Unruly Groundwater: Corporate Capture, Epistemic Resistance and Possibilities for Alternative Governability

• In Event: Common Challenges in Nature: Australia and Latin American Commons, Ecology and Governability

Abstract

Atacameño-Likanantay communities and Chile’s State Defence Council (CDE) recently sued three mining companies for having harmed an aquifer and its related surface ecology in ways that were ‘continuous, cumulative, permanent and irreparable’ (CDE 2021). The scientific reports appended to the unfinished court case, over twenty years of mining company reporting, and attendant regulatory science have held stable the myriad uncertainties of the aquifer in the interests of extractivism. Companies continue to claim that their extraction from the aquifer of millions of cubic litres of groundwater over this time is legal and ‘sustainable’. Instead, analysis of groundwater modelling from scientific, company and regulatory sources demonstrates how groundwater is epistemically resistant to the certainty of governance models; an unruly object that refuses certainty in both present and future terms. This paper examines the limits of current water governance models and practice as well as movements that indicate the potential of Indigenous-led science.

Author

• Sally Babidge, The University of Queensland