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Paper short abstract:

This paper reports from participant observation with London residents and experts concerned with improving urban water. The function of cost-benefit modelling for translating between local imaginaries of rewilding and expert practices of asset-making will be discussed with particular focus on scale.

Paper long abstract:

London's rivers and streams count among the most polluted in Europe. At the same time, various community-driven and state-sponsored initiatives to improve urban water courses are under way. Drawing on ongoing participant observation with North London residents and urban water experts, this paper explores their environmental imaginaries and traces the translation from imagined riverine wilderness to economic asset through the practice of cost-benefit modelling. Whereas residents concerned with their local rivers imagine river restoration as the creation of sites for encountering urban wilderness, experts tasked with delivering urban water improvements navigate a funding landscape premised on demonstrating the economic benefits of public expenditure. However, both residents and experts converge on calling for the construction of sustainable drainage systems such as urban wetlands that remove pollution before it can enter urban rivers while simultaneously creating sites for experiencing urban nature. In order to secure funding for these schemes, experts translate imaginaries of re-wilding into the economic calculation of green infrastructure benefits with the aid of cost-benefit modelling software. The paper finds that the benefit most sought after by residents, namely water quality improvement, is attributed only negligible economic benefit in the practice of turning urban water into an economic asset. The paper discusses the ways in which scale, both as level of economic measurement and as scope of spatial attribution, might trouble the alignment of local imaginaries of re-wilding with expert practices of asset-making.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on ethnographic data collected among upstream riparian land users involved in the first "payments for watershed services" programme to be implemented in Kenya to reveal the modalities and stakes of the social construction of the "watershed".

Paper long abstract:

Over the last decades the number of projects labelled "payments for watershed services"(PWS) has increased exponentially. In Kenya, several PWS projects have been developed but most of them failed to go beyond the feasibility or piloting stage. A common feature of these programmes is that they point to the practices of upstream farmers in the degradation of water quality. This paper draws its analysis from empirical data collected in the Naivasha region where Kenya's first PWS project to be implemented is located, as part of a study about the "translation" (Callon 1986) of the PWS concept at the local scale. Interviews were notably conducted in a village upstream of Lake Naivasha water basin over several weeks in 2016. This village was among the ones targeted by the project for the implementation of soil conservation measures as an identified "hotspot" for the provision of "watershed services". Using an ethnographic approach and methods of the French school of comparative agriculture, the influence of the interviewees' involvement in this project on their land/water perceptions was explored. This study shows how the upstream/downstream connections have been highlighted along the project's implementation by its facilitators and local intermediaries, and how the concept of "watershed" was disseminated and reinterpreted locally. These results unravel the discourses influencing the social construction of the "watershed" locally and its political stakes. This calls for a closer mobilization of ethnographic methods in reflections on the "translation" of influential concepts in environmental and water management policies.

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Paper short abstract:

Transdisciplinary project bringing exploring the issues with current catchment-based approaches and a proposal for a catchment capabilities approach.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper we explore key issues with the catchment-based approach used in the UK encountered during a transdisciplinary study in SE England. We identify these as arising from a continued focus on centring water in catchment-based approaches. We argue that the catchment-based approach is not delivering its potential benefits because it remains subsumed to a focus on delivering quantities and qualities of water to different stakeholders within the catchment area. We observed that the highest aim of a catchment-based approach is to coordinate the management of water across the whole of a catchment area to take into consideration the whole network of water flows that impact each other. In other words, stakeholders who are using the catchment-based approach see themselves as being "holistic". However, we argue that water is merely an interconnective network of flows rather than an end in itself. It is just one dimension of a catchment and not the key element that a catchment can be reduced to. Through the lens of the Medway Catchment this paper explores the implications of a holistic yet water-centric approach to catchment management and proposes a deliberative-analytic approach instead.

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Paper short abstract:

The anthropocene arrived early in East Asia, where vast landscapes were restructured as minutely controlled irrigation systems. The longterm destruction and recreation of the landscape by human art and effort is reflected in folkloric concepts of lineage continuity as related to the watertable.

Paper long abstract:

The earliest recorded Chinese traditions of environmental change are presented as imperial water works to control watersheds and make them more productive agriculturally.

Later both folk and elite ideologies embodied practices called fengshui [literally wind and water], whose more formal name dili means literally "principles of the earth" (translates modern 'geography'). The fengshui "compass" and its "magic needle" that always aligned north/south, early attracted the attention of western visitors to the orient, which they adapted to practical navigation; but they overlooked the importance of the supporting matrix of that needle: a pool of water at the very center of the compass on which the needle floated.

In China, Fengshui reflects a system of thought that mutually correlates time and space, a kind of practical cosmology possessing instruments and formulae appropriate to calculating the effects of any place or orientation on human fate.

But Fengshuiis also a practical art, sometimes translated as 'siting' because it functions primarily for locating and orienting objects in space, especially man-made structures such as tombs or houses that literally situate human bodies within the flux of cosmic forces. This paper will describe how individuals and family lineages situate themselves in the landscape in relation to the local watertable. They do so with much effort and strong belief in the efficacy of their endeavors. It is a practical application of folk knowledge critical to the health and reproductive success of both individuals and social groups, ineluctably emmeshed in the continuous cycles of generational time.