A Drop in the Ocean. On Writing Histories of Water Resources Management

A Drop in the Ocean. On Writing Histories of Water Resources Management

Ertsen, M.W. (TU Delft Water Resources)
Morgan, Ruth A. (Australian National University)

Bogardi, Janos J. (editor)
Gupta, Joyeeta (editor)
Nandalal, K. D. Wasantha (editor)
Salamé, Léna (editor)
van Nooijen, Ronald R.P. (editor)
Kumar, Navneet (editor)
Tingsanchali, Tawatchai (editor)
Bhaduri, Anik (editor)
Kolechkina, Alla G. (editor)

2021

This text builds on the shared focus of historians and engineers to understand how particular circumstances came to be. In their endeavours, engineers regularly turn attention to the past, many times with the explicit aim to build on the past. In this chapter, it is discussed why these water histories written by engineers are vulnerable to being less correct. Using a range of scholarship on water history and shared experiences within the International Water History Association, we discuss the core of any historical scholarship: a drive to demonstrate and understand the complexity of the past. As such, this chapter wants to warn against the engineering drive to use (water) history as a guide towards the future. Instead, we propose a perspective of history as a way of reading and understanding the complex paths we have travelled until now.

Historiography
Grand narratives
Deserts
Colonial irrigation
Climate change

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:512318dd-97cd-44e4-9b22-da31f73ba2df

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60147-8_4

Springer, Cham

2021-12-13

9783030601454

Handbook of Water Resources Management: Discourses, Concepts and Examples

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Institutional Repository

book chapter

© 2021 M.W. Ertsen, Ruth A. Morgan