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Water managers increasingly rely on the indirect potable reuse (IPR) of recycled effluent to augment potable water supplies in rapidly growing cities. At the same time, the presence of waste - as abject material - clearly remains an object of concern in IPR projects, spawning debate and opposition among the public. In this article, we identify the key governance factors of IPR schemes to examine how waste disrupts and stabilises existing practices and ideologies of water resources management. Specifically, we analyse and compare four prominent IPR projects from the United States and Australia, and identify the techno-scientific, legal, and socio-economic components necessary for successful implementation of IPR projects. This analysis demonstrates that successful IPR projects are characterised by large-scale, centralised infrastructure, state and techno-scientific control, and a political economy of water marked by supply augmentation and unchecked expansion. We argue that - despite advanced treatment - recycled effluent is a parallax object: a material force that disrupts the power geometries embedded in municipal water management. Consequently, successful IPR schemes must stabilise a particular mode of water governance, one in which recycled effluent is highly regulated and heavily policed. We conclude with insights about the future role of public participation in IPR projects.

In this paper we construct an object-oriented approach to power and politics. Building on the work of Graham Harman, we argue that objects are engines of power, able to fully shape the contours of existence through the production of difference and affectivity in the world. We present four key points to underpin our argument. First, we define an object by expanding on the Heideggerian idea that objects are split between their 'present qualities' and 'absent qualities'. Second, we discuss why objects are irreducible to scientific naturalism or social relativism. Third, we contend that the world is 'policed' by objects that act as phenomenological viruses. And finally, we explain that such policing is never exhaustive and autonomous forces are constitutive of new commons. We conclude that a speculative metaphysics is vital for building new geographic understandings of objects and power, and a politics of action – one brick at a time.

A vast and growing interdisciplinary research effort has focused on the rise of the so-called New West, purportedly the product of regional socioeconomic, political, and ecological upheavals in states like Montana and Colorado. Reviewing the growing research on this problem in sociology, economics, geography, and conservation science, this article identifies four central questions at the core of this diverse scholarship. Our review demonstrates that none of these central questions has generated consensus conclusions and that there is untapped potential for more structurally robust analyses of the drivers and outcomes of rapid change in the region. Indeed, supporting other analyses that have called the consistency of the region into question, our survey suggests the ways in which this region is not unique, but largely reflective of larger scale socioecological forces playing out in similar ways around the postindustrial world. We conclude, therefore, with a series of crucial questions, which may be unanswerable by assuming the “New West” as a coherent geography.

The history, perceptions, and effects of Global Water Initiatives (GWIs) remain poorly understood: How and when have GWIs formed? What have they accomplished? And perhaps most importantly, what role do GWIs play in sustainable water management – in the boardrooms, on the reading shelf, and on the ground?

Intransigent, obdurate, intractable, perverse - these and similar words are commonly used and often suitable descriptions of freshwater as an issue in today's world. There are floods in normally dry parts of Africa, protracted droughts in Australia, still more than 1 billion people worldwide without a reliable supply, and at least double that number lacking effective sanitation. Could the situation be any worse? With a burgeoning population and increasing volumes of pollution, the demand for water in many parts of the globe has already outstripped the available resource. And climate change, now seen as manifest, threatens to exacerbate an impossible situation, particularly for the poor and weak in those nations least able to cope. Water resource challenges are increasingly assuming a global face for governments, organizations, and citizens around the world. Groundwater systems provide 25 to 40 percent of the world's drinking water, yet they suffer from massive overdraft and inadequate rates of recharge. The world's rivers, already overtaxed by pollution and the effects of damming and diversion, are also exhibiting declining flows - especially in arid and semiarid regions. Nearly a billion urban dwellers live in slums with unacceptably low rates of water provision, while sanitation coverage in developing countries (49 percent) is only half of that of the developed world (98 percent). Drought, pollution, ecosystem degradation, natural disasters, urbanization, corruption, and population growth are some of the many dynamics that pressure water resources at levels beyond the watershed. The tenor of the world's water troubles has never been so global. Water governance, like the problems it seeks to mitigate and resolve, has also reached new heights of globalization.

Cities in the global South are confronting unprecedented challenges to urban sustainability and equitable development, particularly in the realm of water provision. Nearly 1.5 billion people worldwide suffer from a lack of safe access to drinking water and sanitation –an increasing proportion of whom reside in cities. Meanwhile, in the gaps of the grid, a diversity of water harvesting and reuse techniques, infrastructures, and institutional arrangements has emerged to provision poor households. Despite the burgeoning presence of this informal water sector, little is known about its institutional character, environmental impact, or relationship with state provision and private supply. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative data collected during nearly 13 months of fieldwork in Tijuana, Mexico, this dissertation queries how informal water use is managed, whether informal water use constitutes an alternative economy and sustainable environmental practice, and to what degree informal water use redefines urban space and alternative development possibilities. Findings reveal that: (1) despite historical efforts in Mexico to federalize and centralize the control of water resources, state action opens ‘gaps’ in the hydrosocial cycle, and informal institutions manage these ‘extralegal’ spaces; (2) informal water use is widespread across socioeconomic levels in Tijuana, largely managed by household-based institutions, and conserves a surprising degree of municipal water; and (3) the spatiality of contemporary water infrastructures and economies is highly diverse–ranging from bottled water markets to non-capitalist, self-provisioning greywater reuse-and is in fact constitutive of ‘splintered urbanism’ and alternative modes of development.

'The rain barrel is the bong of the Colorado water garden.'

Groundwater systems provide 25 to 40 percent of the world's drinking water, yet they suffer from massive overdraft and inadequate rates of recharge.1 The world's rivers, already overtaxed by pollution and the effects of damming and diversion, are also exhibiting declining flows-especially in arid and semiarid regions.2 Nearly a billion urban dwellers live in slums with unacceptably low rates of water provision, while sanitation coverage in developing countries (49 percent) is only half of that of the developed world (98 percent).3 Drought, pollution, ecosystem degradation, natural disasters, urbanization, corruption, and population growth are some of the many dynamics that pressure water resources at levels beyond the watershed. The ensemble draws on common notions of institutional sustainability that include laws, policymaking processes, organizational forms, and activities that induce stability and resilience; thus, they permit institutions to transcend personal politics, withstand opposition, and preserve legitimacy over the long term.6 In this view, global water initiatives (GWIs) can be broadly defined as the institutional frameworks, organizations, special events, and awareness-raising campaigns that focus on global water-resources management.7 The upshot is that GWIs are more than just highly visible international congresses.

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Producing Nature Unsettling the Social A Site Ontology of Social Natures Material Worlds, Emerging Politics, and Concluding Thoughts References

Meehan reviews Precious Commodity: Providing Water for America's Cities by Martin V. Melosi.