Ethnic diversity, scarcity and drinking water: a provocation to rethink provisioning metropolitan mains water

ABSTRACT

Urban water scarcity in south-east Australia forces us to engage with how our present centralised public utilities are embedded in our everyday lives, amidst uncertain futures. In the last decades, socio-technical approaches have illustrated how the myth of endless main water supply is made possible by cultures of engineering and plumbing. To extend debates about the cultural dimensions of environmental sustainability, this paper takes an ethnographic approach to understand the processes by which Burmese refugees and migrants who lived with water scarcity pre-migration make water potable post-migration to Australia. With a focus on mapping the material, discursive, spatial and emotional relations that enable the provisioning of potable water, the paper brings into conversation Elizabeth Shove's social practice theory with Elspeth Probyn's emplaced formulation of subjectivity. The adaptive provisioning capacities of people whose lives are immersed in cultures of water scarcity point towards a politics and relational ethics of care underpinned by provisioning and first-person contact. To conclude, these grounded Burmese examples provide an opportunity to employ scenario thinking to imagine alternative drinking water futures for south-east Australian cities.

KEYWORDS:

• Social practice theory
• cultures of urban water
• ethnography
• Burmese
• politics of care

Acknowledgements

I thank the research assistance of Louisa Welland, the cultural liaison assistants (Min and Mya), the study participants, the two anonymous referees, Chris Gibson, editor of Australian Geographer, and the staff and higher degree research students at the University of Wollongong and beyond who provided helpful feedback on earlier versions of this paper, including Lesley Head, Leah Gibbs, Heather Goodall, Natascha Klocker, Rebecca Campbell, Anath Gopal and Ryan Frazer. I am indebted to these individuals for their generosity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In 1989, the military government of the Union of Burma changed the official name to the Union of Myanmar to better reflect the ethnic diversity and sever the state from its British colonial past. The United Nations accepted the name change, although those opposed to the military government questioned the imposed changes. At the same time, many of the place names were changed from English to conform with Burmese spelling, for example Rangoon to Yangon. Mindful that the act of naming is always political, this paper reflects the participants’ use of the terms ‘Burmese’, ‘Burma’ and English place names.

Additional information

Funding

The author received financial support for the research from the Australian Research Council Discover Project ‘Sustainability and Climate Change Adaptation: Unlocking the Potential of Ethnic Diversity’ [DP140101165].