Transformations to Groundwater Sustainability: joint learnings from human-groundwater interactions

世界上数十亿人的日常生活依赖地下水。然而，它的不可见性使得地下水难以管理，也使避免枯竭或污染的努力复杂化。本项目旨在比较研究在水资源压力特别严重的地方（印度、阿尔及利亚、摩洛哥、美国、智利、秘鲁、坦桑尼亚）围绕地下水组织起来的有前途的基层倡议。由于这些举措经常违背或挑战传统智慧，该项目的假设是，这些举措包含了处理地下水治理固有紧张关系的创造性见解：个人利益与集体利益之间，短期利益与长期可持续性之间。关注地下水实践——了解、获取和共享——我们将定性人种学方法与水文地质和工程见解结合起来，探索这些举措的知识、技术和制度特征。我们的目的是阐明和规范地评估它们的逻辑和功能，以追踪重叠或模式，使它们能够作为向地下水可持续性转变的更一般的模型。这一努力的灵感来自于水同时具有社会性和自然性的理论，建立在最近关于机构的批判性学术基础上，并且对地下水的分布和使用如何通过技术进行调解具有特别的敏感性。我们的总体目标是建立全球行动研究合作，为思考和处理人类与地下水之间的相互联系和相互依赖关系提供新的灵感

Billions of people around the world rely for their everyday existence on groundwater. Its invisibility, however, makes groundwater notoriously difficultto govern, also complicating efforts to avoid depletion or pollution. This project sets out to comparatively study promising grass-roots initiatives ofpeople organizing around groundwater in places where pressures on the resource are particularly acute (India, Algeria, Morocco, USA, Chile, Peru,Tanzania). As these often defy or challenge conventional wisdom, the project's hypothesis is that these initiatives contain creative insights about waysof dealing with the intrinsic tensions that characterize groundwater governance: between individual and collective interests and between short-termgains and longer-term sustainability. Focusing on groundwater practices - of knowing, accessing and sharing - we combine qualitative ethnographicmethods with hydrogeological and engineering insights to explore the knowledges, technologies and institutions that characterize these initiatives. Ouraim is to enunciate and normatively assess their logic and functioning in view of tracing overlaps or patterns that allow them to serve as more genericmodels for transformations to groundwater sustainability. This effort is inspired by theorizations of water as simultaneously social and natural, buildson recent critical scholarship on institutions, and has a particular sensitivity to how the distribution and use of groundwater is mediated bytechnologies. Our overall aim is to create global action-research collaborations to generate new inspirations for thinking about and dealing withinterconnections and interdependencies between humans and groundwater