As water flows through the hydrological cycle, it connects different bodies, human and other-than-human, to one another, carrying organisms and changing constantly. As it flows, it acquires different meanings—as a solvent, a sink for waste, the source of life. It is social, technical, and political. Water is multiple. There are debates about who should own it, access it, control or regulate it, manage it, and benefit from it. As social anthropologist Veronica Strang has put it, “Nothing on earth, not even land, is more contested.”2.2.1 River management practices therefore offer a pertinent lens through which to consider models of and approaches to consensus building, as this pathway explores.

The management of water (in pipes and rivers) and the development of water infrastructure are deeply rooted in discourses of empire, economic growth, state formation, sustainability, and technological efficiency. River management as informed by different agendas in turn causes management practices to differ across various levels of governance, research, and communities, and as a result multiple meanings of water emerge. How do we collectively respond to the varying demands that water elicits? How do we build a consensus on what water means, and how we need to care for it? Our pathway provides different perspectives on these questions and is itself the result of a process of consensus building between an academic and an artist—demonstrating that knowing bodies of water is multiple in nature. We have chosen to organize the pathway along a set of key terms and concepts that relate notions of consensus building to practices of water management, with particular reference to the Kuils River in Cape Town, where we both live and work.

Equivocation

Our case study2.2.2 on the Kuils River examines how equivocation—the deliberate use of ambiguous or confusing language and terminology—impacts river management practices, and it investigates how these practices shape the well-being of people and more-than-human communities living in and with the river. The “fallacy of equivocation” seems to be at play in this case, referring here to the conflation of arguments that results in environmental management and protection being understood as one thing that all stakeholders agree with. In practice, environmental management and protection become many things, informed by local context and with epistemological and ontological orientations playing out differently at various levels of society. One of the greatest challenges is the contestation of whose knowledge really matters in the resolution of environmental issues. What is evident in the case of the Kuils and of other rivers is that, in place of consensus regarding these complexities, very often there is instead an assumed objectivity, one that applies “unified” understandings and one-size-fits-all agreements to what caring for the environment constitutes.

Ways of knowing

How does one know a river and the environment in all its complexity? What are different ways of knowing?2.2.3 Different ways of knowing and being with the Kuils River shape and are shaped by the river, which in turn can inform different river management practices, influencing environmental governance locally and across the globe. Dominant Western discourses of environmental conservation tend to portray the environment as a single unified object that exists separately from society. Consequently, a dominant set of rules and management practices are often enforced on people and multispecies communities that do not necessarily subscribe to those particular ways of being with the environment.

When building consensus on river and environmental management, it is therefore crucial to acknowledge the existence of the multiple ways in which rivers and environments are known and interacted with and how they mean different things depending on context, histories, and cultures.2.2.4 From there, this diversity of knowledge and experiences can build toward more democratic approaches to environmental management that are not dependent on decision-makers removed from the realities on the ground, but instead involve stories of multispecies relationships between human, animal, soil, and water communities.

Temporality

Focusing on time and different temporalities in relation to the Kuils River calls attention to the processes and relations that shape landscapes and flows, how human and multispecies communities settle, and how governance happens within this environment. There is not “one” version of time, since rivers are constantly making and unmaking relations through landscape interactions across multiple temporalities.2.2.5 However, global-scale governance and climate negotiations, for example, use one version of time, which is often managerialist and operates in financial years. This “time zone” typically ignores all other temporalities and ultimately presumes that humankind is dealing with a singular set of environmental relations that can be controlled.2.2.6 As historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has described,2.2.7 this results in the Anthropocene operating on two separate timescales of “Earth history” and “world history,” thus continuing the bifurcation between environment and society. It is therefore essential to build consensus around these multiple temporalities and what they mean for how governance, climate negotiations, and the treatment of the environment unfolds.

Forms of violence

Environmental literary scholar Rob Nixon explores the notion of “slow violence” in his book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor,2.2.8 the term referring to a type of violence that is not immediately visible or spectacular, and the effects of which become evident only years, decades, or centuries later. Four hundred years of colonialism in Africa has left its inhabitants with particular ways of being in the world, and those that do not align with the idea of cheap nature extracted for economic growth are often met with antagonism and exposed to different forms of violence.2.2.9 How can acknowledging and coming to consensus about different forms of violence shape and better inform responses to unjust and unequal histories of environmental changes that have resulted in the Anthropocene?2.2.10

Different versions of care

In this pathway, we also wish to acknowledge the role played by different practices of care2.2.11 in building and maintaining practices of consensus building. Attuning to the presence of multiple beings through paying attention to how we care, and how we can care differently, makes other ways of knowing possible, which in turn highlight different ways of relating. Different knowledge, skills, and histories of settling have shaped ways of relating to and caring for the river at the heart of our research. In this context, care practices arising from the fields of science and engineering have often been conflated with those of governance and control. An awareness of socio-eco-political intimacies can assist in reframing how science, engineering, and governance are done, enabling the type of shift that philosopher Bruno Latour has described as moving from dealing with “matters of fact” to addressing “matters of concern.”2.2.12

Democratic governance

To change the current system, it is essential that other ways of knowing and being in the world are recognized. As anthropologist Lesley Green and her colleagues have written, “Science needs to work with and for society.”2.2.13 Scientific approaches to environmental management, such as that of rivers, should be regularly updated and suit the context in which they operate while also adhering to international norms (such as peer review). Communities need to be involved2.2.14 in drawing up and finding consensus on what the “matters of concern” are, determining what questions are asked, and therefore what knowledge is needed to live well in their environments.2.2.15 Policy needs to be informed by lived experiences on the ground, rather than prioritize profit over well-being. What tools can be used to build bridges across intellectual, conceptual, physical, and metaphorical divides?

Finally, through our key contribution, we extend our discussion on consensus building in the Anthropocene via a filmed conversation that expands upon the questions outlined here and introduces new threads, such as the role of language and historicity, especially in the context of the global south.