Making Water Security: A Morphological Account of Nile River Development (IHE Delft PhD Thesis Series) - Softcover

Smit, Hermen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0367460041 ISBN 13: 9780367460044

Publisher: CRC Press, 2019

Synopsis

This book examines Nile water security through the morphology of the river: it uses the always changing form of the river as a theoretical and empirical device to map and understand how infrastructures and discourses dynamically interact with the Nile. By bringing a history of two centuries of dam development on the Nile in relation with the drainage of a hill slope in Ethiopia on the one hand and irrigation reform in Sudan on the other, the author shows how the scales, units and ‘populations’ figuring in projects to securitize the river emerge through the rearrangement of its water and sediments. The analysis of ‘Making water security’ is more than yet another story of how modern projects of water security have legitimized often violent dispossessions of Nile land and water. It shows how no water user is confined by the roles assigned by project engineers and planners. As ongoing modern ‘development’ of the river reduces the prospects for new large diversions of water, the targeted subjects of development and modernization make use of newly opened spaces to carve out their own projects. They creatively mobilize old irrigation and drainage infrastructures in ways that escape the universal logic of water security.

About this title

About the Author

Hermen Smit teaches Water Governance at IHE Delft Institute for Water Education. His work focuses on the making of water infrastructures to understand the politics of water engineering.

Edition details

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0367460041
• ISBN 13: 9780367460044
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 206