ABSTRACT
The ‘doing’ of assemblage articulation and analysis is laid bare through the application of an epistemology of practice in the context of situated water governance in south-eastern Australia. Arguing that the creation of three flows – consumptive, environmental and cultural – has mechanistically abstracted water from its social-ecological landscapes and hidden and then perpetuated the colonial history of occupation and use, the chapter outlines how environmental flows in particular (as legislated in the Water Act 2007) attempt to create certainty. They do this mainly for economic uses rather than wider social-ecological outcomes. Situated water governance emerges as un-situated and rarely to the benefit of tangible places or people, or for a social-ecological commons. This is despite regional catchment management boards and local ecological evidence of water stress. Using the epistemology of practice to construct an imaginary social-ecological assemblage for water and land use elucidates the possibilities when intersecting land and water governance, social and ecological interaction are pursued. This imaginary requires that we reposition and consciously respond to social and environmental justice within these landscapes. Disrupting the dominant ways of seeing and doing, as explored with the application of this methodology, encourages the potential as Latour suggests, of assembling the public in different ways.
