Feminist contributions to water and development scholarship

In this chapter, I suggest that feminist scholarship offers useful ingredients for new and better ways of knowing and acting on water questions in development. First, the shift in focus in water agendas from "development" to "conservation" can benefit from the deeply feminist insight that the division between nature and society is always a human one. Second, feminist proposals for new norms of objectivity based on situatedness, on being explicit about one's perspective, embodiment and location, are useful for replacing the old idea of water science as distinguishable from power or politics with one that explicitly recognizes how knowledge and power are intrinsically mixed. Taken together feminist ideas also usefully propose new ways of organizing collaborations between or across disciplines. By replacing the one-world (universe) quest for commensuration with a more modest search for the partial connections - between different worlds, places and disciplines - attention shifts to creating the translations needed to make insights travel. Rather than the single best, optimal or most accurate representation, the debate becomes a more pragmatic and political one: one about which enactments (realities, imaginaries and futures) are plausible and desirable for a specific situation, place or community.