A Future History of Water by Andrea Ballestero

Reviewed by: A Future History of Water by Andrea Ballestero Astrid B. Stensrud Andrea Ballestero. A Future History of Water. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. 248 pp. Water was declared to be a human right by the United Nations in 2010, yet universal access to water is still not a reality. In A Future History of Water, anthropologist Andrea Ballestero provides a sophisticated and intriguing analysis of the everyday, mundane work done by bureaucrats, politicians, NGO workers, and activists to render water a human right while working within existing legal and political-economic frameworks. These actors are not especially radical, but they wish to make a difference in the world by shaping the future history of water. Through a material-semiotic lens, Ballestero explores the constant work of differentiating water as a human right from water as a commodity that takes place in bureaucratic and political spaces. She analyzes this work as processes of disentanglement and forms of bifurcation that never seem to end; new distinctions are always required, but they are never fully finalized, resulting in a "never-ending bifurcating mesh" (6). Ballestero does not enter into direct conversation with the many ethnographies of water published in the past decade, most of which focus on users, their relations to water bodies and infrastructures, as well as the role of engineers and bureaucrats as key actors in the distribution of water. Instead, she makes a point of doing something different. Taking a radical move away from the physical water sources, users, and canals, Ballestero intentionally looks for water elsewhere, "in places where we might not usually explore its material politics" (15). The ethnographic material of the book derives from many years of research with technocrats, documents, models, and calculations in offices, [End Page 709] Costa Rica's Congress, workshops in Brazil, and international meetings. Instead of being located in a specific place, the book is ethnographically grounded in particular devices, which are instruments for organizing and channeling technopolitical work. This focus on devices enables the author to "identify the particular practices, offices, computer files, and conversations whereby that material-semiotic labor is performed" (9). Understanding the device as a structured space for improvisation that opens for other possibilities, Ballestero suggests that a device has an impetus to "improve" futures. As an intense node of temporalities and passions, a device is simultaneously precarious and hopeful, just as the nonlinear future histories of water in this book. The book is organized into four chapters, each dealing with a device: formula, index, list, and pact. Chapter 1 ("Formula") looks into how public regulators decide the price of water and analyzes how their assessments are constituted by ethical, cultural, and mathematical relations. Most anthropological research on water payments focuses on how the users – whether small-scale farmers or urban households–experience changes in water prices. The processes of water pricing are often obscure, black-boxed technical decisions that take place against a backdrop of neoliberalism, privatization, and structural adjustment. Ballestero, on the other hand, shows how the technical practices of deciding water prices consist of the dynamic and ethical considerations of bureaucrats and regulators who aim to set a just and correct price. The chapter follows the work of employees in ARESEP, Costa Rica's public services regulation authority, which is responsible for mediating between corporations, citizens, and the state via "technical" decisions. The author shows how mathematical models and accounting standards have become normative forms of knowledge, leading to the financialization of water, although it is formally a public utility. Hence, she argues that defining the water service as either public or private is not enough to understand the undergirding values. The formula used to calculate the "correct" price of water indicates which costs the price should cover, in addition to generating a surplus that will ensure an improvement in the quality of the service. The tricky part of the formula is the variable that captures the difference between income and expenses, which is the "surplus." For the ARESEP bureaucrats, it is crucial to differentiate the surplus from "profit," seeing as generating profits from the provision of water services is prohibited by law in Costa Rica. Thus, the fundamental question of human rights

Bureaucracy · Water security · Water Governance and Infrastructure