Inspired by the proposal of political scientists and anthropologists to focus on “practice” as the smallest unit of analysis for understanding politics, as well as the renewed scholarly attention to materiality, this paper sets out to show that detailed ethnographic attention to processes and acts of sociotechnical tinkering provides a useful entry-point for understanding water governance. This is so methodologically, because infrastructural forms of tinkering are very visible, and therefore researchable, manifestations of agency and change in water governance. Attention to sociotechnical tinkering helps shift the basis for understanding water realities from official norms, designs and laws to everyday practices. This in turn allows questioning, rather than assuming, how expertise and agency are exercised and distributed in water governance, thereby also providing useful information for re-thinking water politics. In addition, by explicitly engaging with the contingency and capriciousness of actual water flows, a sociotechnical tinkering approach entails a much-needed re-appreciation of the materiality of water, infrastructure and other matter, a re-appreciation that extends to those who design, construct, operate and use water infrastructure.

In this article we present two logics of water efficiency: that of the Water Footprint and that of mango smallholder farmers on the desert coast of Peru (in Motupe). We do so in order to explore how both can learn from each other and to discuss what happens when the two logics meet. Rather than treating the Water Footprint as scientific, in the sense that it is separate from traditions or politics, and Motupe poza irrigation as cultural and, therefore, thick with local beliefs and superstitions, we describe both as consisting of intricate entanglements of knowledge and culture. This produces a more or less level playing field for the two water logics to meet and for proponents of each to enter into a conversation with one another; allowing furthermore for the identification of what Water Footprint inventors and promotors can learn from poza irrigators, and vice versa. The article concludes that important water wisdom may get lost when the Water Footprint logic becomes dominant, as is currently about to happen in Peru.

Efforts to measure and regulate groundwaters and irrigators are notoriously ineffective. The starting point of this article, therefore, is to question the continued faith in techno-managerial solutions to groundwater depletion. We discuss the potential of the conceptual vocabulary of ‘care’ to complement, refresh and expand ways of talking about and doing groundwater governance. Mobilizing a diverse range of examples from places where pressures on aquifers are particularly acute, we do this by exploring what care entails in everyday practices of groundwater use and management. We show that foregrounding care nuances and sometimes challenges stories of users unavoidably depleting aquifers when given the chance and means to do so. Irrigators may display concern about the longer-term sustainability of the aquifers on which their livelihoods depend, even when their own pumping practices are unsustainable. In spite of pressures to intensify and individualize, farmers sometimes do hold on to or creatively develop collective rules to fairly share groundwater and use it sustainably, complementing strategies to make do with what is available with investments in conservation and recharge. Attention to care, moreover, highlights the ongoing processes of tinkering that governing groundwater always entails. The ability to tinker hinges on intimate and often embodied knowledge of a watery place. Accepting the care involved in governing groundwater, our analysis therefore concludes, prompts a re-consideration of what is and who has water expertise, with important implications for the role of ‘outside’ experts. More than a new theory, we propose embracing care as an analytical sensibility, with the study of practices of care serving as one promising way to widen the conceptual and political space for understanding and doing human-groundwater relations.

In the Motupe valley on the north coast of Peru, the cultivation of mango for export is in the hands of smallholders, many of whom cultivate on communal lands without water rights or official approval to grow perennial crops. In this article I present the case of the smallholders, known as excedentes de agua, who only have access to irrigate in time of abundance or excess water. Although these small farmers are considered displaced by modern agro-export, they and their mango plantations have managed to put down roots in a desert climate and adverse market sector. They challenge in this way, not only such conditions for doing agriculture, but also how to write about them and their water realities. It is this last point that constitutes the main contribution of this work. Inspired by actor-network theory, this article presents alternative ways to situate the partial ontologies that emerge from the case study as a point of interference – to converse or interchange with the grand narratives and their holistic aspirations, without having to add to them.

The authors wish to make the following correction to this paper