Biopolitics refers to a form of politics concerned withadministering and regulating the conditions of life atan aggregated level of populations. Thisbookprovides a biopolitical perspective on water governance and its effects. It draws on the work of Foucault toexplore how notions of scarcity are used in strategies of governance and how such governancedifferentiates between different populations. Furthermore, theauthorinvestigates what such biopolitical regulation means for people’s lifestyles and the way they understand themselves and their moral responsibilities as humans, individuals and citizens. The book begins by investigating the global water agenda, with a particular emphasis on its focus on water for basic needs, and provides different examples of hydromentalities around the world. It also presents rich empirical details of one local case in South Africa. By carefully exploring the water 'stories'of water users, the book provides new perspectives on the relationship between water and power. Additionally, it offers an innovative methodological framework through which we can study the workings of governance more generally, and water governance specifically. It thereby contributes to the scholarship on water governance in relation to how water governance and technologies are part of producing subjectivities, notions of life and lifestyles and, more specifically,how the global water agenda can work so as to produce, or further entrench, distinctions between different lives and lifestyles. Ultimately, such differences between individuals and populations that are produced as an effect of water governance are assessed in relation to social sustainability.
