Joe Williams – A Politics of Relationality: infrastructure and the political ecology of “new” water

Although I trained as a human geographer, political ecology – and more specifically, urban political ecology – has always been an intellectual and political home for me. There are a number of reasons for this. The field of political ecology, although diverse, is built on a desire for more just and egalitarian forms of society, and a deep conviction that this requires us to fundamentally re-think (and re-make) social-ecological relations. Political ecology is all about relationality – it is a way of understanding the world through processes and connections. I have always been interested in how different intellectual traditions conceptualise relations and how this underpins different political, ethical and practical approaches. During my PhD I started thinking in terms of a “politics of relationality” – a term which hasn’t really caught on, but I think is still relevant. This is reflected in my main interests: water, which is commonly understood as a connecting element; and infrastructure, which as we know from the “infrastructural turn” in social theory, deeply concerns socio-material relations.

Political ecology, for me, has been a tradition where I have found freedom to explore different (and more-or-less compatible) theories. Over the last decade I have been inspired by Marxism and historical materialism, post-structuralism, science and technology studies, nexus thinking, post-/de-colonialism, theories of finance and financialisation, and more recently, Georgist political economy. Heterogeneity and openness to new ways of thinking, in my opinion, contributes to the richness of the field.

But like many political ecologists, I am suspicious of over-theorisation, and so being empirically “grounded” is important. Across my empirical work, I critically examine the rise of “unconventional” or “new” waters – particularly through the desalination of sea and other salty waters – as technological and policy responses to scarcity. I explore how these approaches are technical fixes, embedded in contested socio-political processes, reshaping relationships between states, markets, and environments. A key strand of my research analyses how desalination has become normalised within 21st-century water policy, often framed as an apolitical and inevitable solution to crisis. By interrogating the narratives and material implications underpinning its expansion, I highlight how such technologies reconfigure water access, energy use, and environmental risk, while frequently obscuring questions of equity and justice.

I am not a regional specialist, in the sense that this research has taken me to different (and divergent) places – I am more interested in following the technology to where new and illustrative things are happening. I currently lead a project looking at how the emergence of new water technologies are re-shaping water access in several African contexts (Kenya, Morocco and South Africa). We are uncovering how such technologies are financed and governed, whose interests they serve, and crucially, how they intersect with existing water inequalities and if they produce new forms of injustice.