disjunctions between what is formally recognised as “governance” and the informal, often invisible, socio-technical practices that actually sustain irrigation. Drawing on mixed methods research, including 401 household surveys, multi-season ethnographic fieldwork, and visual documentation, this paper examines how land tenure arrangements, caste hierarchies, and gendered labour co-produce differentiated access to electric and diesel pumps in contexts where groundwater is the primary irrigation source.
I argue that the dominant policy frameworks in Nepal reproduce a radical separation between visible infrastructures (electric meters, subsidies, formal pump schemes) and the subterranean social relations that enable irrigation to function: informal pump markets, shared labour, seasonal leasing, and embodied practices of watering. These layered forms of access constitute what I term invisible architectures, a stacked socio-material assemblage through which aquifers are known, managed, and contested.
Through this lens, groundwater knowledge is not simply technical, hydrogeology, electrification, pricing, but is actively shaped by property relations, migration, and gendered responsibilities. This paper shows how these dynamics challenge state imaginaries of “user communities” defined solely through formal electrification or surface/groundwater distinctions.
By centring the everyday politics of marginal and tenant farmers, the paper contributes to critical debates on groundwater knowledge production, exposing how the separation of visible and invisible waters reproduces inequities, while local practices gesture towards more just, situated futures of groundwater governance.
Presentation short abstract
Water generates fluidities and territories, with groundwater being a complex resource whose boundaries—biophysical, jurisdictional, or community-defined—are often vague and overlapping. This paper applies boundary logics to explore spring water governance in India's Eastern Himalayan Region.
Presentation long abstract
Water generates both fluidities and territories. Groundwater is a familiar resource, yet its understanding remains limited and often non-interactive. It spans both depth and breadth, with movement ranging from a few centimetres per day to a kilometre over thousands of years. Its physical boundaries are hard to define, making it less visible. Boundaries appear on multiple levels—some clear-cut, while others overlap. These boundaries can be biophysical, jurisdictional, or defined by official state documents. Within the local administrative level, boundaries are often established by communities, based on kinship, ethnicity, or geographical location. There is also an intertwining and blurring of boundaries between formal and informal water provisioning. This paper employs boundary logics to conceptualise and historicise boundaries, laws, and inequalities, thereby rethinking the territorialities of water governance. I aim to understand the various imaginaries of spring water governance in the Eastern Himalayan Region of India that have developed from the creation of territories via boundaries and the laws and practices. Springs are the main water sources influenced by knowledge, representation, and mapping, which differ among lawyers, engineers, farmers, and others. Their experiences shape perceptions of springs and show their success or failure in securing access and creating sufficient overlap between groundwater and its governing rules. Overlapping jurisdictions among departments lead to fragmentation, which hampers effective spring management. Institutions are organised both vertically and horizontally, necessitating coordination. One potential solution is to create a body that ensures water access as a right while safeguarding water sources.
Presentation short abstract
India's groundwater crisis stems from the institutional separation of surface-groundwater governance and agricultural sector capture. Post-independence policies incentivised extraction before establishing regulation, creating lock-ins that resist reform despite integrated management proposals.
Presentation long abstract
India's groundwater crisis illustrates how the institutional separation of surface and groundwater governance reinforces power relations that enable systematic overexploitation. This paper employs a policy process sequencing framework to trace how post-independence agricultural policies created a fragmented institutional structure that separated surface water (managed by irrigation departments) from groundwater (privatised through land ownership), enabling the politically powerful agricultural sector to capture groundwater governance.
The temporal analysis reveals that agricultural modernization policies (1947-1970s) incentivized intensive groundwater extraction through subsidized electricity, credit for tubewells, and guaranteed prices for water-intensive crops, establishing what became the entrenched water-energy-food nexus. Critically, these incentives preceded any regulatory framework by decades. This sequencing created economic, institutional, and political lock-ins that consistently defeated subsequent regulation attempts (1970-present). The colonial-era fragmentation separating surface and groundwater bureaucracies persisted despite repeated calls for integrated management, as departmental interests and agricultural political power blocked restructuring.
The case demonstrates how the separation of surface and groundwater is not merely technical but serves specific political-economic interests. Growth-oriented, food security policies framed groundwater as an agricultural input rather than a common pool resource requiring collective management. Engineer-dominated water bureaucracies maintained this separation, marginalizing alternative knowledge systems and community-based governance.
Understanding groundwater overexploitation requires examining how the agricultural sector's dominance, manifested through the temporal sequencing of policies and the persistence of fragmented institutions, shapes what counts as legitimate water knowledge and who holds power over water governance. Challenging surface-groundwater separation necessitates confronting these accumulated historical dependencies, not just proposing integrated frameworks that ignore existing power structures.
Presentation short abstract
Through an attention to knowledge practices of state and international agencies in mobilising watersheds and aquifers for governing groundwater in Indian state of Maharashtra, the paper explores the scalar politics of groundwater development and management to reveal obscure processes and discourses.
Presentation long abstract
This paper traces the scalar politics of mobilising watersheds and aquifers as sites of groundwater 'potential', 'exploitation' and 'management' in the western Indian state of Maharashtra. Since the 1970s, when the state groundwater agency first identified and delineated them, watersheds have been the basis for groundwater knowledge production, knowledge that informs and circulates through policies and programmes rooted in an irrigational framing of groundwater resources. In early 2000s, the introduction of aquifers as units of groundwater management has led to tensions of mobilising scalar relations between the surface (watersheds) and the sub-surface (aquifers) into governance responses like defining ‘project units,’ ‘aquifer federations’ and ‘groundwater user groups’.
Through discourse analysis of the evolution of groundwater knowledge practices and associated policies led by state and international donor initiatives, coupled with in-depth interviews with state groundwater officials, consultants and civil society practitioners, I illustrate scale as ‘work’ rather than a pre-fixed entity. Drawing from the critical work on the Green Revolution, which paved the way for paradigm of agricultural intensification and associated ontologies of irrigation and resource 'potential', I reveal the emergence of new scalar categories of knowing and governing groundwater. I unpack how state officials and practitioners navigate scalar mis-matches while implementing a shift from watershed-based to aquifer-based groundwater management within a governance framework tightly linked and mobilised through administrative units like village, blocks and districts. By deploying scale as an analytical category, this paper presents an opportunity to reveal obscure processes and discourses associated with groundwater development and management in Maharashtra.
Presentation short abstract
This presentation explores how humans draw powerful territorial boundaries with and against aquifers. A conflict perspective is mobilised for unpacking the spatial connections and disconnections evolving between water bodies, people, governance schemes and infrastructures in Spain and Germany.
Presentation long abstract
This presentation explores how humans draw powerful territorial boundaries with and against aquifers. To do so, a conflict perspective is mobilised for unpacking the spatial connections and disconnections evolving between water bodies, people, governance schemes and infrastructures.
Worldwide, humans compete over groundwater – yet rarely in direct and visible conflicts. Whether a groundwater conflict remains latent or turns manifest relates to powerful spatial structures. Therefore, I investigate the territorialisation processes that make groundwater conflicts emerge, persist or disappear. The conceptual lens of hydrosocial territories nurtured with more-than-human concerns is applied to groundwater conflicts in the Júcar river basin, Spain, and the Südharz region, Germany.
I will show how a drought (Júcar) and uranium concentrations (Südharz) rendered the conflicts direct and visible. In turn, models, self-governance and water transfers buried the conflicts underground again. For instance, separating groundwater and Júcar river flow facilitated the quantification of sustainable groundwater use and its partly substitution with a surface water transfer. In Südharz, uranium was separated discursively and materially from groundwater and hence problematised. Again, a surface water transfer was mobilised as a supposedly safe solution.
However, beyond a simplistic and romanticising portrayal of groundwater as always opposing and transfer infrastructure naturally supporting techno-managerial approaches, this research reveals that other-than-humans’ roles in contested territorialisations is an empirical question. Acknowledging that hydro(geo)logical processes exceed human control implies that aquifers can oppose but also support practices of boundary-drawing between local vs regional, underground vs surface or safe vs toxic hydrosocial territories.
Presentation short abstract
Ghaziabad shows how treating groundwater as “invisible” creates governance blind spots. Combining spatial analytics and stakeholder insights, we connect groundwater decline to sprawl, private borewells and fragmented regulation, arguing for integrated, just futures.
Presentation long abstract
Ghaziabad, an integral part of India’s national Capital Region, has become a frontline where rapid urbanization meets the hidden politics of groundwater. Ghaziabad’s groundwater crisis reveals how cities are governed through what is made visible—and what is kept unseen. This paper argues that water insecurity is not only a biophysical outcome of urbanization but also a governance effect of surface/groundwater silos that fragment responsibility, knowledge, and regulation. Analysis shows a rise in built-up area, alongside a decline in surface water bodies, and a reduction in cultivated land over two decades. Sprawl driven by edge extension and high-rise clusters has disrupted recharge pathways and intensified runoff. Depth-to-water trends indicate groundwater decline, highlighting a widening gap between urban growth and hydrological renewal.
Combining spatial analysis, hydrological modelling, and stakeholder engagement, the paper traces how groundwater knowledge is produced, authorized, and contested across state monitoring, planning rationalities, extraction practices, and community experience. Interviews with officials, planners, private providers, RWAs, and peri-urban residents show how the subterranean is rendered administratively “invisible,” enabling unregulated borewell expansion and shifting risk onto informal settlements and peri-urban spaces. The paper also shows how real-estate-led and industrial development normalize groundwater dependence, reshaping power over urban waters and deepening uneven exposure to depletion and pollution.
By making socio-technical links between surface and groundwater empirically legible, this paper contributes to efforts to trouble radical separations in governance and to imagine integrated, just urban water futures that foreground recharge protection, accountable regulation of extraction, and plural forms of water knowledge.