Kenya and Morocco are turning to desalination and wastewater reuse to solve their water shortages, and this project will track whether those "new water" sources actually help or simply entrench old inequalities. The research addresses a gap in knowledge: most studies of unconventional water focus on technology or engineering, not on how these resources reshape power, finance, and development in countries with colonial histories. Kenya and Morocco are both investing in desalination and reuse, but for different reasons—Kenya faces chronic drought, Morocco seeks to reduce dependence on rainfall. The project will combine on-the-ground case studies with analysis of the global water industry, which is aggressively marketing financialised water solutions to the Global South. If successful, the research could change how governments and funders evaluate water infrastructure projects. Instead of asking only whether a desalination plant produces enough water, they might also ask who owns it, who profits, and whether it locks a country into long-term debt or dependence on foreign technology. The project is fundamentally about the politics of infrastructure—it will not build a new pipe or pump, but it could reshape the criteria by which such systems are judged.
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This project brings together two emerging and under-researched frontiers of knowledge: 1) the 'global development turn', which calls for a movement away from traditional North/South framings and practices of international development towards a more global (though unevenly distributed) understanding of challenges; and 2) the emergence of 'new' or unconventional water, such as desalination and wastewater reuse to address chronic and worsening water challenges in the context of growing demand and climate change. The main objective of the project is to critically assess how new water resources are being used to address water challenges, and in turn, to analyse how they are shaping development opportunities. Original data will be generated through indepth research in two transitioning African countries: Kenya and Morocco, which are both for different reasons turning to unconventional water to address entrenched water-related constraints. The case study research will be complemented by analysis of the new water industry, which is growing rapidly, is global in scope and increasingly looking for opportunities to expand financialised 'solutions' into countries in the Global South. Conceptually, the project advances current debate between planetary and situated forms of knowledge and theory by addressing the tension between context-specific water challenges rooted in colonial history and global flows of finance, technology and knowledge. The project develops a multidisciplinary and mixed method approach that will advance knowledge in the fields of geography, development studies and sustainability studies. The research team will be led by me, as PI, and will include two RAs on 4-year contracts, a PhD student, along with other collaborators, mentors and advisors. The methodology is rooted in the principle that the decarbonization and decolonization of academic knowledge are inseparable moral imperatives.
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