A Future History of Water.

• Author: Mittal, Ashima

Ballestero, Andrea. A Future History of Water. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2019. xvi + 232. Paperback, $25.95.

In A Future History of Water, Andrea Ballestero navigates the technopolitical landscape of water access in two Latin American countries--Costa Rica and Brazil. The aim of the book is to elucidate: "if water is to be a human right, and not a commodity, how do you differentiate these two legal and economic formulations? And more generally, how do people create distinctions and why?" (p. 3). In this work, these field sites are deemed critical for another reason; in both Costa Rica and Brazil, an explicit recognition of access to water as a human right is not formally incorporated in the national constitutions. Ballestero skillfully operates with this situation through deft methodological inventiveness.

Given that the countries do not rely on the symbolic significance of law to cater to the problem of water access and provision, the ethnographic lens allows the author to explore unconventional avenues such as NGOs, bureaucratic offices, scientific institutions, and international networks like the World Water Forum where the struggles over differentiating between regimes of value that make water into a right versus a commodity unfold. Her interlocuters include economists, lawyers, engineers, environmental scientists, philosophers, sociologists, farmers and high school teachers. It is at these diverse sites that Ballestero traces the "effective epistemic and political work of making distinctions matter" (p. 4).

By examining this work, A Future History of Water elaborates how water is "kept mattering" through quotidian bureaucratic and technical decisions and how it's very materiality changes through the work of making bifurcations. The analytic of bifurcation further compels the framework of "future history" as it is through these very decisions and distinctions that people connect their everyday work to a future that is yet to be. It is in this situation that her collaborators' work becomes "a constant effort to make distinctions recognizable, since the more you try to clarify and separate, the more you bring about mutuality, these differentiations struggles turn water into a planetary archive of meaning and matters. An archive that is constituted through ongoing processes of abstraction and materialization, where word and matter, formalization and substance are inseparable" (p. 7).

A critique of liberal fantasies of control...