Presentation short abstract

This study examines the growing reliance on desalination in the Mediterranean amid structural droughts. Focusing on a controversial project in Albufeira, Portugal, it explores how technological fix and resilience discourses shape policy, conflict, and environmental governance narratives.

Presentation long abstract

With the impacts of the climate crisis, the Mediterranean region has in recent years experienced an increasing number of drought situations. In response to this challenge, a wave of political and infrastructural measures has emerged to address the resulting water deficits. Among these interventions, desalination has gained significant momentum, with a proliferation of plants projects at varying scales.

Behind this trend lies the prioritisation of a discourse centred on the technological fix, a solution that seeks to mitigate the water crisis through technology without necessarily questioning its underlying causes and systemic issues. This discourse, often grounded in the notion of resilience, can generate intense socio-technical controversies, as the implementation of such projects often involves trade-offs that are far from being consensual.

In this paper, we focus on a desalination plant project located in the Algarve region, in southern Portugal. Initially triggered by funding provided by the European Union, a new desalination plant is planned within the municipality of Albufeira. The proposed site lies nearby Falesia Beach, a site renowned as one of the most beautiful beaches in the world, and has sparked a heated debate. The controversy juxtaposes the necessity of ensuring water supply for the entire region against concerns about landscape degradation, tourism impacts, effects on fisheries, and the health of marine ecosystems.

Through a critical discourse analysis, this presentation explores the diversity of storylines mobilized around this project and examines how the notions of technological fix and resilience have come to form a hegemonic discourse.

Presentation short abstract

This presentation explores the ways the emerging assemblages of desalination expertise are increasingly reconstructing visions of just access to water in Egypt. In doing so, it aims to bring into focus the water futures these assemblages open up and the ethical assumptions underlying them.

Presentation long abstract

In recent years, non-conventional water resources, including desalination, have emerged as a critical aspect of Egypt's response to growing water scarcity, driven by climate change and population growth. As the country embarks on an ambitious program to ensure water security through significantly increasing its desalination capacity, new ethical and political questions arise, particularly in relation to universal and equitable access to water. A meaningful engagement with these questions necessitates that desalination is understood not merely as a technical challenge, but as the product of the confluence of a set of mutually entangled fields. These fields include water governance and policy, energy systems (especially high energy use and costs and the future integration of renewable energy), the involvement of international finance and the private sector through public-private partnerships (PPPs), environmental management (particularly the environmental impacts of the discharge of brine), and social equity and justice.

This paper draws upon the insights of the nascent field of the political ecology of desalination that stresses the socially constructed and politically contested nature of desalination (O’Neil and Williams 2024), to examine the ways these interlinked fields are shaping the contours of Egypt’s water strategy and future. In particular, it interrogates some of the new assemblages of expertise emerging out of them, asking how they morally and politically shape visions of just and equitable access to water in Egypt. Ultimately, the paper aims to bring into focus the kind of water future these assemblages open and make inevitable and the fundamental ethical assumptions underlying them.

Presentation short abstract

Through the examination of the Agadir desalination plant, this paper explores contradictions between the implementation of large-scale desalination and the capacity of the State in securing demand for its desalinated water while ensuring the preservation of other water resources.

Presentation long abstract

In Morocco, seawater desalination has become a central strategy to increase water supply. In the midst of a prolonged drought - which has now lasted for more than eight years – the government has announced a flurry of large-scale desalination projects. The first one to be completed – in 2022- has been the Agadir plant along the Atlantic Ocean. In addition to supplying Agadir’s drinking water, the mega-plant is meant to provide irrigation water to the agricultural plain of Chtouka.

The new plant is presented as a way to enable the export-oriented irrigated agriculture of the plain while ensuring a sustainable use of water resources, mostly through the preservation of the Chtouka aquifer. However, agricultural producers appear to have different priorities. Some of them add the new water to the mix of water sources that they rely on, some others do not use it altogether despite having access to it. Indeed, the desalination of brackish underground water through individual units is cheaper, more reliable, and free from state control.

This paper questions the widespread assumption in the literature, both technical and critical, that demand for desalinated water can be easily secured. Rather, we explore the difficulties faced by the State in securing demand for its desalinated water; and the strategies deployed by different state agencies at different scales to attempt to secure it. Our analysis provides broader insights into the evolution of state-business relations at a time of ecological crisis.

Presentation short abstract

Desalination is promoted to solve Mombasa’s water stress, yet large projects have stalled. Instead, costly small-scale plants by firms and NGOs serve select areas, making water far pricier than public supply. These uneven rollouts deepen inequality and refragment urban space in coastal Kenya.

Presentation long abstract

‘New water’ technologies are increasingly being rolled out in certain countries and regions in sub-Saharan Africa to address water access challenges. The incipient political ecology literature on this topic suggests that in contexts already characterised by water inequalities, the use of desalination tends to exacerbate uneven development and lead to new forms of fragmentation (see Campero et al. 2023; Fragkou 2018; Scheba and Scheba 2018; Velasquez and Wachtendorf 2023; Williams et al. 2023).

Desalination has been widely presented as a water management solution for coastal Kenya, particularly Mombasa; the country’s second-largest city. Investors and the global desalination industry are attracted to Mombasa because of its combination of severe water stress, growing industry and a large population accustomed to paying high rates for water on the informal market. There have been several attempts to develop large-scale projects along the coast through Kenya’s public-private partnership directorate, but none of these have come to fruition, mostly for financial and political reasons. Instead, there has been a proliferation of small and medium-scale decentralised desalination facilities, led by companies and NGOs such as Texas-based Give Power. While many see these initiatives as positive, the water produced is typically at least five times more expensive to consumers than what public water companies are allowed to charge, and only certain neighbourhoods are deemed suitable for such facilities to be financially sustainable. The result is that desalination is driving a refragmentation of urban space in coastal Kenya.

Presentation short abstract

Interviews, photovoice, and cascade diagrams reveal desalination as a risk system that restructures island life, generating new dependencies, ecological pressures, and persistent inequalities. Islanders’ perspectives show it reorganizes scarcity and reinforces uneven vulnerability to risk.

Presentation long abstract

Desalination is rapidly expanding across Caribbean islands, even as its emergent risks remain poorly understood. Using interviews (35), photovoice (10), and islander-generated cascade diagrams (3), this research examines how desalination in the San Andrés and Providencia Archipelago, Colombia interacts with socioecological processes that co-produce water risks and geographies. Results reveal that desalination is reshaping everyday water practices and creating new forms of vulnerability. Daily routines are increasingly coordinated around technological availability rather than traditional water cycles, as hazards shift from climatic (drought) to technological (plant, and pipeline failures). Interviews show limited understanding of desalination processes and the persistence of water injustices. Hotels and some households now operate private desalination units, intensifying inequalities. Traditionally, households store rain, well, or trucked water, so desalinated water is mixed with these sources, reducing its quality and intended benefits. Photovoice images further reveal a tangled water life of tubes, schedules, pumps, and flooding, alongside the cultural value of the sea and rainwater. Cascade diagrams co-developed with islanders trace how desalinated water infrastructure triggers cascading effects on health, ecosystems, and tourism. It identifies feedback dynamics: extraction for desalination drives salinization of the aquifer, and higher salinity leads to greater dependence on desalination, increased extraction, and further salinization. Rainfall, by contrast, reduces aquifer salinity, increase water availability, lowers the energy cost of desalination; but these dynamics remains unexamined and unaddressed. Ultimately, households continue to receive mixed, inconsistent, and low-quality water. Desalination is not resolving scarcity but reorganizing it while reinforcing uneven vulnerability to risk.

Presentation short abstract

In examining the ongoing feasibility studies, pilot projects, and demonstration sites that serve to keep desalination relevant in South Africa despite steep trade-offs, this paper reveals how scoping activities pave the way for desalination PPPs and preclude alternatives in water supply development.

Presentation long abstract

South Africa is notorious for issues of both water and energy: insufficient water infrastructure continuing from the apartheid era and energy loadshedding that has become nearly mundane in its frequency. Seawater desalination as a solution to improve water access seems clearly inhibited by insufficient water and energy infrastructure alike. Yet, desalination has been a persistent theme in the South African water sector since the early 2000s, and seems all the more attractive coupled with national policies to further encourage public-private partnerships (PPPs). Whilst the overall state of desalination in the country is still in its infancy, the dream is kept alive by a myriad of feasibility studies, pilot projects, and demonstration sites. Existing research has demonstrated that even simply scoping out desalination projects can lead to a path dependency that narrows the overall field of water supply planning (O’Neill & Boyer, 2023). Understanding infrastructures as always ‘incomplete’ (Guma, 2022) adds a dimension of fortitude and persistence to this lens, reminding us to take such seemingly small-scale efforts seriously for their potential broader implications. Coupled with South Africa’s longstanding issues with insufficient water infrastructure, lack of municipal funds, and desire for further private sector investment, this means that projects currently deemed as infeasible could haunt the water sector for long to come. This paper argues that ongoing scoping activities serve to keep the desalination option on the table despite steep implementation barriers: paving the way for future desalination PPPs whilst precluding alternative futures for water supply development.

Presentation short abstract

We examine Barcelona’s Indirect Potable Reuse (IPR) through a hydrosocial lens. We argue IPR acts as a technological fix: while promising "climate-proof" security, it obscures energy and equity risks. We call for a critical analysis of these new water imaginaries.

Presentation long abstract

Together with desalination, Indirect Potable Reuse (IPR) emerges as a pivotal site of socio-technical innovation and controversy in the debates on urban water supply and management. Despite its growing prominence, IPR has received limited critical analysis compared to desalination. This contribution attempts to address this gap by examining IPR in the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona through the lens of the hydrosocial cycle. Following the severe drought of 2023-2024, the regional strategy shifted beyond desalination to increasingly rely on IPR from the Llobregat and Besòs rivers to combat structural scarcity. Employing a qualitative methodology, we investigate the narratives that drive the imagining of a "climate-proof" water supply as foreseen in the new water planning documents prepared by the regional authority. Theoretically, the paper bridges critical hydrosocial perspectives with the concepts of sociotechnical imaginaries and futures-in-the-making. We argue that the planned expansion of IPR infrastructure functions as a technological fix for climate uncertainty, yet it simultaneously generates new tensions. While these solutions promise security, they obscure latent risks regarding health safety, energy intensity, and the socioeconomic impacts of rising water prices. By analyzing these dynamics, our contribution highlights the politics of reconfiguring urban water systems, demonstrating that the technological pursuit of resilience must be critically evaluated considering issues of distributive justice and social equity to shape truly sustainable futures.

Presentation short abstract

We assess seawater desalination as an adaptation strategy in Chile, using gendered understandings of domestic water supply and security. We argue that desalination is a maladaptation strategy, part of long-standing neoliberal water policies that don´t protect vulnerable groups.

Presentation long abstract

Within wider concerns on water security under climate change, drinking water supply is particularly challenging, as non-compliance with strict quality norms and service requirements can have direct impacts on public health and wellbeing. Desalination is one of the prominent solutions for resolving water scarcity and Chile’s main adaptation strategy in water-stressed regions, especially in urban hubs along the coast of the Atacama Desert. Here, we merge insights from literature on climate change maladaptation, gendered and feminist understandings of domestic water supply and security, and critical social research on desalination, to create a framework that permits a gendered and intersectional evaluation of desalination through the concept of maladaptation. We use this, in turn, to assess desalination in Chile not as an isolated adaptation strategy with negative or neutral impacts, but as an essential part of the long-standing Chilean neoliberal water policies that are based on market-based solutions, capital-intensive mega infrastructure, and that produce or maintain water insecurity for women and other vulnerable groups. To support our argument, we analyse how domestic water insecurity is constructed in the daily lives of urban Chilean women who drink desalinated water. Results are based on extensive household surveys, in-depth interviews, focus groups, and literature review, and permit the understanding of desalination as maladaptation in 3 manners: 1) it does not guarantee water security, 2) it displaces conflict geographically, temporally, and socially, and 3) it contributes to climate change, the same problem it adapts societies to.