Going with the Flow: Sustainable Water Management as Ontological Cleaving

Abstract

In this paper, I consider what it might be to do sustainable management through a case study of the Goulburn River in southeastern Australia. Rather than evaluating sustainable development as more or less successful techniques, or as competing discourses of integrating resource use and environmental protection, I attend to sustainable management as ontological work. Engaging with work on relational materiality, I tell of irrigation water and environmental water as emergent in particular gatherings of practices, technologies, and stories of river management and rural life. I argue that sustainable management of the Goulburn's flow performs ontological cleaving: ontological multiplicity is both drawn together and held apart. Through processes of translation and segregation, irrigation water and environmental water are made to intermingle, whilst sustaining ontological difference. This paper contributes to the consideration of how ontological difference is managed and extends recent work on the materialities of water. In doing so, it engages with concerns about the politics of water management and confronts social science critiques about the ambiguity of sustainable development.