Transformative Water Relations: Indigenous Interventions in Global Political Economies

Abstract

This Special Issue of Global Environmental Politics, on water governance, focuses on the disruptive and transformative potential of Indigenous politics for revealing the multiplicity of political economies and enhancing the theory and practice of global environmental politics. In this issue, we unsettle the assumptions of dominant colonial systems of production and exchange (often the starting point for global environmental politics scholars), using water to bring to light the conflicting approaches of settler colonial and Indigenous political economies. With a focus on the settler colonial states of the Global North—specifically, Canada and the United States—the contributing authors interrogate the ways in which different forms of water relations are positioned at the center of conflicting understandings of land, law, and development trajectories. Through analyses of varying forms of water infrastructure, water law, and waterways, and with careful attention to spatial and temporal distances in production and trade systems, the articles curated here examine conflicting legal forms and traditions, upstream and downstream relations, and opportunities for and limits to resistance by affected communities. In a dominant global political economy with increasing distance between sites of extraction, production, consumption, and discard—and even further removed from the financing that underpins these commodity chains—our Special Issue suggests that the acknowledgment and visibility of multiple forms of water relations contribute to reshaping both economies and environmental outcomes.