ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the key technologies that constitute desalination in different parts of the world, including prospects for future innovation. It analyzes desalination through different framings of urban water sustainability discourses. Desalination presents a technical solution to the sustainable development challenge of improving standards of living for a growing global population within resource constraints. In Chennai in India, desalination has been promoted as a sustainable solution to local water shortages and an alternative to unsustainable exploitation of groundwater by residents, industry and the water utility. The political ecology analysis of desalination focuses on the role of private capital in the expansion of the industry and its attractiveness as an option for water resource managers and politicians in maintaining existing socio-environmental hierarchies of power. Radical ecological critique of modern industrial development and its domination and exploitation of nature presents a fundamental challenge to the enthusiasm for the expansion of desalination.
