CAREER: Moral Economies in Water Markets: Implications for Understanding Human Responses to Water Insecurity

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Half of the world’s population will live in water-stressed conditions by 2040. To manage water insecurity, many communities will increasingly need to rely on mobile, adaptable, and decentralized water infrastructures, such as private water vending, rather than on centralized public systems alone. In the coming years then, it will be crucial to understand how market-based infrastructures can be designed to uphold local notions of water justice and advance the Human Right to Water. This CAREER project will examine when and how communities mobilize market-based moral economies to manage water insecurity in ways they consider to be fair and just. Moral economies are normative economic institutions in which shared notions of justice obligate individuals to provide access to vital resources. While scientists have documented reciprocity-based moral economies as a key human response to resource insecurity, we have little understanding of when and how people may use market-based moral economic arrangements to manage water insecure conditions within contemporary capitalist contexts. In Phase 1 of the project, the researcher will ethnographically examine private water vending in a major U.S. water insecurity hotspot to understand if and when market-based moral economies for water arise. In Phase 2, the researcher will explore the generalizability of these findings through a cross-cultural study of market-based moral economies in six global sites (via collaboration with the NSF-funded Household Water Insecurity Research Coordination Network). Both phases of research will focus on three water markets (informal exchanges, semi-formal water hauling, and formal water retail stores) to examine how market formality enables or constrains moral economies for water. Within each market, the researcher will examine how social distance, dyadic social ties that are strong, weak, or absent, enables or constrains moral economies for water. Findings from this research will: contribute to anthropological knowledge of the social foundations of markets; further understand how humans respond to resource insecurity in market-based economies; advance interdisciplinary scholarship on the multi-scalar causes, consequences, and responses to household water insecurity. Funding for the project will also support the development of a novel research apprenticeship model that will integrate all phases of research with graduate and undergraduate teaching in order to train a new generation of social scientists in team-based interdisciplinary social science and community-based research methods.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.