Kris Hartley, Assistant Professor, School of Sustainability in the College of Global Futures, is lead and corresponding author on Through the water glass darkly: global cities as problematic exemplars in the sustainability discourse, a new publication in the International Journal of Water Resources Development.
"It is prudent to note that the sustainability discourse is doubling-down on the ‘promise of technology,’ under the assumption that innovations and the capacity to implement them will always outpace environmental degradation," says Hartley. "A more skeptical view would consider such approaches a leap of faith."
Hartley says that without meaningful pushback against what he calls "the entrenched technocratic epistemic of the global water consensus," technology remains the only sustainability bet that society has placed. "Breaking epistemic lock-in can meaningfully transform water management, but such an evolutionary leap disrupts the comfort of managed decline – an incrementalism that above all sustains economic and political stability while sitting behind a fortress of data, technology and narrative plausibility. Scholars should therefore be creative and provocative in exploring novel alternatives."
A brief summary follows:
Urban water management practices are standardized through narratives informed primarily by the experiences of global cities. While these cities have resources and influence, their persistent economic and environmental challenges point to epistemic faults in technocratic policymaking. Therefore, it is prudent to critically evaluate global cities as sustainability exemplars. This article discusses problematic power dynamics in the global standardization of water practices and technologies, and applies a critical-theoretical perspective to the techno-optimism defining the sustainability discourse. The practical analysis outlines implications for urban water managers balancing contradictory political mandates, and considers scenarios in the relationship between global cities and resource hinterlands.
