Rivers like the Rhine are embedded in complex hydrosocial entanglements. They serve as vital, though often latent, infrastructures that provide essential services and resources and underpin a wide array of situated sociomaterial practices. Yet their close relationship with societies is marked by a profound duality, as indicated by the increasing frequency of flood events and droughts. This article introduces a sociological account of rivers as hydrosocial infrastructures, that acknowledges heterogeneity, materiality and fluidity, alongside technical rationality and issues of control. Drawing on Bennett’s "thing-materialism", the paper develops a theoretically grounded, process-sociological heuristic that reconceives "thing-power" as a relational capacity and systematises (hydrosocial) infrastructuring across six dimensions. Applying this framework to the historical case of the Rhine rectification in the 18th and 19th centuries enables a deconstruction of the engineering work as the product of a heterogeneous assemblage, while highlighting the multifaceted forces at play in the river’s gradual transformation into a hydrosocial infrastructure. The paper shows how the Rhine’s "modern" infrastructural character emerges from long-standing transformations that inscribe particular ontologies, values, expectations and relations to nature into the river’s form – patterns that remain embedded within ongoing sociomaterial processes. While emerging from hydrosocial inquiry, the framework offers a perspective that may extend to other sociomaterial contexts that are shaped by infrastructured relations.
This paper examines the sociomaterial bricolage that emerged on the island of Gozo, Malta, following the introduction of treated wastewater for irrigation, commonly branded as 'New Water'. Drawing on an actor-centred sociomaterial bricolage approach, the study investigates how farmers adapted infrastructures and institutions in response to the opportunities, constraints and inequalities created by the new-water system. Based on qualitative fieldwork involving interviews with farmers, Water Services Corporation employees, and local officials, the analysis compares four water dispensers that are each operating under different conditions of water availability and pressure. The findings show that infrastructural and institutional adaptations are closely intertwined and are shaped by material conditions. At water-abundant 'head-ender' locations near the beginning of the water distribution canal, farmers developed arrangements enabling simultaneous water sharing, while water scarcity and unreliable supply at tail-ender locations encouraged forms of time sharing and stricter coordination. These adaptations also generated new tensions that prompted interventions at broader system-level scales. The study demonstrates how sociomaterial bricolage is multiscalar and path dependent, with successive adaptations responding to the consequences of earlier interventions; it also highlights the importance of anticipating such dynamics when designing equitable wastewater reuse systems.
This article examines the transformation of inherited hydraulic infrastructures through the case of the former saltworks of the Camargue, in France's Rh & ocirc;ne Delta. There, an ecological restoration project - subsequently framed as a Nature-based Solution - has restored hydrological connectivity while discontinuing the maintenance of former industrial seafront dykes. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork conducted between 2021 and 2023, combining semi-structured interviews, observation and document analysis, the article examines the social and political consequences of this transformation. The project is conceptualised by the authors as a process of de- and reinfrastructuring that reconfigures hydrosocial territories and their historically sedimented hydrosocial heritages. The analysis shows how infrastructural transformation reshapes social practices, ecological relations, power relations and perceptions of risk, and how it can generate conflicts over historically constituted relationships between water, infrastructures and territorial practices. The article argues that such transformations can produce forms of hydrosocial misrecognition when historically constituted socio-ecological relations, situated knowledge and territorial practices are insufficiently recognised. More broadly, it shows that Nature-based Solutions, often presented as consensual and depoliticised, can themselves become sites of conflict over how territories should be inhabited, protected and transformed.
Datacentres are increasingly being built to service artificial intelligence (AI)-and large volumes of water are often required to power and cool these facilities. Today, public opposition against new datacentre development is sharply increasing in the United States, with local water insecurity concerns-including institutional distrust, ecosystem risks, and escalating utility rates-featuring prominently. The scientific community participates in these debates by quantifying datacentres' volumetric water use-what we call "assessment-driven" research. Our viewpoint argues that such assessments can inadvertently produce an information ecosystem in which water overuse becomes framed as a resource management problem to be solved with more efficient water-use technology. To us, this will not be sufficient to overcome opposition-and could, paradoxically, inflame existing tensions. This is because the "water problem" is an existential one for local communities, not a techno-managerial one. Water access shapes the futures of local communities, their perceived character, and the lives people want for themselves-and water use, including more efficient use, by these industrial facilities can enable the very kinds of existential changes that are often the bases of local resistance movements. Assessing who (if anyone) benefits from the water used for AI can challenge existing managerial approaches that often separate co-constitutive water-society relationships and assume efficiency improvements will, at least partly, quell public opposition.
With the global rate of water privatisation either slowing or going into reverse, the water and sanitation sector in Brazil stands as an outlier. This paper develops an in-depth analysis of the Brazilian model, arguing that the privatisation of water services represents not simply a transfer of ownership but a process of profound sectoral re-engineering. The theoretical framework combines a Marxist approach to political economy with a neoinstitutionalist analysis. Empirical content is drawn from legislation, documents on regulatory standards, concession contracts, official reports, auction documents, and financial prospectuses. The paper's findings reveal three structural features: the rapid expansion of privatisation, the oligopolisation of service provision, and the increasing financialisation of operating firms' ownership structures. These structural features have emerged in a context of political de-risking and disenfranchisement of social movements. The paper goes on to analyse five drivers of the privatisation process: the influence of international finance, regulatory stability as a de-risking strategy, the influence of interest groups, a neoliberal shift in Brazilian politics, and the federal government's role as anchor and guarantor of privatisation. The paper concludes by questioning whether the Brazilian experiment will catalyse a new wave of water privatisation worldwide or whether it will come to be viewed as another chapter in the failure of neoliberal policies more broadly. Taken together, the findings situate the Brazilian case within broader debates around the reform of public services under financialised capitalism.
