Critically assembling water quality ethics beyond thresholds,hierarchies and best practices

Abstract

The emerging field of water ethics analyses and explores the moral implications of particular human–water relations and practices. This article focuses on ethical aspects of planning, management and governance of water quality, in what I refer to as water quality ethics. In particular, I draw attention to the potential for incorporating the ethical perspectives of philosophers Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari into water quality planning, management and governance, opening for exchange between these normative fields of policy and practice with speculative philosophy. Deleuze and Guattari’s ethics emphasises the rejection of externally imposed binaries and categories onto a deeply heterogenous and dynamic world. Therefore, I identify three potentially problematic moments in how water quality is defined and responded to according to these criteria. I provide examples of how abstract and universalising principles can obscure the complexity of individual situations and thus hinder the visibility of alternative solutions. In so doing, I note the possibility for the empirically oriented arena of water justice scholarship to be complemented by a philosophical approach that emphasises the situated, fluid and lively materiality of water and water quality.

Keywords

Water quality Deleuze and Guattari water ethics water justice assemblage theory

Introduction

Threats to water quality pose urgent and ubiquitous challenges for human and ecosystem well-being. Urbanisation, land use change, pollution and climate change increase the pressure on global freshwater resources, despite expensive local and global efforts (Biswas and Tortajada, 2019). Worldwide, nearly two million children die each year from water-related diarrhoeal disease (WHO and UNICEF, 2017). Hundreds of millions of people suffer regularly from the health impacts of consuming contaminated water (Corcoran, 2010; IFPRI and VEOLIA, 2015). These problems do not impact everyone equally. Low income and minority populations are the most exposed to industrial pollution and untreated wastewater, and they often pay higher prices for lower quality water (WWAP (World Water Assessment Programme), 2019).

Despite the pressing need for change, it is important not to obscure the role of values and normative positions in judgements about water by focusing on narratives of urgency and crisis (Schmidt and Peppard, 2014: 533). Those tasked with management and governance of water access and quality often encounter value-laden problems with multiple incommensurable implications reaching beyond their administrations (Bjornlund et al., 2018; Cisneros, 2018). Complexity and uncertainty further confound attempts to manage water resources in an objective, rational manner and pose profound challenges for answering the question ‘What is the right thing to do?’ For example, how might trade-offs between current and future needs be managed, or how can potable water for the largest number of people be ensured while also keeping access to water affordable (Bjornlund et al., 2018)? Every decision regarding use, management and governance of water implies moral and ethical considerations. Still, a global discourse around water has emerged that sees problems as universal and solvable by technical and rational means (Schmidt and Peppard, 2014). Compared to the technical aspects of water resources management, the moral and ethical sides receive limited attention (Schmidt, 2010).

In response to this gap, this article builds on and strives to be in conversation with a growing body of work on water justice and water ethics. Water justice is a field which strives empirically to identify situations of water injustice according to identified normative principles, including dimensions of participation, representation, distribution and sustainability (Zwarteveen and Boelens, 2014). Water ethics is the philosophical study of the moral claims and ethical positions that underpin human relations with water (Ziegler and Groenfeldt, 2017), and increasingly reflects on the situated and dynamic social and cultural construction of ethical norms and practices around water (Meisch, 2017). In this paper, I conduct an application-oriented ethical reflection on water quality problems as a particular area within the broader field of water ethics, giving examples of possibly problematic ethical moments. The article is meant to intervene in current debates about water quality management in an increasingly complex and unpredictable world.

Given the diversity of social and hydrological situations practitioners may be faced with, I argue that it may not be possible, or desirable, to define a universal water quality ethic. The suggestion of multiple water ethics is not ethical relativism but realism given how complex the world is now (Schmidt and Peppard, 2014). Therefore, while recent interventions in water ethics have argued in favour of a Global Water Ethic, they also acknowledge that the specifics of this ethic should be adapted to the needs and challenges of local contexts (Groenfeldt, 2019; Härlin, 2017). Relatedly, I suggest that the ethical–philosophical perspective of Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari encourages a particular form of ethics that can be characterised as immanent.¹ Ethical processes in a Deleuzian view are locally specific and situated in ways that maximise the power of each actor (human and non-human) to engage in positive affects (Tedeschi, 2016). Deleuze and Guattari thus encourage rejecting externally imposed and pre-determined categories, practices and principles wherever possible. Conversely, in theoretical debates which assume there is a best or most fair solution to every problem the ‘complex multiplicity of events is reduced to its simplified interpretation, while potentially relevant features, which may enhance the chance for change, are dismissed’ (Ansaloni and Tedeschi, 2016: 317).

To explore the potential of an immanent understanding of water quality ethics, in this article I identify three externally imposed, abstract and universalising tendencies in current water quality management. These pertain to: (1) definition of water quality as a quantifiable and objective state amenable to thresholds and binary classifications; (2) acceptance of universal hierarchies of intended uses of water and their associated standards of quality; and (3) diffusion of best practices for water quality management and in particular achievement of potable water in cities. By interrogating these tendencies I make visible certain assumptions in dominant paradigms and highlight potential alternative perspectives.

I begin the article with an introduction to current work on water justice and water ethics. In the following section I introduce the immanent ethical perspectives associated with assemblage theory and suggest how they might complement and extend current thinking on water ethics and water justice. I then provide three examples of universalising and abstract tendencies in how people relate to water quality and explore their limits. I consider the challenges of an immanent approach to water quality ethics, and I acknowledge the potential benefits of universal principles and positions in some cases. Finally, I conclude by tentatively endorsing an immanent drinking water quality ethic as a way to draw attention to the implicit assumptions guiding current responses to drinking water quality problems.

Water justice and water ethics

In response to global water quality challenges, growing academic and activist movements call for attention to water justice and water ethics. These movements have their roots in longstanding philosophical traditions, and continue to build on those traditions in new and innovative ways. Scholarly attention to water justice has emerged in close contact with broader environmental justice debates and often combines identification and description of particular water injustices with an activist orientation towards improving unjust situations (Boelens et al., 2018). A water justice framing attends to inclusiveness and participation, equitable distribution of water-related hazards and benefits, recognition of distinct values and knowledges and care for the environment (Boelens et al., 2018; Zwarteveen and Boelens, 2014). Water in particular is seen as amenable to a justice perspective because of its uneven spatial and temporal distribution, its necessity for all life and the political and power-laden nature of its governance (Neal et al., 2014). Water justice approaches provide valuable sources of critique and foundations for making claims for more equitable distributions of harms and benefits associated with water (Boelens et al., 2018). A particular goal of water justice scholarship is tracing power relations between competing interests on different scales that contribute to injustice, such as inequitable exposure to poor quality water (Karpouzoglou et al., 2018; Rusca et al., 2017).

This paper identifies two potential limitations to water justice approaches as they stand today. First, (in application) justice approaches can tend to assume a binary form of moral judgement (just/unjust) (Ansaloni and Tedeschi, 2016). This tendency arguably stems from the application of abstract and universalising principles that risk obscuring the specificity, emergence and dynamism of reality (Ansaloni and Tedeschi, 2016), and of the water cycle in particular. Later in this paper I argue that this binary approach to reality is also relevant and potentially problematic with regards to definitions of water quality and the prioritisation of certain kinds of quality over others. Second, in some cases the ways of understanding quality in water justice research slip easily into a worldview in which there are universal best practices which can be applied to all situations – without considering fully the assumptions which are built into these paradigms. For example, the widespread water management approach of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) has been critiqued for perpetuating a particular way of seeing all waters and values of water as economically commensurable and thus exchangeable in pursuit of efficiency (Aldaya et al., 2017).

Water ethics is a field complementary to water justice which has largely focused on the study of normative justifications and claims in the relationships humans have with water (Ziegler and Groenfeldt, 2017).² Water ethics approaches, particularly those drawing on environmental pragmatism and ecofeminism, have begun to challenge the binaries and universal principles which have been identified as problematic for water justice (Palmer et al., 2014). While studies of water ethics may result in prescriptive calls for shifts in the way humans relate to water, the primary aim remains to analyse and assess how concepts of good and right behaviour inform certain water-related practices (Ziegler and Groenfeldt, 2017). In sum, water justice typically represents a normative and practical approach, while water ethics is more philosophical and descriptive. In conversation these two perspectives may encourage particular shifts towards better (here more ethical and just) management of water resources (Groenfeldt, 2017).

Water ethics is an emerging field, which as of yet has focused for the most part on issues of access to water and sanitation and distribution of scarce freshwater resources for human and ecological needs (Ziegler and Groenfeldt, 2017). Further engagement with the particularities of water quality – what I will refer to in this paper as water quality ethics – could potentially be beneficial. While water quality is built into definitions of water security³ and Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6.1,⁴ thus far much of the critical social science literature has focused on issues of access, while quality has typically been implied or taken for granted (Karpouzoglou, 2012; Lavie et al., 2020; Rusca et al., 2017). Importantly, this lack of critical attention to water quality has allowed certain assumptions about what exactly water quality is to persist uninterrogated. There are some notable exceptions. Recent work focusing on multiple ontologies of water (Yates et al., 2017), and indigenous water knowledges (Russell and Ens, 2020; Von der Porten et al., 2016) has begun to address this gap by showing that there are many ways of knowing, valuing and relating to water (including its qualities). Biocultural anthropologists have further argued that poor water quality (as one aspect of water insecurity) has wide-ranging direct and indirect impacts which require further study, including not only physical illness and disability, but also stress, anxiety and decreased psychosocial well-being (Rosinger and Young, 2020). In addition, emerging critiques in science and technology studies of threshold theories of pollution and harm are emblematic of the increasing questioning of binaries and hierarchies for water (Liboiron, 2021; Pine and Liboiron, 2015).

Water ethics as a field has developed out of a broader tradition of environmental ethics. Environmental ethics has gained traction as a discipline and field of study largely since the 1970s, although it has its roots in much longer-lasting ethical debates. The field of environmental ethics explores questions about the relations between humans and the non-human environment according to specific values and principles (Palmer et al., 2014). Environmental ethicists have also debated the moral status of different entities, according to anthropocentric, biocentric and eco-centric ideals. Water ethics can additionally be framed in relation to rights, with the Human Right to Water (HRW) being the most prominent example. The HRW was formally recognised by the UN in 2010. It was previously seen as taken-for-granted and therefore not necessary to state, but mounting pressure from advocacy groups led to explicit recognition of the right to allow people to be able to make claims on their governments when the right is not being realised (Fantini, 2020).

Generic approaches to environmental ethics have been challenged by eco-feminists who, among other things, see the drive to determine particular characteristics indicative of moral status as problematic (Palmer et al., 2014). According to eco-feminist thinking, ethics are relational, particular and complex and the introduction of binaries and abstract principles – including about who or what is deserving of ethical consideration – does not reflect this complexity accurately (Kao, 2010). Environmental pragmatists are also sceptical of normative theory-oriented perspectives which posit the possibility of identifying any single or universal form of environmental ethics, arguing instead for pluralistic and contextual perspectives (Katz and Light, 2013). Instead, pragmatists argue for a form of ethics that is situational, learned, individual and grounded in the everyday (Furlong et al., 2017). Proponents of this position advocate for a form of ‘practical reason’ which is based on intuition and experience (Barnett, 2011, 2012). Relatedly in the realm of water ethics, Kowarsch suggests that moral claims (for example regarding water justice) should be treated as hypotheses rather than universal truths, and iteratively re-evaluated in conversation with all stakeholders (2017). This approach is largely compatible with the immanent ethical position that I will introduce in the next section, although I focus on the aspect of breaking down and looking beyond externally mandated norms and categories. Rather than aiming to achieve a particular vision of what is right and good, Deleuze and Guattari propose seeing the world as a-categorical and thus amoral (Banville and Torres, 2017). Such an approach can be risky, but it merits further exploration.

Assemblage theory and immanent ethics

Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical project, most completely laid out in their collaborative work in the Capitalism and Schizophrenia series, is widely known as the foundation of assemblage theory. In geography, political ecology and associated critical social science fields, assemblage theory is increasingly used to support analysis of social phenomena pertaining to water, for example seawater desalination projects (Williams, 2018), pollution of rivers (Gorostiza and Sauri, 2017) and regulation of maritime activities (Bear, 2013; Jay, 2019). Many of these studies interpret Deleuze and Guattari’s work indirectly via the writings of Bruno Latour (2005) and Manual Delanda (2006; 2016), resulting in an assemblage theory which emphasises heterogeneity, emergence and fluidity. In Capitalism and Schizophrenia Deleuze and Guattari present an approach to understanding the world which focuses on formation and transformation: an ontology of becoming rather than the more common focus on being (Adkins, 2015). Assemblages are defined as heterogeneous collections of human, non-human and more intangible elements, and assemblage theory provides tools for understanding how those elements come to be allied with each other and either hold together or fall apart (Buchanan, 2020).

One aspect of Deleuze and Guattari’s work which has received less attention in empirical academic work (Frichot, 2012) and in practice (Banville and Torres, 2017; Purcell, 2013) is their ethics. In part, hesitation to engage with their ethical though may stem from the reputation assemblage theory has for being apolitical and a-normative and thus unable to provide solutions to real-world problems (Buchanan, 2011). However, although Deleuze rejects some versions of normativity, he is not an amoral nihilist – as some critics have claimed – he simply espouses what can be called an immanent ethical perspective (Jun, 2011). Immanence refers to a form of ethics which ‘resides within (rather than above or outside) matter and practice’ in contrast with transcendence which is external to or above its object (Coleman and Ringrose, 2013). Consequently, when scholars refer to an immanent ethical position in Deleuze and Guattari’s work they are referring to how, for them, ethics is concerned with situated evaluation of an action instead of judgement relative to an external ideal (Smith, 2011). In contrast to judgement Deleuze and Guattari (building on Spinoza, among others) posit that there is a limit to what extent any event or assemblage can be good or bad, because this is always relative and partial in terms of what kinds of affects it promotes. External ideals are therefore seen as limiting the possibility for thinking about what might escape or be outside our pre-conceived notions of reality.

Deleuze cannot support an ethics relying on transcendence because this would be at odds with his underlying ontological and philosophical claims (Bryant, 2011), specifically the metaphysics of continuity (Adkins, 2015). Continuity refers to the idea that there is no inherent distinction ‘between virtue and virtuous acts, between beauty and beautiful things, between the good and particular goods’ (Adkins, 2015: 1). Thus, Deleuze and Guattari argue that entities which have long been seen as distinct categories differ in degree rather than in kind (Adkins, 2015). Continuity reinforces the idea of immanence over transcendence because it means there is no possibility of ‘spiritual or immaterial dimensions of being that are ontologically and epistemologically distinct from a priori material reality’ (Karaman, 2012: 1208).

Exemplifying this immanent mode of existence, the most clearly ethical chapter of A Thousand Plateaus introduces the concept of the Body Without Organs (BwO) (Holland, 2013).⁵ The BwO is an assemblage freed from all preconceptions and restrictions, which is free to explore all of its possible connections within and beyond itself (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Deleuze and Guattari thus encourage everyone to experiment with possibilities to explore their potentials beyond external norms and constructs, while also warning that casting off all of existing boundaries is dangerous and can potentially lead to collapse (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Purcell, 2013). An immanent mode of existence can be said to occur when people have considered the limits of possibility (Banville and Torres, 2017).

This concept of an immanent ethic has been applied to urban planning by Ansaloni and Tedeschi (2016) to argue that social justice approaches which assume pre-defined categories of the most marginalised and the best ways to help them can be problematic and lack attention to context. Furthermore, they posit that in its pure form justice as a category risks tipping into the realm of transcendence because it assumes a universal ideal against which actions can be judged (2016). Further, justice represents a limit which one strives for but may never reach (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2014). For example, there cannot be a final ideal end state where water justice is achieved because increasing the availability or quality of water in one place or for one type of use logically leads to a decrease in availability or quality elsewhere. There will always be trade-offs that are specific to the context and these can be unpredictable and complex. As I showed in the previous section, current water justice literature, in particular writing on indigenous water justice and multiple ontologies, has tried to meet this critique by leaning into multiplicity and trying to reflect the socio-material complexity of the world (Ayre and Mackenzie, 2013; Russell and Ens, 2020; Yates et al., 2017). Along with the call for a water justice that is diverse, plural and open-ended, there should be water ethic that is equally heterogeneous. Therefore, ethical analysis of any situation must be specific and concrete rather than abstract and universal. To explore how such an analysis might work, in the following sections I identify three abstract and universalising tendencies pertaining to drinking water quality which potentially limit the realisation of an immanent drinking water quality ethic.

Thus far I have established that to be ethical in Deleuze and Guattari’s perspective means resisting and rejecting externally imposed (universal, abstract or static) categories and binaries wherever possible. In the following sections, I present a critique of three aspects of water quality and its management that are enveloped in assumptions often naturalised to the point that it is normal not to even question the validity of their core moral claims. The first of these concerns how drinking water quality is defined, the second refers to the positioning of water for drinking as the central water quality problem in some fields and the third involves best practices in the field of water quality management.

Water quality as standards and thresholds

The first externally imposed category of note is water quality itself. Scientific measurements and technical processes of treatment are typically used to ensure the safety of drinking water and establish thresholds above which quality is deemed bad and below which it is good. The reality of water as experienced by consumers can be more transient and complex than this binary would make it appear. Also, what constitutes adequate or acceptable water quality is something that is negotiated based on politics, finances and availability of certain kinds of equipment as much as human or ecosystem health and well-being (Cisneros, 2018). The measured quality of water as it pertains to standards and thresholds may or may not be a deciding factor for consumers on the acceptability of water. Cultural factors including trust in providers and sources of information (Stotts et al., 2019), multiple knowledges and perceptions (Berry et al., 2018), taste, smell and appearance of water, price, distance from point of use, consistency (de França Doria et al., 2009), associations between sources of water and violence (Nagata et al., 2011) and the history of a body of water (Gorostiza and Sauri, 2017) also play a role in understandings of quality. Furthermore, water quality is always relative, mediated by cultural and social practices and assumptions and deeply connected to knowledge, values and politics, including with regards to prioritising certain uses of water (Berry et al., 2018). An assemblage approach strives to avoid re-creating abstract categories of water quality by encouraging practitioners to undertake a grounded analysis of the situated aspects of water that may be important in a particular case rather than uncritically accepting externally imposed norms.

Water quality standards are often built around assumptions and values that are framed as objective but in fact reflect political negotiations and positions. The idea that drinking water quality is objective and knowable solely by experts obscures nuance and struggles over what is included or excluded from drinking water quality (Berry et al., 2018). Uncertainty permeates decision making about where thresholds should be set, whether impacts are acute or chronic and what the range of impacts can be from exposure to particular things in water (Damania et al., 2019). For instance, Bouleau and Pont (2015) trace negotiations of surface water quality definitions in the European Water Framework Directive. They argue that the idea of ‘reference conditions’, which became instrumental to the Water Framework Directive, were not actually based on current scientific theories about ecology and river water quality, but were rather based on what suited the needs of the European Union at that time for implementable quantitative norms. Pine and Liboiron (2015) give another example of the UK Rivers Pollution Prevention Act. In 1887, policy makers agreed on what scientists considered an arbitrary distinction between potable and non-potable water. Acknowledging that pure water does not exist in nature they decided that to qualify as potable water had to have been filtered using modern techniques (Pine and Liboiron, 2015). Chemists further decided that current scientific methods were not good enough yet to determine if germs remained in water after treatment, so they selected nitrogen as an indicator that could refer to the presence of upstream organic material. They referred to this indicator as ‘previous sewage contamination’, knowing that if consumers believed that they were drinking faeces they would get angry and demand better water quality from the government (Pine and Liboiron, 2015). The way this data was framed was an intentional and explicitly activist use of measurement, with the goal of banning raw sewage disposal into local waterways. The chemists used their expertise to select and create evocative forms of data that would involve the population in advocating for their desired drinking water quality management actions (Pine and Liboiron, 2015). These examples show that the act of selecting and naming concepts for water quality can hide the political negotiations and assumptions these concepts contain, with implications for how people respond to water quality problems.

In addition, water quality is typically framed numerically by scientists and policy makers, for instance in terms of parts per million or milligrams per litre of priority substances in a sample of water, linked to abstractions like disability adjusted life years.⁶ These numbers facilitate translation across contexts and contribute to making water quality appear objective, but such abstractions and technical language about water quality can limit participation of, and contestation by, non-experts (Karpouzoglou, 2012). Moreover, numbers are not neutral. The process of setting numerical indicators, goals and targets for water performs and shapes a certain kind of reality (Ballestero, 2014). Therefore, abstracting water quality into the form of numbers (when it is inherently qualitative) brings particular social and political relations and practices into being; there are ethical issues at play in all such determinations.

Thresholds in particular, above which concentrations of identified substances in water are deemed too high, may be problematic for three reasons. First, the use of threshold theories of pollution for environmental water quality and pollution inherently contain an assumption that some amount of pollution is inevitable (Liboiron et al., 2018). Relatedly, thresholds suppose that there are some bodies (human or non-human) and parts of the environment that must be sacrificed as sinks for waste (Liboiron, 2021).⁷ Finally, the locations of thresholds imply a particular understanding of acceptable risk versus caution (Hoffman, 2013). For example, when referring to water scarcity, threshold concepts such as minimum environmental flow and maximum sustainable yield have been critiqued as dangerous because they invite targets too close to the limits of unsustainable use (Overton et al., 2014; Pang et al., 2014). Alternatively, the precautionary principle would err on the side of the lowest detectable negative impact of pollutants in the environment, inviting a different, more careful, attitude (Hoffman, 2013). Thus, thresholds can imply a specific degree of ambition with regards to how clean or pure water should be (a moral judgement). The immanent approach I propose would not reject such concepts, but instead ask practitioners to continuously reflect on how thresholds have been determined and what might potentially be left out.

Stable hierarchies of water qualities

Scholars of environmental history have shown that historically people have distinguished between multiple waters – for example river water, drinking water or rain water – rather than considering there to be a singular ‘water’ (Garcier, 2010; Linton, 2010). The commodified modern version of water as H₂O thus has to be produced through discursive and political practices which abstract water from its context (Linton, 2010). Similarly, there are many water qualities rather than a singular water quality. As shown in the previous section, standards for water quality are politically negotiated and thus could be different depending on context. In environmental ethics, a classic point of contention contrasts utilitarian and instrumental ways of valuing nature with an intrinsic view of nature’s value in and of itself rather than as a means to an end (Brown and Schmidt, 2010b).

Water quality is often defined in an instrumental fashion referring to intended uses, such as recreational water quality, agricultural water quality and drinking water quality. Ecological requirements regarding necessary levels of water quality for maintaining or returning to healthy function are also common. In this section I turn to the potential ethical tensions between diverse water qualities and how they are positioned relative to each other in a hierarchy of needs. In particular I show how the HRW is founded on an assumption that drinking is the most valuable intended use, with the consequence that water management is narrowly focused on the provision of a certain amount and type of drinking water. I argue that, though the HRW, and thus water quality oriented towards potability and domestic needs, may be rightfully argued to be the most important, there are some normative assumptions in such a position that could remain open to questioning. Thus, while the principle may be correct in theory, there may be individual situations where it may benefit from being expanded or updated. Additionally, though the HRW is meant to be context-sensitive with qualifiers like accessible, affordable and acceptable, the selection and definition of each of these aspects of water access must be defined based on agreed-upon principles and moral/ethical determinations.

The HRW is considered a fundamental principle of ethical water management wherein water for human consumption and domestic use (including hygiene and sanitation) comes first in a hierarchy of possible uses. In discourses on the HRW, water for human consumption is described as essential to the realisation of many other rights, in part because the HRW is intimately connected to a variety of dimensions of water and well-being including, most prominently, the right to sanitation, but also rights to religious expression, self-determination, dignity, food, indigenous rights to land and traditional practices, economic and productive needs and more (Fantini, 2020). This multiplicity and complexity ‘challenges the consensus around a universal definition and common understanding on the HRW’ (Fantini, 2020: 2), including with regards to how much water and what kind are necessary to consider the HRW to have been achieved. While to some extent the United Nations has agreed on the normative content of the HRW, not all member countries have formally agreed to the 2010 Declaration on the Human Right to Water and Sanitation (General Assembly Resolution 64/292); 44 countries abstained from the vote (Fantini, 2020).

This lack of consensus on the universal nature of the HRW extends into academic and practical realms. The HRW, along with other human rights, has been critiqued as amenable to privatisation, anthropocentric and based on a Western conceptualisation of rights (Fantini, 2020). For instance, the HRW does not preclude privatisation of previously common pool water resources, since management by the private sector can arguably be an efficient and effective way to ensure access to water; some activists and scholars find this problematic (Bakker, 2007). The HRW is arguably too narrowly focused on one form of water (drinking water of potable quality) which can limit attention to associated issues such as dignity (Morales et al., 2014). It may also obscure the importance of productive use of water and makes an unnecessary distinction between issues of access and supply, and quality (Hall et al., 2014; Mehta, 2014). Furthermore, the idea that the obligations pertaining to the HRW are met when basic needs have been achieved can underplay water insecurities in the Global North (Ranganathan and Balazs, 2015) or fail to address the materiality and experience of historical injustices and inequalities (Rodina, 2017). In addition, the anthropocentric and urgent framing of the HRW puts human needs, often in the immediate term, above all others in pursuit of universal and uniform access to drinking water (Hall et al., 2014).

To counter these tendencies there are increasing calls to enlarge the boundaries of the HRW to include capabilities and manage water with the needs of the environment and future generations in mind. For instance, Jepson et al. (2019) argue in favour of highlighting the positive freedoms enabled by access to water, in other words capabilities and human flourishing, as a part of an expanded HRW that recognises the complexity of human-environment relations. Along with wider debates about expanding the realm of ethics beyond the human, recently there has been an innovative push to grant legal rights and ‘personhood’ to rivers, thus granting rivers certain rights regarding the amounts and qualities of waters necessary to maintain healthy functioning (Eckstein et al., 2019). In Australia, New Zealand and India specific rivers are now attributed legal personhood, albeit in distinct ways with specific mechanisms, arrangements and justifications (O’Donnell and Talbot-Jones, 2018). The process of granting legal rights to rivers has thus far been context-specific and attuned to the challenges facing each specific environmental object (rivers and their watersheds) (O’Donnell and Talbot-Jones, 2018). Intergenerational justice, referring to the expectation that future generations of humans will continue to have access to their basic needs, including safe and sufficient water, also pushes the realm of moral concern beyond individual people and households and towards sustainability and community rights (Meyer and Pölzler, 2020).

The externally determined primacy of the HRW can be problematic if it is taken uncritically to mean that any non-potable water should be kept away from people. In terms of water quality, and the obligation of the state towards citizens vis à vis the HRW, the state can provide information and education but should not necessarily decide a priori which water people should use and for what (Grönwall and Danert, 2020). This may be highly context-specific and localised, thus a universal principle can have unexpected implications. For instance, a single source of water can have multiple uses and focusing exclusively on drinking water as an intended use can conversely have negative impacts on public health. For instance, MacAfee (2021) observed public health actors in Kaolack, Senegal blocking consumers from using a well because bacteriological contamination was detected. This stopped all use of water from that well, even though not all of the well’s water would have been used for drinking and the water could have still been used for hygienic or agricultural purposes (MacAfee, 2021). As a result, the people who relied on that water experienced an increased burden of finding water for other domestic uses (such burdens often fall on women). Additionally, in terms of public health, handwashing is the most effective intervention to prevent diarrhoeal disease so in some cases having enough poor quality water is better than having good quality water but not enough (Grönwall et al., 2010). Stopping access to a well can counterproductively make household hygiene practices more difficult and increase risk of exposure to diarrhoeal disease instead of protecting citizens (Grönwall et al., 2010). Furthermore, similar to the threshold theories of pollution discussed above, there is a risk of the HRW actually limiting ambition by stopping at the level of basic survival needs (Rodina, 2017).

Trade-offs between water quality in different places and times matter and decisions about what is most important should be explicitly considered in each situation. For instance, in some cases steps taken to achieve the HRW neglect the possible rights of other species or ecosystems, paradoxically endangering a resource that would provide water to current or future people (Neimanis, 2014). This is not just about water quality, but quality is relevant. Technology like reverse osmosis desalination can be used to improve the quality of water to potable levels, but externalities stemming from its energy-intensive nature and the saline brine produced in the desalination process endangers surrounding ecosystems and future sustainability, with implications for environmental justice (Williams, 2018). Alternatively, protecting a vulnerable ecosystem from pollution so that it can be used for drinking water can entail restricting access, making it unavailable for traditional indigenous or religious use (Dayo et al., 2018), or meeting the domestic water needs of an urban area can make water less available for the agricultural and domestic use in rural areas where the water is sourced from (Hommes et al., 2020; Torio et al., 2019).

An immanent perspective on drinking water quality ethics is confronted by the common-sense assumption that current human consumption should automatically be the highest priority relative to productive use, sustainability or environmental quality. Any claim to the contrary can be contested on moral grounds because access to safe and sufficient drinking water is fundamental to the survival and well-being of all people. The immediacy of this requirement means that elevating drinking water quality within a hierarchy of needs may be justifiable. The purpose of this section is not to say that it is reasonable to neglect human basic needs in favour of protecting the environment (or vice versa for that matter). Instead, the implication of an immanent approach would be to always question the processes by which certain hierarchies are established and become hegemonic, potentially allowing for a more thorough search for options which includes transparent examination of the balance between risks, uncertainties and measures taken so that affected parties have the opportunity to contest decisions. Ideally, according to the normative principles of water justice, this search could take into account possible trade-offs and include considerations like future water needs and potential pollution, with due attention to the moral and ethical aspects of these decisions. In light of competing needs, progressive realisation of rights to domestic and productive use can follow after the immediate need for drinking water of adequate quantity and quality, for instance (Hall et al., 2014). Thus an ethical approach to water quality management would strive for a balance which considers all of these purposes, in acknowledgement of the fact that one may have to come first according to principles which may not be universally shared. Still, implicit judgements about risk and value should be recognised and made explicit, including open discussion about ethical questions such as how knowledge has been made, where thresholds are and who has the power to decide.

Water management best practices and water quality

Given the complexity described in the previous two sections, deciding what to do about water quality problems is clearly a difficult task encompassing both technical and ethical challenges that cross scales and are not easily resolved. Current work on water ethics has embraced the aforementioned acceptance that there are many waters. Feitelson (2017), for example, argues that ocean water, groundwater, water for agriculture and water produced through extraction or processes like desalination can each be managed according to their characteristics and the context (e.g., as commodities, as common goods, as necessary for human and ecosystem well-being), and in line with acceptance of a certain hierarchy of needs. Relatedly, many qualities can be managed in different ways.

Individual instances of water quality problems are situated in particular historical, political and hydrological contexts, and yet development and management of water resources remains heavily ‘influenced by ideas that manifest themselves through ubiquitous and proliferating “success stories”, “best practices”, “bright spots”, or “promising technologies” readily promoted as universal and transferable to other contexts’ (Molle, 2008: 131). Each potential approach to water quality problems may work well in specific situations, but when they are identified as ‘best practices’ and extrapolated out to other contexts it is important to identify the values and assumptions the practices are aligned with (Groenfeldt, 2017).

This critique of best-practice solutions fits within a broader critique of the idea that all water governance and planning can be done in accordance with universal norms and practices, such as the broad adoption of IWRM principles. IWRM is intended as a science-based approach which uses participatory and democratic methods to incorporate and coordinate the various social, ecological and agricultural needs for water (Global Water Partnership, 2000). Since the 1990s, IWRM has been explicitly embraced by the international community, including as it relates to the Dublin Statement on Water and Sustainable Development in 1992. Despite general support for its ambitions, the conceptual underpinnings of IWRM contain a moral and ethical assumption that all values of water are commensurable and able to be assigned relative economic value, making it possible to set priorities accordingly (Aldaya et al., 2017). Though there are accepted to be both measurable and intangible aspects of water, for example its’ religious and spiritual dimensions, it is more difficult to assign monetary value to the intangible ones, posing challenges to integration (Aldaya et al., 2017). When it comes to water quality, if it is to be managed within the IWRM framework, water quality is treated as instrumental relative to certain efficient uses rather than attributed any kind of intrinsic value. Which kind of quality takes priority would be determined in a cost-benefit analysis that might end up favouring agricultural quality (for instance) over potability because of the potential for greater economic impact (Aldaya et al., 2017).

Critical infrastructure studies identify another widespread, although arguably less explicit, orientation towards (mainly urban) drinking water challenges. These researchers note that what they refer to as the modern infrastructure ideal imposes external conceptions of the proper way to deliver drinking water to urban populations onto a heterogeneous reality (see, for example, Coutard and Rutherford, 2015; Furlong and Kooy, 2017; Graham and McFarlane, 2014; Lawhon et al., 2018). While they do not necessarily reject central piped networks as an option for delivering water in some contexts, they demonstrate that in many situations there are alternatives which are swept aside by the assumptions of the modern infrastructure ideal. In this view, the informal systems and multiplicities of ways people access water common in the Global South should not be seen as a failure to achieve universal access; they can actually be a sign of vitality and flexibility within a system (Amin, 2014; Jaglin, 2014). Looking specifically at drinking water quality, the universal piped network and centralised treatment of the modern infrastructure ideal are not inherently better than any other way of delivering water.

Current debates about infrastructure in the urban Global South note that small-scale, private and informal ways of accessing drinking water are pervasive in many cities and persist even in areas connected to piped water (Furlong and Kooy, 2017; Kooy and Bakker, 2008; Meehan, 2013). Alternatives to tap water provide flexibility and security to households, and displacing or replacing them may in fact do more harm than good (Peloso and Morinville, 2014). Arguments in favour of decentralisation of drinking water services are plentiful (Leigh and Lee, 2019). Decentralising, or at least changing the scale and scope of drinking water quality and treatment, can entail supporting small sources of potable water instead of treating all water or creating multiple flows of drinkable and non-drinkable water in cities (Boakye-Ansah et al., 2021). This can be complicated, however, because if decentralisation is not done carefully there can be a lack of oversight, and new systems can preserve old inequalities or create two-tiered systems where some groups are more entitled to safe and good quality drinking water than others (McFarlane and Harris, 2018).

Regardless, defining the end in advance closes off still unidentified spaces of becoming and possibility (Hillier and Abrahams, 2013), and focusing on failure to achieve an ideal distracts from what is actually present (Furlong and Kooy, 2017; Jaglin, 2014). The tendency of governments to continue with business as usual (with centralised and large-scale infrastructure development as the default) has led some scholars to speculate that they are more interested in a particular image of development than delivering services adapted to socio-economic realities (Nilsson, 2016). Critical scholars therefore ask: ‘Is poor infrastructure really the problem […]? Or is it our inability to see and think about technology in new ways that keeps millions of people from having access to safe water and decent sanitation systems?’ (Nilsson, 2016: 482). The externally imposed vision of the modern infrastructure ideal therefore limits possibilities to provide more people with consistently safe and secure drinking water, even if such forms of access may not be synonymous with connection as defined in current frameworks.

Both IWRM and the modern infrastructure ideal represent external solutions to water quality problems which are perceived as translatable from one context to the next. While they, as with other best practices, have the potential to work in some cases, it is important to recognise and consider the assumptions they carry with them rather than uncritically accepting their value in every case.

Conclusion

An immanent drinking water quality ethic calls on academics and practitioners to acknowledge and critically reflect on the utility of any externally imposed concepts, hierarchies and practices. The emphasis on immanence in assemblage theory can therefore be seen as an encouragement to explore the possibilities of ‘a new land’ (Purcell, 2013) or to stretch ‘beyond the horizon’ (Hillier, 2017) of water management, governance and planning. In this paper, I have applied such a speculative orientation to standards, hierarchies and thresholds, in each case considering the possibilities and pitfalls of what might lay beyond their borders.

The aim of the paper is not to position an immanent ethic against standards and thresholds, but rather to encourage a more open-ended way of thinking about them. While standards and guiding principles can be useful and beneficial in some cases, if universal positions are not discussed openly along with their attendant assumptions, standardisation can also facilitate the spread of problematic approaches driven by economic and growth-oriented actors (such as IWRM). However, if we accept the need for some such standards and principles in guiding water quality management, governance and planning, the important thing is to acknowledge implicit underlying assumptions and decisions instead of hiding them inside statements seen as universal or objective.

These three categories of externally imposed elements of water quality – pertaining to definitions of water quality, hierarchies of qualities and externally sourced best practice solutions – could provide some guidance for evaluating responses to specific water quality problems in terms of their ethics. Deleuze and Guattari might encourage planners and managers to attempt to cast off such elements and explore what might be possible without them, but they are ubiquitous and enduring for a reason. Therefore, the suggestion of an immanent drinking water quality ethic is challenging, and in some ways may be problematic. For example, there are benefits to identifying standards and thresholds for water quality as they relate to particular uses. Knowing (based on experiments and assessments) at what level the average person or ecosystem might start to experience harmful effects of pollution can facilitate goal setting towards improvement and protect vulnerable people and environments. Furthermore, articulating certain acceptable levels of pollution allows for comparison and for people to make claims in ways that are intelligible to governance actors demanding that those standards be met to protect their health. Arguably, in today’s world, there is no reasonable way to expect that all pollution can be avoided, so there does need to be a maximum level which may not be exceeded.

In addition, acknowledging that there can be multiple forms of drinking water quality that are not the same for everyone or all the time can be problematic if it allows for inequality of access and exposure. For instance, Dunn et al. (2014) found that flexibility in drinking water quality standards across Canada meant that rural and First Nations communities are more likely to have lower standards which increase their risk of exposure to harmful things in their drinking water. The variation in thresholds and requirements was intended to accommodate the financial and technical challenges of smaller municipalities. But cases such as these raise questions about whether allowing drinking water quality to mean different things for different people can make it too easy to justify inequality. Moreover, given the increasingly global nature of water problems relating to climate change, water grabbing and trade in virtual water, a too-narrow focus on local-level challenges can hide problematic connections between water quality inequalities across scales. On the other hand, standardised global indicators and thresholds as they are currently operationalised are not effectively contributing to improving peoples’ lives (Bain et al., 2012); what might water quality management look like without or beyond them?

The water quality ethic I propose in this article, grounded in my interpretation of Deleuze and Guattari’s writing on immanent ethics, draws attention to specific moments in water quality management, governance and planning that may hide some moral and ethical assumptions. Thus certain kinds of dilemmas and challenges associated with externally imposed aspects of existing norms and practices in water quality management become exposed to critique. In this sense, a water ethics approach can be complementary to existing analyses based on water justice, by drawing attention to possibilities that might be obscured in existing paradigms. Pragmatic approaches to water ethics also argue for a situated assessment that takes moral claims as hypotheses to be iteratively tested in context (Kowarsch, 2017). This immanent approach to water ethics points to a specific category of moral claim, suggesting the possibility to challenge pre-assumed binaries so that both water ethics and water quality emerge in the meeting between specific bodies. This article has been focused on the potential to apply an immanent water quality ethic to critique; future research could try to more concretely elaborate what an immanent approach to water quality issues could look like.

While at first the lack of fundamental moral principles upon which to base ethical judgements appears a concerning limitation of a Deleuzian ethics, on further reflection it instead appears a challenging but worthwhile provocation to reconsider how drinking water quality problems and solutions are viewed. Instead of universal versions of water problems with correct answers, individual situations should be understood in all their peculiarity. In a practical sense, this could entail more participatory approaches where the planner or manager of a drinking water system is themselves affected by other members of assemblages. Such a drinking water quality ethic is less about helping make decisions on concrete cases (this action would be more/less ethical than another) and more about the entire approach.

Despite the limitations I outlined previously, an immanent drinking water quality ethic is not as distant as it first appears. For instance, Brown and Schmidt (2010a) claim an ethical imperative to foreground situated practical knowledge of water to allow us to adapt and handle uncertainty. They further emphasize that there is much that is not, and perhaps cannot be, known about water systems and as (Brown and Schmidt, 2010b). The world is too complicated for single or inflexible principles which prevent managers from adapting and limit their options, a perspective which seems quite well aligned with Deleuze and Guattari’s immanent view of ethics. In this combined view, ethical drinking water quality governance and planning emerge as a mode of being which is oriented more towards evaluation than judgement and ‘not a directive as to what to do, but an orientation as to how people cope with the contingencies one faces’ (Hillier, 2015: 103). This approach encourages experimentation, avoids prescriptive models or universal solutions and rules and looks at the world through a lens of becoming. Plans or actions regarding drinking water quality can thus be evaluated in terms of their flexibility, openness to connectivity and perhaps even humility.

When drinking water quality is recognised as a multiplicity and a becoming, it is even more clear that applying repetitive solutions to diverse water problems does not make sense. It is not my intention to obscure the fact that some people are more at risk from poor water quality than others – far from it. Instead I argue that whether a particular instance of water is good or bad is a normative judgement which must be negotiated, constructed and assembled, and that in some cases this process allows water quality to become elusive and slippery. Therefore, nuancing and looking beyond categories and best practices may better align with an unpredictable, complicated and fluid world. Water is slippery, and water quality is heterogeneous and non-linear. There are not one but many waters, and many qualities. Thus an immanent water quality ethic could be one way to meet the shifting and uncertain materiality of water itself.

Given these possibilities and limitations I end with a tentative endorsement of Deleuze and Guattari’s immanent ethical perspective. Deleuze and Guattari suggest casting off external binaries and categories and exploring the BwO – but they also acknowledge that this can be risky and the results are not always positive, especially if you do it all at once (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Therefore, examining and even rejecting externally imposed categories has the potential to open up new spaces of possibility, but it is not entirely clear what water quality would look like on the other side.

Highlights

Assemblage theory proposes a form of immanent ethics that can be applied to water quality management, governance and planning.

An immanent water quality ethic provides foundations for critique of externally imposed binaries, categories and norms.

These abstract and universalising principles include how quality is defined, hierarchies of qualities and norms for solving water quality problems.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Miriam Tedeschi for providing comments on an early draft of this article and to Synne Movik, Tim Richardson and Matthew Cashmore for supervision and support throughout the writing process. In addition Rebecca Cavicchia and Cornelia Helmcke have provided invaluable feedback at different stages, and three anonymous reviewers contributed constructive critique of the manuscript.

Declaration

Parts of this article have appeared in the author’s PhD dissertation (Assembling drinking water quality and inequality: the case of Kaolack, Senegal) at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Norges Miljø-og biovitenskapelige universitet (NMBU) over the course of a stipend for PhD education.

ORCID iD

Elizabeth MacAfee

Notes

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