ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses interrelationships between water security and water infrastructure. The premise of the chapter is that water security is defined by an ethos of, and attempts at, water sharing amongst users experiencing water variability and scarcity. As is explained below, sharing partially meets the Grey and Sadoff (2007) concept of security achieved through water sufficiency: ‘the availability of an acceptable quantity and quality of water for health, livelihoods, ecosystems and production’ (p545). The chapter proposes a water-management framework (termed water meta-control) that puts ‘share management’ alongside ‘demand management’ and ‘supply management, and explores all three via an infrastructural lens. I argue that choices over structures for controlling water are greatly influenced by past and current infrastructural fashions and trends that I term hydromentalities. Cultural and sociopolitical influences arbitrate engineers' choices, while views held by water users are intangibly mediated by arrays of nearby and distant infrastructure. Without deeper reflection, water infrastructure will be unable to meet the growing challenges of climate change and water distribution (Pahl-Wostl, 2007; Giordano, 2013). By considering an infrastructural lens, I offer this definition: Water security seeks, and is consequent to, the sharing of water surpluses and deficits between different users mediated by the designed architecture of water infrastructure deployed to address the spatial, temporal, and scalar complexities of demand and supply. Although this definition ostensibly corresponds with a narrow volumetric deterministic concern for water (in)security (Zeitoun, 2011), this framework seeks to highlight the interplay between water security, the challenges and technologies of control, and cultures of water engineering.
