Accounting for Water: Questions of Environmental Representation in a Nonmodern World

This chapter discusses new science policy initiatives that involve water in terms of environmental representation: who represents, what is represented, for what purpose (equity, sustainability). One such initiative, of science and politics (and nature–society) as being distinct and distinguishable. The effect of this is that particular water “facts” (e.g., the water consumed per unit of land, or the crops produced per unit of water) appear as the (only or most) objective starting points for improving water management and governance; other “facts” and other possible ways of representing water come to be seen as less true or important. Typically modernist claims of neutrality and independenceWater Accounting, adheres, at least on paper, to a modernist treatment also make it difficult to recognize how water accounting representations, measurements, and calculations derive from specific epistemic and policy communities, whose members have specific concerns, are part of specific knowledge traditions, and pursue specific societal projects of betterment. Inspired by social studies of science, it is suggested that water accounting and other attempts to speak for water or represent the environment become more useful and honest when efforts are made to address, more explicitly, the entanglements between science and politics. This abandonment or relaxation of modernism includes embracing diversity, plurality, or multiplicity as well as acknowledging, accepting, and reconciling the existence of many different ways to engage with, relate to, and account for water—many different versions of water. It also includes replacing the aspirations of transcendence, integration (or universality, commensuration), and inclusion (consensus) with equally difficult to attain, but more modest and pragmatic, ideals of situatedness, translation (mediation), and contestation (or dissent).