ABSTRACT
Water scarcity has long been an idiom of the biophysical and positivist social sciences; and, historically, has most often been used to describe local and regional conditions. Many authors have recently focused on the neoliberal in governance of water resources. This makes good sense since neoliberal accounts of nature, society and the economy have been dominant in recent shifts in governmental rationalities associated with late modernity. Under neoliberalism, solving the problem of water scarcity is hinged on unleashing different types of freedoms. This chapter proposes a genealogical approach that traces back the origin of water scarcity and proposals to govern it, like commodification, privatization, decentralization and freedom of trade, to that of the scarcity of grain and its governance in 17th-century Europe as discussed by Michel Foucault. A political-geographic correction to Foucault underscores the central role of the colonial encounter in shifting European governmental rationality. Freedom as a technology of government was predicated on unfreedom as a technology of coloniality.
