Moral Ecologies of Water Infrastructure: How Normative Assessments and Perceptions of Justice Shape and Respond to Infrastructure Development

ABSTRACT Delta regions increasingly suffer from both biodiversity loss and the effects of climate change. In response, many conservationists, ecologists, and urban designers have called for infrastructural models that restore rather than undermine natural systems. Yet, efforts to implement such pro‐environmental transformations often face pushback due to competing normative frameworks about what deltas are for and who they should serve. Drawing on recent developments in the anthropology of infrastructure, we argue that infrastructural transformation can be complicated due to how existing infrastructural arrangements articulate with different “moral ecologies,” or sets of moral ideas regarding how and for whom to organize relationships between human and nonhuman actors and environments. While the concept of “moral economy” has previously been used to examine normative claims in environmental disputes, it falls short in addressing infrastructural contexts where economic, ecological, and moral logics intersect. We propose moral ecology as a complementary analytical framework that better captures how just relations are understood among particular sets of actors. Moral ecologies, we argue, entail three elements: (1) commonly held understandings of appropriate human–nonhuman relations; (2) forms of participation in environmental processes influenced by those understandings; and (3) mechanisms by which pressure can be applied to those who violate them. Through a review of emerging literature in archaeology, environmental anthropology, and human geography, we outline the conceptual foundations of moral ecologies and illustrate their relevance for understanding infrastructural inertia, contestation, and how change can be better strategized in deltaic regions. We conclude that while the framework offers powerful tools for analyzing normative conflict in hydrosocial systems, further work is needed to theorize how change occurs within and between moral ecologies, as well as how they interrelate. This article is categorized under: Human Water > Water as Imagined and Represented Human Water > Value of Water Human Water > Methods