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.