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Assumptions of trust in water systems are widespread in higher-income countries, often linked to expectations of “modern water.” The current literature on water and trust also tends to reinforce a technoscientific approach, emphasizing the importance of aligning water user perceptions with expert assessments. Although such approaches can be useful to document instances of distrust, they often fail to explain why patterns differ over time, and across contexts and populations. Addressing these shortcomings, we offer a relational approach focused on the trustworthiness of hydro-social systems to contextualize water-trust dynamics in relation to broader practices and contexts. In doing so, we investigate three high-profile water crises in North America where examples of distrust are prevalent: Flint, Michigan; Kashechewan First Nation; and the Navajo Nation. Through our theoretical and empirical examination, we offer insights on these dynamics and find that distrust may at times be a warranted and understandable response to experiences of water insecurity and injustice. We examine the interconnected experiences of marginality and inequity, ontological and epistemological injustice, unequal governance and politics, and histories of water insecurity and harm as potential contributors to untrustworthiness in hydro-social systems. We close with recommendations for future directions to better understand water-trust dynamics and address water insecurity.

Political ecologists (PEs) have powerfully illuminated dynamics responsible for the uneven distribution of resources and risk in society. However, localized PE approaches have been criticized as in...

The construction of desalination plants is proliferating worldwide. In Chile, seawater purification technologies are framed as a tool for confronting water scarcity, stabilizing water provision and optimizing overall water availability while minimizing impacts on groundwater resources. Yet, local communities hosting desalination facilities in their territories are still confronting ongoing water-related inequities. The aim of this paper is to analyse how Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) and Declarations of Environmental Impact (DIAs) fit with the assessment and mitigation of socio-environmental implications of desalination. While they are intended to highlight and minimize negative impacts, and address them as part of the approval process prior to the construction of these facilities, we see instead how they are at times marshalled in ways that enable negative socio-environmental outcomes. Thorough analysis of EIAs (1994–2018) and DIAs (2010–2018) of mining companies in the Atacama region our research revealed shortcomings concerning public participation, mitigation and compensation plans, and water-energy management. This occurs, in part, through the depoliticization (or rendering technical) of desalination, in ways that obscure uneven and negative socio-environmental outcomes.

Work on narrative, story, and storytelling has been on the rise across the humanities and social sciences. Building on significant work on these themes from Indigenous, Black, and Feminist scholarship, and other varied traditions, this piece explores and elaborates the potential regarding the elicitation, sharing, and analysis of stories for nature-society studies. Specifically, the piece examines core contributions along these lines to date, as well as the methodological, analytical, political, and transformative potential of story and storytelling to enrich, broaden, and deepen work in nature-society, political ecology, and environmental justice. All told, focus on story and storytelling, offers a number of relevant and rich openings to understand and engage complex, unequal, and dynamic socio-natures. While these elements have been present in nature-society work from some traditions and lines of inquiry, the time is ripe to broaden and deepen these engagements to more fully imagine, and respond to, key nature-society challenges.

Compounding systems of marginalization differentiate and shape water-related risks. Yet, quantitative water security scholarship rarely assesses such risks through intersectionality, a paradigm that conceptualizes and examines racial, gendered, class, and other oppressions as interdependent. Using an intersectionality approach, we analyze the relationships between household head gender and self-reported socio-economic status, and water affordability (proportion of monthly income spent on water) and water insecurity (a composite measure of 11 self-reported experiences) for over 4000 households across 18 low- and middle-income countries in Central and South America, Africa, and Asia. Interaction terms and composite categorical variables were included in regression models, adjusting for putative confounders. Among households with a high socio-economic status, the proportion of monthly income spent on water differed by household head gender. In contrast, greater household water insecurity was associated with lower socio-economic status and did not meaningfully vary by the gender of the household head. We contextualize and interpret these experiences through larger systems of power and privilege. Overall, our results provide evidence of broad intersectional patterns from diverse sites, while indicating that their nature and magnitude depend on local contexts. Through a critical reflection on the study’s value and limitations, including the operationalization of social contexts across different sites, we propose methodological approaches to advance multi-sited and quantitative intersectional research on water affordability and water insecurity. These approaches include developing scale-appropriate models, analyzing complementarities and differences between site-specific and multi-sited data, collecting data on gendered power relations, and measuring the impacts of household water insecurity.

At least half of Accra's residents do not enjoy safe, secure, and affordable access to water on a regular basis. Focused on underserved communities in and around urban Accra, this essay highlights the meanings and importance of water insecurity for residents' daily lives. In particular, this essay extends beyond the well-established ways that the lack of safe and affordable access conditions poor public health outcomes, to a broader understanding of well-being informed by residents' own experiences of irregular and insecure access to water. This essay thus seeks to broaden understandings of water insecurity beyond the basic and minimum access required for daily needs, and to consider broader social-contextual dynamics, such as reported experiences of stress or conflict, that residents face daily in negotiating water insecurities.1

Peak water describes the hydrological response of glacier-fed rivers to climate change, indicating that warming first drives increasing discharge until a glacier mass loss threshold is surpassed an...

This paper describes and critically examines the process and outcomes of a community-based participatory video (PV) research project on issues related to water governance with residents of underserved and informal settlements in Khayelitsha, South Africa and Accra, Ghana. Co-produced videos were used to facilitate communication and to open a dialogue between the participating communities and their respective local governments, with the aims of improving awareness of the issues, enhancing agency and enabling participation in the political and social debates about water governance. Analysing the approach, our research draws on two key principles of participatory governance –recognitionandresponse– to evaluate the application of PV as a potential engagement tool for participatory water governance. We critically discuss the reality and tensions of PV in shifting deep-rooted inequities of power in decision making through two case studies, both of which involved residents and representatives from local governments in the research process.

Adaptation needs in high mountain communities are increasingly well documented, yet most efforts to address these needs continue to befall mountain people who have contributed little to the problem of climate change. This situation represents a contravention of accepted norms of climate justice and calls attention to the need for better understanding of prospects for externally resourced adaptation initiatives in high mountain areas. In response, this paper examines the architecture of formal adaptation support mechanisms organized through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and how such mechanisms might help to meet adaptation needs in high mountain communities. It outlines key global adaptation initiatives organized through the UNFCCC, clarifies idealized linkages between these global adaptation initiatives and meeting local adaptation needs, and evaluates actual progress in connecting such support with discrete adaptation needs in the upper Manaslu region of Nepal. The paper then critically examines observed shortcomings in matching adaptation support organized through the UNFCCC with local adaptation needs, including complications stemming from the bureaucratic nature of formal adaptation support mechanisms, the intervening role of the state in delivering aid, and the ways in which these complexities intersect with the specific socio-cultural contexts of mountain communities. It concludes by highlighting several prospects for increasing the quantity and quality of adaptation support to mountain communities. These opportunities are considered alongside several salient concerns about formal adaptation support mechanisms in an effort to provide a well-rounded assessment of the prospects for planned adaptations in high mountain communities.

International audience

Mega-damming, pollution and depletion endanger rivers worldwide. Meanwhile, modernist imaginaries of ordering ‘unruly waters and humans’ have become cornerstones of hydraulic-bureaucratic and capitalist development. They separate hydro/social worlds, sideline river-commons cultures, and deepen socio-environmental injustices. But myriad new water justice movements (NWJMs) proliferate: rooted, disruptive, transdisciplinary, multi-scalar coalitions that deploy alternative river–society ontologies, bridge South–North divides, and translate river-enlivening practices from local to global and vice-versa. This paper's framework conceptualizes ‘riverhood’ to engage with NWJMs and river commoning initiatives. We suggest four interrelated ontologies, situating river socionatures as arenas of material, social and symbolic co-production: ‘river-as-ecosociety’, ‘river-as-territory’, ‘river-as-subject’, and ‘river-as-movement’.

This paper analyzes water services in relation to trust in government, with insights for broader state–society relations. The work is based on a multi-year and multi-sited case study of underserved areas of Cape Town, South Africa and Accra, Ghana. The analysis reveals that water quality and satisfaction are statistically linked to trust in government in South Africa, but not in Ghana. As well, while indicators of water access and quality appear to be very good in South Africa, there is nonetheless deep contestation and ongoing dis-enfranchisement. For Ghana, water access and quality are important for people’s daily lives, but are less strongly connected to senses of governmental responsibility—although for both countries there is a strong sense that government should be “doing more.” Features of history and context are emphasized in the Discussion and Conclusion sections to understand key differences between the sites and other results.

Water sharing between households could crucially mitigate short‐term household water shortages, yet it is a vastly understudied phenomenon. Here we use comparative survey data from eight sites in seven sub‐Saharan African countries (Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda) to answer three questions: With whom do households share water? What is expected in return? And what roles do need and affordability play in shaping those transfers? We find that water is shared predominantly between neighbors, that transfers are more frequent when water is less available and less affordable, and that most sharing occurs with no expectation of direct payback. These findings identify water sharing, as a form of generalized reciprocity, to be a basic and consistent household coping strategy against shortages and unaffordability of water in sub‐Saharan Africa.

In this special issue, we set out to analyze the dynamics, discourses, identities and material conditions that evolve with increasing urbanization and associated transformations of rural–urban (dis...

Claims abound regarding the empowering possibilities of community-based natural resources management (CBNRM). Social capital is seen as a key element towards that end, yet there is a paucity of cri...

Small drinking water systems (SDWS) are widely identified as presenting particular challenges for drinking water management and governance in industrialised nations because of their small customer base, geographic isolation, and limited human and financial capacity. Consequently, an increasing number and range of scholars have examined SDWS over the last 30 years. Much of this work has been technocentric in nature, focused on SDWS technologies and operations, with limited attention to how these systems are managed, governed, and situated within broader social and political–economic contexts. This review seeks to provide a comprehensive overview of the governance dimensions of SDWS by drawing together existing literature relating to SDWS governance and exploring its key themes, research foci, and emerging directions. This overview is intended to provide guidance to scholars and practitioners interested in specific aspects of SDWS governance and a baseline against which researchers can position future work. The review identified 117 academic articles published in English-language journals between 1990 and 2016 that referred to some aspect of drinking water governance in small, rural, and Indigenous communities in industrialised nations. The articles’ content and bibliographic information were analysed to identify the locations, methods, journals, and themes included in research on SDWS governance. Further analysis of SDWS’ governance dimensions is organised around four questions identified as central to SDWS research: what governance challenges are experienced by SDWS, and what are their causes, solutions, and effects? Overall, the review revealed that the SDWS governance literature is piecemeal and fragmented, with few attempts to theorise SDWS governance or to engage in interdisciplinary, cross-jurisdictional conversations. The majority of articles examine North American SDWS, retain a technocratic orientation to drinking water governance, and are published in technical or industry journals. Such research tends to focus on the governance challenges SDWS face and proposed solutions to systems’ performance, capacity, and regulatory challenges. A small but growing number of studies examine the causal factors underpinning these governance challenges and their socio-spatially differentiated impacts on communities. Looking forward, the review argues for a more holistic, integrative approach to research on SDWS governance, building on a water governance framework.

In March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) issued a set of public guidelines for Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) prevention measures that highlighted handwashing, physical distancing, and household cleaning. These health behaviors are severely compromised in parts of the world that lack secure water supplies, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). We used empirical data gathered in 2017-2018 from 8,297 households in 29 sites across 23 LMICs to address the potential implications of water insecurity for COVID-19 prevention and response. These data demonstrate how household water insecurity presents many pathways for limiting personal and environmental hygiene, impeding physical distancing and exacerbating existing social and health vulnerabilities that can lead to more severe COVID-19 outcomes. In the four weeks prior to survey implementation, 45.9% of households in our sample either were unable to wash their hands or reported borrowing water from others, which may undermine hygiene and physical distancing. Further, 70.9% of households experienced one or more water-related problems that potentially undermine COVID-19 control strategies or disease treatment, including insufficient water for bathing, laundering, or taking medication; drinking unsafe water; going to sleep thirsty; or having little-to-no drinking water. These findings help identify where water provision is most relevant to managing COVID-19 spread and outcomes.

Safe and secure water is a cornerstone of modern life in the global North. This article critically examines a set of prevalent myths about household water in high-income countries, with a focus on Canada and the United States. Taking a relational approach, we argue that household water insecurity is a product of institutionalized structures and power, manifests unevenly through space and time, and is reproduced in places we tend to assume are the most water-secure in the world. We first briefly introduce "modern water" and the modern infrastructural ideal, a highly influential set of ideas that have shaped household water provision and infrastructure development over the past two centuries. Against this backdrop, we consolidate evidence to disrupt a set of narratives about water in high-income countries: the notion that water access is universal, clean, affordable, trustworthy, and uniformly or equitably governed. We identify five thematic areas of future research to delineate an agenda for advancing scholarship and action-including challenges of legal and regulatory regimes, the housing-water nexus, water affordability, and water quality and contamination. Data gaps underpin the experiences of household water insecurity. Taken together, our review of water security for households in high-income countries provides a conceptual map to direct critical research in this area for the coming years. This article is categorized under: Human Water > Human Water Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Study, University of British Columbia; PLUS Alliance; Texas AM University; U.S. National Science FoundationNational Science Foundation (NSF) [BCS-17759972] Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Study, University of British Columbia; PLUS Alliance; Texas A&M University; U.S. National Science Foundation, Grant/Award Number: BCS-17759972

Over the past several decades, gender-sensitive analysis of water use, management and governance has made significant contributions to the scholarly literature. This chapter aims to draw insights from this literature that can be relevant for engendering energy transitions. To this end, we follow three steps. First, we identify the meanings given to gender within the context of water governance. Second, we discern the key themes on the nexus of gender and water governance by examining the theoretical and methodological approaches. Third, we distil theoretical, methodological and practical insights that are of relevance for engendering energy transitions. The theoretical insight concerns the theorization of gender to include the social and emotional aspects of resource access and participation, whereas the methodological insight relates to the added-value of mixed methods and large-N comparative studies. Finally, we highlight the practical insight on the role of wider social, political and historical contexts.

Drawing on an analysis of water access and supply in Cape Town (South Africa) and Accra (Ghana), we illustrate that neoliberal and human right to water-oriented transformations co-constitute each other discursively, practically, and in policy implementation. Focusing on the transfer of policies and experiences (particularly conjoined demand management-free basic water programs and related social contestation), we provide examples of how neoliberal logics and human right to water principles intersect in evolving hybrid regulatory landscapes, which are characterized by contradiction. The human right to water makes a difference by influencing the drafting and implementation of water-related policies that affect to the lives of poor and vulnerable populations. Yet this process unfolds unevenly, as human right to water principles and practices are contextually applied, often alongside neoliberalizing policy instruments within evolving regulatory landscapes. Our analysis reveals the uneven effects of policy experimentation, transfer, and adaptation. The analysis shows that the principle of the human right to water affects the transformation of policy options circulating in the water sector, but it does so in relation to the institutional histories and policy options associated with uneven patterns of variegated neoliberalization in the water sector.

Many cities are experiencing increasing water resource stress. In Cape Town, South Africa, surface water supplies are at a record low due to a multi-year drought crisis which began in 2015. This pa...

In this paper, we examine the role of gender in community-based management of marine protected areas (MPAs) in the Central Philippines. MPAs are a common conservation and fisheries management tool in this area, but the relationship between gendered fishing practices and participatory MPA management is rarely considered. In this region, women and men’s fishing practices are often socially and ecologically distinct. MPAs are found in both intertidal and subtidal areas where women and men tend to fish respectively. Based on over 500 interviews in 12 fishing communities, MPAs were largely perceived to be a management tool for men’s fishing. Very few men and women reported a negative effect on their personal fishing or displacement from their fishing area. However, in two communities MPAs that had been in intertidal areas had either been moved or opened specifically to allow for gleaning. Women were less likely than men to report that the MPA had a positive effect on their fishing, but women and men recommended the MPA in equal numbers. Women and men reported attending MPA meetings, but women were less likely to describe active participation in MPA management such as decision making. This research adds to the larger body of work that considers gender and inequality to critically examine issues of power and exclusion in community-based resource management.

While the agency of individuals has been identified as a key factor in triggering governance transformations in social-ecological systems, more research attention is needed on how the social position of the actors involved influences these processes of change. Here, we highlight how the unique position of Indigenous women in a recent fishery conflict brought strength to this resource struggle and led to changes in the management of Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii) on the Central Coast of British Columbia, Canada. Through 18 semi-structured interviews with Heiltsuk women and men involved in this fishery conflict, we identified important actions taken by women in the community, which contributed to advancing the preconditions for transformation of the existing governance system. Heiltsuk women took on key leadership roles, increasing social cohesion, facilitating the flow of information, and negotiating among those holding power and conflicting objectives. Viewed through the framework of transformative change in social-ecological systems, women demonstrated strategic agency in challenging colonial governance regimes and catalyzing change. We relate these findings to theoretical understandings of women in environmental justice movements and activism and underscore the importance of Indigenous women as agents of change in their communities and as important actors in fisheries governance transformations. These leadership roles must be recognized and supported to navigate towards natural resource sustainability and social justice, globally, as well as reconciliation for past injustices, nationally.

This article engages a critical feminist analysis of a community-based participatory video (PV) process focused on water and sanitation issues in underserved settlements of Accra, Ghana and Cape Town, South Africa. With focus on emotions and empathy, we highlight these concepts in relation to participant narratives and shifting subjectivities. In so doing, we consider how arts based engagement (in this case, through participatory video), might serve to foster new ways of relating to water resources and water infrastructures. The analysis highlights how the participants themselves reflect on PV as a vehicle for personal transformation, knowledge co-creation and a shifting sense of their own ‘watered’ subjectivity. We find that the PV process helps to uncover and identify knowledge and process gaps on by enabling individuals and communities—often unheard—to participate in civic and political debates around resource governance. While many positive elements were emphasized, we also suggest that there is a need for critical engagements that also address challenges associated with these methods, including limitations with respect to fostering fundamental long-term change in communities. In the conclusion, we broaden beyond our individual case studies to consider implications for community engagement and citizenship practices in the realm of natural resource governance.

Household water insecurity has serious implications for the health, livelihoods and wellbeing of people around the world. Existing methods to assess the state of household water insecurity focus largely on water quality, quantity or adequacy, source or reliability, and affordability. These methods have significant advantages in terms of their simplicity and comparability, but are widely recognized to oversimplify and underestimate the global burden of household water insecurity. In contrast, a broader definition of household water insecurity should include entitlements and human capabilities, socio-cultural dynamics, and political institutions and processes. This paper proposes a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods that can be widely adopted across cultural, geographic, and demographic contexts to assess hard-to-measure dimensions of household water insecurity. In doing so, it critically evaluates existing methods for assessing household water insecurity and suggests ways in which methodological innovations advance a broader definition of household water insecurity.

We analyze the relationship between perceptions of domestic water access, and quality, in relation community engagement. While others have suggested linkages between material conditions of water ac...

Coupling a hydrosocial perspective with institutional bricolage, this research considers possibilities for participatory water governance in Ashaiman, a peri-urban settlement of Accra, Ghana. We ex...

Summary Agricultural livelihoods are resilient when capable of enduring and overcoming socio-environmental stressors. The “Sustainable Livelihoods Approach”, popularized in development programs, frequently targets farmer capacities to cope with and recover from loss and damage by (i) enhancing tangible capitals (e.g., ecological, financial) and/or by (ii) reducing socio-institutional constraints on entitlements and opportunities to access those capitals. While this two-pronged approach can reduce damage to production or expand the range of livelihood activities available to farmers, it often positions tangible capitals themselves as the central and objective means for building resilience. The recent “social turn” is a call to theorize resilience’s intangible and non-material dimensions (e.g., subjective, emotive, and relational forms) as emergent from specific local social-cultural-ecological contexts. Drawing on in-depth field research with rice-farmers in a region of the Philippines experiencing water-related risks, we analyzed several situated “intangible” narrations of resilience, with a focus on emotive and affective indicators. Farmers narrated their courage to get back up following loss and damage as well as their optimism, faith, and hope for brighter futures in farming and in life. These emotions flowed from their affective relationships with the cosmos (naturalizing life’s hardships as cyclical), themselves (strong belief in their own capabilities to persist in times of hardship), and the Divine (faith in God’s power to protect hard-working families). Our results contribute to the “social turn” in resilience literature in two ways. First, we highlight affect and emotion as indicators of farm livelihood resilience. Second, we suggest narrations of resilience are constituted through farmers’ particular “worldings”, or constructions of reality where knowledge, belief systems, and relations, are lived and enacted on an everyday basis. Situating oneself in local contexts can illuminate sources of intangible resilience otherwise hidden from top-down approaches, while engaging “worldings” can help render these intangible sources intelligible within their contexts.

Pesticide exposure in Ecuador's banana industry reflects political economic and ecological processes that interact across scales to affect human health. We use this case study to illustrate opportunities for applying political ecology of health scholarship in the burgeoning field of global health. Drawing on an historical literature review and ethnographic data collected in Ecuador's El Oro province, we present three main areas where a political ecological approach can enrich global health scholarship: perceptive characterization of multi-scalar and ecologically entangled pathways to health outcomes; critical analysis of discursive dynamics such as competing scalar narratives; and appreciation of the environment-linked subjectivities and emotions of people experiencing globalized health impacts. Rapprochement between these fields may also provide political ecologists with access to valuable empirical data on health outcomes, venues for engaged scholarship, and opportunities to synthesize numerous insightful case studies and discern broader patterns.

Entitlements are generally defined as the commodities/resources (material and non-material), through which one can establish ownership or command access to resources. Applying this analytic to a case study of everyday water access in Accra, Ghana, we evaluate community water entitlements in two low-income communities with different locational and socio-cultural characteristics. We also evaluate how different entitlements to water map against variable dimensions of vulnerability. The study uses a mixed methods approach including a 200 household survey, focus groups with community members, and semi-structured interviews with local opinion leaders. Our results indicate that in both study communities, an entitlements approach provides a significantly richer portrait of water access beyond availability of piped water infrastructure. Among other factors that are important to everyday negotiations and entitlements related to water access, it is important to consider familial and kin networks, water storing options available to households and vendors, the distance and waiting time to fetch water, and local leaders' perceptions of water issues, particularly how these compare with broader citizen understandings. In this way, an entitlements approach broadens the perspective beyond infrastructural endowments (e.g. piped water), to include a range of other socioeconomic, socio-cultural and local institutional characteristics. Drawing on the empirical examples, as well as related conceptual debates, the study questions how water access is defined, and how water governance processes might benefit from a broader understanding of entitlements, as well as links to differentiated vulnerabilities, notably in times of water-related stress or scarcity.

Drawing from the proceedings of an expert workshop with academics, researchers, government and NGO participants working in diverse countries in southern Africa and beyond, this paper reviews the discourse on resilience, both conceptually and in practice. We highlight opportunities to develop and apply a more situated, equity-sensitive and context-relevant understanding of resilience, particularly in the water sector. To pursue more just and resilient water futures in highly unequal and water stressed regions, we propose that researchers and practitioners (1) place greater emphasis on the transformative potential of resilience, (2) broaden the social dimensions of resilience to account more fully for intangible and other social factors, (3) engage critically with the decision-making processes and practices of building resilience, (4) contribute to the development of indicators and guidelines for building just and resilient water futures, (5) strengthen the role of situated knowledges, (6) critically engage with scale and boundaries in complex adaptive systems, and (7) strengthen the policy–science–civil society interface.

Public consultation has become an increasingly common form of democratic engagement. While critics have challenged the potential for public consultation to democratize policy-making due to existing...

This Special Issue on water governance features a series of articles that highlight recent and emerging concepts, approaches, and case studies to re-center and re-theorize “the political” in relation to decision-making, use, and management—collectively, the governance of water. Key themes that emerged from the contributions include the politics of water infrastructure and insecurity; participatory politics and multi-scalar governance dynamics; politics related to emergent technologies of water (bottled or packaged water, and water desalination); and Indigenous water governance. Further reflected is a focus on diverse ontologies, epistemologies, meanings and values of water, related contestations concerning its use, and water’s importance for livelihoods, identity, and place-making. Taken together, the articles in this Special Issue challenge the ways that water governance remains too often depoliticized and evacuated of political content or meaning. By re-centering the political, and by developing analytics that enable and support this endeavor, the contributions throughout highlight the varied, contested, and important ways that water governance needs to be recalibrated and enlivened with keen attention to politics—broadly understood.

There is growing acknowledgement that the material dimensions of water security alone are inadequate, we also need to engage with a broader set of hydrosocial relationships. Indeed, more holistic approaches are needed to explain Indigenous peoples&rsquo, relationships to water including the use of traditional water sources such as mountain creeks and springs. In this paper, we seek to reimagine water security through a case study of Tr&rsquo, ond&euml, k Hw&euml, ch&rsquo, in&rsquo, s relationships to both treated and traditional water sources throughout the First Nation&rsquo, s traditional territory in Yukon, Canada. Through community-based research including interviews with Elders and other community members, we examine the importance of traditional water sources for meeting important health requirements including physical, spiritual and cultural wellbeing. This intervention contributes to ongoing debates about what it means to secure safe and affordable water in three key ways: First, we argue that Indigenous water relations invite a shift towards more a holistic understanding of water security, second, we contend that settler colonial politics should be understood as a root cause of water insecurity, finally, we explore how Two-Eyed Seeing can be applied as an alternative to the &lsquo, integration&rsquo, of Western scientific and Indigenous approaches to drinking water.