Search

Water security has emerged as a major framing template in environmental governance and resource management. The term and underlying concepts have attracted the attention of governmental and nongovernmental organizations, private industry, and the academy in policy and practice. Notwithstanding the palpable rise in its use, a comprehensive understanding of how water security is conceptualized and employed in different contexts around the world is limited. We aim to address this gap, by assessing how water security is considered, articulated, and operationalized in place-based studies. We employ a two-part methodological approach that includes (1) a systematic analysis of 124 articles, books, and book chapters published between 2010-2015 using a standardized coding framework to examine trends and patterns in place-based water security research, and (2) an analysis of the treatment of governance as a subset of this body of research to reveal how water governance is framed and understood in place-based water security scholarship. We find broad diffusion of water security across geographic regions and scales, expansive framing of water security, and evolving approaches to indicator formulation. The narratives around future pathways for governance practices include the promotion of participatory processes, solutions that engage both quantitative and qualitative methods, and a mix of both hard- and soft-path approaches to achieve water security. The persistent diversity in perspectives and applications of water security suggests that scholars adapt the concept to the contexts of the cases they are studying. The variation in how water security is utilized in different regions and spatial scales underscores the importance of incorporating community context in how we understand and employ water security. By empirically assessing the diversity and utility of water-security analyses, highlighting regional differences, and tracing evolving conceptions over time, our research can inform future project design, policy-making, and management from the international to the local levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Digitization and automation of mining amplifies abstraction and decontextualization. • Conceptualizes the digital mine as a self-reinforcing earth-as-mine feedback loop. • Utilizes theories of mediation to unblackbox technical relations of smart mine. • Automation can transform the conceptual god's-eye-view into the hand-of-god. • Digital twin transmutes complex milieu into dominant representation of target site. As natural resource extraction moves into increasingly remote frontiers, rapidly proliferating technologies associated with digitization and automation are respatializing technical and environmental relations both on- and off-shore. Drawing on scholarship in digital geographies and media studies, we employ the concept of mediation to open up the blackbox of digital encounters in mining and extraction. The digitization of earth's lithosphere serves to physically distance the miner from the mine, while simultaneously producing novel relations between humans and more-than-human matter via granular, multi-spectral, and richly textured information that streams from the mines. Thus, the mine is reconceived as a double treasure trove, where the seams of the earth are both ore and data rich. Focusing on two iron-rich sites targeted for robotic extraction - the proposed seabed mine off Aotearoa New Zealand and the heavily-mined Pilbara region of Western Australia - the comparative findings expand theorization through an explicit focus on digital mediation and shifting relations of the human and non-human components of the extractive industry. Our analysis of the digital mine illustrates how these technologies are driving increased abstraction and decontextualization of the broader socio-ecological relations, serving to obscure the ecological, social, and cultural context within which the mine site is materially entangled. Technologies with automated and remotely-controlled manipulation and simulation capacities, such as digital twins, displace human miners from physical mine sites, increase transmission distances, and reinforce extractive ways of knowing the subterranean and subaqueous. We reveal how digital mediation amplifies a reflexive phenomenon of earth-as-mine feedback loop and how environmental manipulation-from-nowhere transforms the god's-eye-view into the hand-of-god. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]