Bhargabi Das writes a commentary on Andrea Ballestero’s book which explores the dynamic and ambiguous nature of water through her ethnographic fieldwork in Costa Rica and Brazil. Following the commentary, we showcase an excerpt from the first chapter, Formula, of Ballestero’s A Future History of Water, as an invitation to delve into the book.

I. Commentary by bhargabi das

Andrea Ballestero in her book A Future History of Water examines the routine-ness or “non-spectacular” lifeworld of water. Ballestero does this by locating its presence in the bureaucratic deskwork and cubicles of lawyers, NGO workers, economists, policy-makers and other community representatives in Costa Rica and Brazil. This is a conscious attempt to nudge the reader to look at mundane, often invisible, taken-for-granted spaces and people that allow the existence of water as a human right in an increasingly consumerist world. For this, Ballestero uses four “technolegal devices”—Formula, Index, List and Pact—each forming a distinct chapter and how each is being used by bureaucrats and lawmakers to distinguish water from a commodity.

What is interesting is the fact that the awareness of her informants that this active pursuance of distinction-creation between a human right and a commodity is an on-going process is also reflected in her writing, particularly in her analytic style of using the technolegal devices. Just like her informants who recognize that bifurcation creation using the devices is temporary as the world is entangled and messy, Ballestero while describing and acknowledging the messiness of policy-making and implementation of water, gives a sense of a focused, organized, often amplified view of the technocratic world of water.  This is largely achieved through her use of the technolegal devices as a framework of analysis.

Her work can and should be seen in tandem with the larger body of the anthropology of infrastructure, particularly with the rich ethnographies of waterscapes (focusing on pipes) and hydraulic citizenship by Nikhil Anand and roads by Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox, chiefly because of a curious affinity of Ballestero’s work with materialities. This is reflected when she talks about how one can see the formation of a collective in promises expressed in colored paper slips in Brazil or the water bills in Costa Rica. However, the use of technical devices allows Ballestero’s work to be seen beyond infrastructure studies. These devices are non-material, intangible, always invisible to the eyes of the common person but nonetheless keep dictating their accessibility to water. Thus, allowing her to go beyond materiality, and trace the politics of making water a human right.

Ballestero’s use of the devices brings fresh perspectives towards collaborative ethnography because the informant is not just involved in the consent forms, in the acknowledgement sections or even as authors, but in the very analytic framework of her writing. The use of technical devices by her informants to draw boundaries and keep water a human right instead of a commodity is directly taken up by Ballestero as her analytic framework. She justifies this by saying, “This choice was also a way to stake a theoretical claim within an anthropological tradition committed to beginning any theorization out of one’s informants’ analytics rather than taking their everyday lives as objects waiting to be diagnosed and interpreted with imported conceptual resources.”

Being a cultural anthropologist, her writing helps in tracing what I call the “affective life of technocratic devices.” Her lucid ethnographic descriptions of how technical devices are made to function by people working with them gives us a glimpse of how the technical is anything but dry. The components of a formula or a percentage interacts with each other guided by the values, ethics and emotions of the people working with it—be it the setting of the price of water being guided by the values of harmony and equilibrium or the formulation of a “pact” through doubts, conflicts and active engenderment of “care” within stakeholders. Though not explicitly stated in the book, I understand that the osmosis of affect and technical devices is what is enabling the creation of continued bifurcations—distinguishing water to be a human right and not a commodity, even though these distinctions often slip and disappear.

Looking at technopolitical devices through the lens of affect can prove extremely meaningful in areas of inquiry which might be what Ballestero says, “well beyond water,” for they proliferate in all sorts of environmental, bureaucratic and political settings. For instance, “Affect and technical devices” as an analytic framework can help provide fresh insights into population studies, state-making and anthropology/sociology of science and technology. Though one has seen numerous post-colonial studies on statistics wherein numbers in censuses, lists, maps, documents etc. are seen consciously or unconsciously through “affect,” but these are mostly seen in the line of propaganda and bio-politics. Ballestero’s work should inspire researchers to use the analytic framework of “technical devices through the lens of affect” beyond propaganda and bio-politics. One could look for a wider spectrum of emotions that interact with and around technical devices. That manipulation of numbers, list, formulas can happen because of care, empathy, etc. And for this, a variety of sites should be explored.

For someone like me working on the Indian citizenship project called the National Register of Citizens (NRC) —a huge bureaucratic exercise wherein residents in Assam, India, are mandated to produce state approved documents to prove their citizenship— Ballestero’s analytical framework can provide fresh insights. Though the NRC was a political project, on the ground it was largely a technically-driven initiative with lower bureaucrats being intimately involved with software developed by technical giants like WIPRO to store and analyze data. If analyzed through the “affective life of technolegal devices” framework, one can reanalyze such a political project by asking questions like: Was there an affectual invasion into the technical aspects of the NRC, such as the software involved, be it in their designing or implementation? How did affect play a role in lower bureaucrats handling of software of the NRC? The affectual manipulation of technical devices in such projects can have huge socio-political implications, denying or providing citizenship rights. 

Ballestero operates from a perspective of state mediation of water, such that public bureaucracies are mediating in making water available from water sources to the common people. This is slightly different from what South Asian scholar-activists like Vandana Shiva propagates in what she terms “Water Democracy.” Water Democracy works with the principle that water as natural basic right is achieved when its access is maintained by local communities. She gives the example of how traditionally in India, village committees smoothly took care of equitable water access. State involvement and bureaucratization of water in anyway, she feels, ultimately gives state the right to pass water’s access and use to private market citing inefficiency and loss. Shiva, however, propagates this “traditional” way of “caring” and distribution of water in Indian villages by romanticizing village life. Her concept fails to acknowledge the inherent caste, class, gender inequities in Indian villages that have directly impacted water accessibility and usage among varied categories of people living there.

In India, state involvement and bureaucratization of water has continued since Nehruvian era with the building of big dams, etc. In countries like India, setting up of departments like Water Resources, Irrigation, etc. brought about a discourse surrounding that. It was only after 1990s, post Liberalization and Globalization, with the involvement of the World Bank, water privatization was largely encouraged. However, in the context of South Asia, privatization of water has not only brought in pollution but also tremendous economic loss. This is starkly different from Ballestero’s context of study, wherein she started with the presumption that though privatization of water can bring in social inequities, it can be profitable for the stake-holders involved, including the state. This also should be taken as an opportunity to conduct political-economic ethnographies on municipalities and state departments handling water in South Asia.

Besides, in the context of South Asia, where most people meet their water requirements through use of ground water, it demands that we move beyond Ballestero’s understanding of “water privatization.” Water privatization is not simply when big corporations get involved with control and use of water, but also can be the involvement of upper-middle classes of a society. In countries like India, where water is a state subject and there lies weak legislation in regard to ground-water, the land-owning class can have monopolization on water use and access. After all people who own land, automatically also owns the water beneath it. This is also giving rise to specific water markets and has contributed to farmer suicides. Thus, what new forms of bureaucratization of water can come up in regard to ground-water control – from kinship/feudal laden networked control (landlords determining water prices of tenants) to purely rational-legal (companies selling ground-water at specific rates) will be interesting to look at.

Ballestero, as can be seen from the title of the book “A Future History…,” stirs important conversations surrounding time and anthropological studies of the future. More in line with the works of Susan Harding and Daniel Rosenberg, she understands futures in non-linear ways and beyond the language of crisis or apocalypse. This is largely achieved because Ballestero, just like Harding and Rosenberg, locates future imaginations in the everyday lives of common people. She notes, “[t]hat apocalyptic disappointment is only possible if you knew what the future would look like. But the problem is such certainty about what the future should have been is only available to a very small group of people in this world.” People, when in midst of dire circumstances, do not see future as apocalyptic. Thus, it allows her to look at futures as non-predictive or not determined, just like her informants.

However, the strict adherence to the technical devices as an analytic framework entails a risk of making the narrative a bit too focused if the researcher is not careful enough to allow wider and enmeshed observations to seep in. An ethnographic object like water, which in its materiality itself is fluid and can go in any direction invites one to follow water flows, leaks, seepages, evaporations and solidification. Ballestero’s use of the technical devices gives the feeling at times that there is an imposed order to the narrative, which can be limiting to capture the diverse directions, meanings and politics that water flows into. She uses what she terms as the “magnifying effect,” wherein she enlarges something more than what one perceives its size ought to be. This runs the risk of seeing the devices in every decision of water governance or what she herself acknowledges as “overemphasizing their power” than what really might be the reality.

Besides, this being a multi-sited ethnography, Ballestero does not justify the rationale behind her analytic framework having more engagement with Costa Rica than Brazil considering three out of the four devices (and hence chapters) are set in Costa Rica and looks at the water governance and middle-range bureaucrats and policymakers there and not in Brazil.

For South Asian scholars like me working on water, Ballestero’s work has the potential to enliven the analysis of water conflicts such as water wars between state governments over the distribution of river water. It could also help understand urbanization or even citizenship, that is, who gets displaced, who migrates, who gets access to clean water, etc. Her work will go a long way in inspiring young anthropologists to experiment more with ethnography, not just in terms of methodologies or format of writing but also in regard to scales of study and analytic frameworks. In fact, Future History of Water should be seen as a pre-cursor to Ballestero’s current exciting work—Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis and her “Ethnography Studio” project, which takes the dialogue about experimentation with ethnography to newer, different spaces and directions.

II. Excerpt from A Future History of water

Chapter 2, “Formula” (P. 43-46)

I began my journey to learn the elements that constitute the prices that Alex and Alvaro pass on to people in Cocles by physically going to ARESEP. In 2008 I attended my first audiencia pública (public hearing) there. After meandering around the streets of San José to avoid traffic and make it to the 5:00 pm hearing, I finally arrived at the agency’s headquarters, located in the western part of the city. A security guard showed me the entryway to an auditorium that had been added to the building many years after its initial construction during one of the many remodels it had gone through. From its creation in the 1990s until shortly after 2010, ARESEP occupied that same apartment building. Over that period, its administrators per- formed all sorts of architectural modifications, not only to make space for the growing number of employees but also to match changing ideas of what a public office should look like.[3]

In the auditorium, the hearing was about to start. With a capacity of about one hundred people, that afternoon there were no more than forty attendees between ARESEP employees, public servants, and utility personnel. Public meetings like this are a central piece of modernist state-making. They allow public officials to assemble symbols of authority and citizens to perform their assigned roles (Li 2007). They are also strategic and care- fully crafted displays of knowledge and ignorance about technical issues (Mathews 2008). But these meetings can also turn into tournaments of political skill where people challenge their expected roles as they convene for information, consultation, or organization purposes (Alexander 2017). The lawmakers who created ARESEP imagined these meetings as a means to increase transparency and bring citizens closer to the state. This particular audiencia pública was held to collect public feedback on the latest petition by the largest water utility in the country, AyA, to increase the price they charge for water services by an alarming 40 percent.[4] 

From the front stage, a young man in a business suit formally guided the audience through a legal and administrative ritual whose high point was a presentation by Sofia, a member of what at the time was the Water and Environment Department (WED) of ARESEP.[5] Sofia is trained in business administration and has worked at ARESEP for close to two decades. When I met her, she was in her mid-thirties and was one of the few women holding technical positions in her department. At the meeting, Sofia was in charge of the PowerPoint presentation because she had been appointed to lead the evaluation of the latest price increase request received by the agency. Her presentation had been prerecorded, and while she sat in the audience, we saw her enlarged image onscreen giving a fifteen-minute introduction to price regulation. Sofia informed attendees about how the agency analyzes the legal and technical propriety of the petitions that water utilities, all of which are state or municipal entities, regularly submit. Most of her talk, as one would expect, revolved around the regulatory methodologies her department follows. But in between analyses of demand elasticity, depreciation rates, and efficiency, Sofia insisted on the responsibility “all” people have to guarantee the implementation of the human right to water. This strong reference surprised me.

My surprise came in part from the fact that it was only in 2010, two years after I met Sofia, that the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 64/292 recognizing the right to safe and clean water for drinking and sanitation as an essential condition for the full enjoyment of life and all other human rights. What at the moment I had temporarily forgotten was that this recognition was the culmination of more than three decades of international discussions. And yet, while welcome, the official recognition of water as a human right by the un General Assembly did not significantly alter the thinking of most regulators. They, and most Costa Ricans for that matter, already recognized the existence of a universal human right to water as something of a natural fact, a self-evident truth. One of the first formal definitions of the right to water was adopted by the un in 2003, well before the General Assembly resolution. That definition already used a term that was especially meaningful to Sofia and her colleagues. That definition noted that, among other things, if water is to be a human right it needs to be affordable.

After her prerecorded presentation was over, Sofia walked to the stage and projected a slide with the regulatory formula wed uses to calculate water prices (see equation 1.1). ARESEP adopted this formula in the 1990s fol- lowing a recommendation by a consultant from the Pan-American Health Organization hired to modernize the methodologies the agency used. Ex- plaining how the variables in the formula made their humanitarian responsibilities concrete, Sofia informed her audience about the possibilities she saw in the elements that make up the prices they produce. A human right to water was not something determined in courts, it was something that resided in their calculations. Their formula, as any equation, was in reality a story about the relations between different entities. And as any story does, this one had material effects in the world.

X= O + A+ D + R

Equation 1.1. Formula used by Costa Rica’s public service regulation authority to set the price of water.

Sofia’s braiding of the price formula with the affordability of human rights was neither romantic idealism nor superficial talk. As I later learned, she wholeheartedly embraces human rights as a powerful instrument for directing public attention to political and economic inequalities.[6] Yet, by drawing attention to how human rights infuse the relations between variables she was also revealing that in these relations, as in any relation, there was tension—in this case, between two logics of political and technical intervention: financial capitalism and humanitarian ethics. On the one hand, moral sentiments and ethical concerns for the Other are intrinsic to the very idiom of human rights. These concerns are put at the center of governing regimes, particularly of those regimes designed to help the poor or the disadvantaged (Fassin 2012: 1). On the other hand, there is the logic of finance, which includes “all aspects of the management of money, or other assets . . . as a means of raising capital” (Maurer 2012: 185). This logic extends well beyond the limits of financial markets into all sorts of economic relations organized around credit, debt, and revenue.

And yet, the tension between these two logics is not necessarily a mis- match between two incompatible philosophies of value. For Sofia, it was more like a puzzle that challenged her and her colleagues to arrange their numbers appropriately, calculate them ethically, and organize them harmoniously. These are two different flows of ideas and preoccupations that coexist inseparably. Sofia’s job consists of giving the tension arising from their coexistence the right intensity so that their prices can stand an ethicality test, an assessment of how they will affect the lives of others.

These tensions between different logics of technical intervention shape the relations between the variables in the pricing formula regulators use. The variables allow for intertwining those logics but also for creating separations between them. Thus, as I will show, the humanitarian implications of financial theories do not have to be analyzed externally only, as when we go to the “real world” to document the effects the usage of those formulas have. We can also trace some of the implications of those logics inside the formula, through the relations between variables, just as regulators do. Such evaluations constitute a processual point of reference against which regulators redefine the limits of appropriate (technical) action (Faubion 2010). The worksheets, mathematical models, and legal resolutions people use when they calculate their variables are, on the one hand, means to reveal the humanitarian standing of water and, on the other, instruments to sharpen their own ethical awareness of the decisions they make (Keane 2010: 72). Worksheets, models, and legal resolutions connect the intimacy of one’s ethical evaluation of everyday work to larger political and economic contexts.

[3] Since then, ARESEP has moved its headquarters further west in San José, the area where most commercial developments were happening at the time. The building it now occupies is shielded by glass, its lobby is all white and open, and next to it are the offices of a private bank.

[4] AyA, a public utility owned by the Costa Rican state, provides water access to close to 60 percent of the country’s population. The rest of the country is sup- plied by ASADAS (community aqueducts) under the legal supervision of AyA, or by municipalities.

[5] After a reorganization of ARESEP, WED was transformed into the Intendencia de Aguas. Since the fieldwork for this chapter was conducted while wed was still in existence, I refer to the team with that acronym.

[6] On framing as a device for ontological multiplication rather than reduction, see Hetherington (2014).

Bhargabi Das is a PhD Candidate of Anthropology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. She is working on riverine ecologies (chars) and the state in Assam, India. Her research is funded by the Irish Research Council and Irish Higher Education Authority. She tweets at @nagging_citizen.

Andrea Ballestero is a faculty member in the Anthropology Department at the University of Southern California. Her work looks at the unexpected ethical and technical entanglements through which experts understand water in Latin America.

Commissioned by Rishav Thakur and Antara Chakrabarti and produced with editorial assistance from Tara Giangrande.