ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 concludes this book by distilling its main conclusions. It argues that a biopolitical perspective on water governance is useful for problematizing the population–resource nexus and the ways in which scarcity functions as a regulatory device. Such an understanding makes explicit how different populations are understood in relation to futurity and how this biopolitical dispositif works so as to produce, and make appear natural, hierarchizations of different forms of lives, both human and non-human. The chapter argues that an engagement with the notion of hydromentalities can be a fruitful way of scrutinizing the different shapes that water governance takes in different contexts, but that we should be wary of approaching hydromentalities as completed projects. In relation to the discussion on the right to basic water, the chapter contends that what we should be concerned with, from a biopolitical perspective, is the drawing of a line between basic water and water used for other purposes. This is because the way that the right to water is practised – along with a commodification above the threshold of survival – risks further entrenching distinctions between different forms of life.
