A further obstacle is the relative obscurity of the institution established in 2008 to manage the cross-jurisdictional waterway ‘sustainably’: the Murray–Darling Basin Authority. In 2017, a compliance review described the Authority as ‘a closed culture’, which concealed much of its data. Then, through much of 2018, the South Australian government unsuccessfully attempted to compel Authority staff to give evidence to its Murray–Darling Basin Royal Commission. While federal ministers, such as Anne Ruston, could be found professing to the press that ‘we haven’t got anything to hide’, their government was launching legal challenges to ensure Authority staff remained cloistered. When the South Australian Royal Commission released its report in January 2019, its findings regarding the ‘gross maladministration’ of the basin were accompanied by numerous (unheeded) recommendations for the inner numerical workings of the Authority to be revealed.

In A Future History of Water, anthropologist Andrea Ballestero provides a compelling case for spending time with water’s bureaucracies and, more to the point, with their employees and consultants. Ballestero has spent years doing exactly this in Costa Rica and Brazil, examining how the human right to water, recognised by the United Nations in July 2010, has been codified into various formulae, indices, lists, and pacts. These ‘devices’, Ballestero argues, are both ‘good things to think with’ and ‘good thoughts to act with’, each one encoded with whole philosophies and norms regarding what counts as human. The author marvels at the ‘wondrous capacities’ of these devices, which ‘translate virtues and values into the dry normality of technocracy’, though their wonder is not necessarily pleasurable. The feeling can be more like vertigo, as we glimpse the immense power that ‘seemingly minor technopolitical decisions’ can have on how the human right of drinking water is delivered to some and not others.

Beyond this, Ballestero also insists we consider how the professionals enrolled in water governance implicitly govern the future, ‘act[ing] to set up structures and obligations for the yet-to-come’ through reworked numerical benchmarks and spreadsheets. This is, again, not simply a positive argument. While more interested in those who ‘work to differentiate the world that already is from the world that should be’, Ballestero is also alert to how water’s uncertainties can be manipulated to relieve pressing obligations to justice rather than to create them. In the third chapter, we learn about how the Costa Rican Libertarian party, Movimiento Libertario, weaponised postmodern reasoning to defer decisions regarding which forms of water should be legally protected, conjuring numerous worlds in which human rights to ice cubes and clouds became a burden on the state. Taking a moment, Ballestero reflects on the parallels between this strategy and critical humanities scholarship, where the questioning of categories as connivances of power is also rewarded.

  Aerial view of the Murray–Darling Basin near Menindee, May 2009 (photograph by Tim J Keegan/Wikimedia Commons)

Jerome Whitington’s Anthropogenic Rivers takes a complementary view of the ‘production of uncertainty’ around water governance. Based on anthropological fieldwork in Laos between 2001 and 2010, Whitington’s book analyses a period of unprecedented hydropower development during which the country effectively doubled its major dams. The book is daunting in its complexity, but it essentially conceptualises the administration of water from its practices, showing that such projects do not rely upon the conceit of a shared understanding of reality. There are ‘post-truth’ resonances here, as Whitington details situations in which ‘no one has invested in the knowledge infrastructure and labor necessary for making facts’, demonstrating how a given project ‘bends the social world around its aspirations and requirements’. The implicit point to the reader is that, whether in Laos or the Murray–Darling Basin, uncertainties are not scandalous to those in charge of water governance. Rather, Whitington argues, river systems present a field of ‘open-ended experimentation’ in which engineers and developers seek to capture their potential through new numerical arrangements.

Since we are forbidden much insight into the Murray–Darling Basin Authority, we can at least use Ballestero’s and Whitington’s acute theorisations to adopt a fresh view of its devices and its defeats. A perusal of federal and state government statements about the basin over the last decade reveals an occult numbers game, one curiously detached from dollars. The current federal Minister for Water Resources is intent on ‘delivering the basin plan in full and on time’, pursuing infrastructural options two to three times more expensive than repurchasing water licences to do so. Rather than finances, the political focus has fallen on a set of devices such as the Water Recovery Target, meaning the 2,750 gigalitres of water that, according to the Authority’s plan, need to be acquired back for the basin from its users by 2026. Famously, as the Authority’s former director of environmental water planning recently stated, this number stemmed from state and federal politicians’ decrees that, despite the scientific evidence, the target needed to begin with a two (not a four).

Following Ballestero, such a device places an obligation on the yet-to-be, pressing upon various institutions to make a certain future through present action. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, different administrations have since set about experimenting with other devices to spare irrigators from that obligation. This began before the plan was even finalised, with the magical thinking of the 2011 parliamentary committee, led by Tony Windsor, which said that the target might be reached ‘without the pain’ through various engineered ‘efficiencies’. In the next seven years, the government would spend more than $4 billion on infrastructure for basin irrigators, cropping the purported water ‘savings’ as line items against the target. Since then, there has been further interstate horse-trading regarding contributing caps and targets, and an ‘adjustment mechanism’ that ostensibly delivers ‘equivalent’ biodiversity outcomes (but without returning water). As with other ‘savings’, the methods used to imagine this equivalency into existence are not published.

The issue is not that these devices and numbers are abstract fantasies. Examining efforts to build hydroelectric dams in Laos and to formulate water’s ‘just price’ in Costa Rica reminds us that, to be governed, water must be unmoored from its material form. As a number, water can be aggregated and redistributed to do wondrous things. The issue, as both Ballestero and Whitington show, is that we need to be able to track the paths between the material and the abstract. We need to know if the devices – curious creatures with names like Sustainable Diversion Limits and Environmentally Sustainable Level of Take – are helping to make the world as it should be. The growing scandals around the basin’s management suggest that the future of this arid continent’s most populous river system has been shaped around the needs of the politically powerful. Perhaps one day, with greater access to the Authority’s inner machinations, we might sight the defeat devices concealed within.