Presentation short abstract

This presentation empirically investigates how water resilience is constructed as a hegemonic governing strategy during Mexico City's current water crisis. Through the example of Fondo Agua Capital, the city's public-private water partnership, it looks to what knowledges are amplified and silenced.

Presentation long abstract

Water is an increasingly contested global resource - with particular challenges facing southern megacities, such as in Mexico City where the fear of "day zero", where the whole city runs out of water, comes ever closer. In light of this, it is increasingly necessary to investigate the production of water knowledges, to see how these produce particular narratives of naturalised scarcity, and contribute to depoliticised water campaigns that place the burden of reducing water use on the poorest and most marginalised citizens.

Based on empirical research in Mexico City with government water experts, water academics, and people affected by water scarcity, and archival research into Fondo Agua Capital, this presentation explores how particular science-politics dynamics emerge in the Mexican context to create a technomanagerial water governance space. It brings literature on water financialisation in conversation with STS work on the production of knowledge, to highlight how financialisation is changing and shaping global water markets.

Mexico City's water public-private partnership Fondo Agua Capital is funded by international corporations and NGOs including Coca-Cola and The Nature Conservancy - and as such the metrics the PPP uses to demonstrate "success" are deeply embedded in geopolitical dynamics of economic neocolonialism, and the desire to present global south megacities - and water scarcity - as potential opportunities for global investment. Knowledge politics are a crucial and often ignored part of this process, and this presentation investigates how positivist water science is increasingly dominating Mexico City's policies and knowledge production within academic spaces.