A Look Below the Surface

Reading: Ken Conca, Governing Water, chapters 1-5.

[My apologies for my late post.]

Some matters are so complex, that I find it extremely fruitful to peel back the layers and expose its core. And from here surfaces the pivotal, central, fundamental issue(s). Sometimes this compounds the original complexity, because the original matter was just one of many limbs sprouting from the same root. But nevertheless, I then see at last (though sometimes barely) a simplicity ruling the complexity, a unity ordering the diversity.

I spent a lot of time in the first chapter. I read like a turtle walks, and Ken Conca was charting a course with so many twists and turns that I feared getting lost, or least missing the sights. Conca begins by examining “controversies that swirl around water issues” (p. 3). “Attempts… to govern water globally… seem doomed to founder on more fundamentally contested questions” (p. 4). In other words, the real/root issue of the water crisis is not water. The nature of these “contested questions” is much more fundamental.

During the seminar I posed the question, What values ought to frame water’s place and use in the world? Graham then added, How do we choose these values? or, How do we value our values? We are familiar with certain ‘metanorms’ (meta meaning ‘higher order’), or rules about rules. Consider science, for example. Before I ask “What is gravity?” I must first answer “What is science, and how is it done?” Or consider history. Before I ask “Who was Pontius Pilate?” I must first answer “What is history, and how is it done?”

So it is with water. Before we ask “What is water, who’s is it, and for what?” we must first answer “What is the world? Who am I / are we? How am I to live?” Whether we think about these questions or not, our values and behaviour whisper our answer. Conca (p. 40, emphasis mine) pinpoints the presumptions of three critical characteristics of regimes, which reveal a certain way of looking at the world and living together in it:

"Extending the popular metaphor of regimes as rules of the game, Basel and Montreal share strong presumptions about the territorial boundaries of play, about standing and hierarchy among states and lesser players, and about the path to victory through science and bureaucracy."

But many disagree (hence the contention), Nature being one of them (hence the failure). To me it’s remarkable that this global problem surfaces and pivots on questions so basic to existence. But… maybe I got it all wrong.

So I suppose the question is, How ought we perceive the world, ourselves, our purpose?