Governmentality and the conduct of water: China's South–North Water Transfer Project

Abstract

Governmentality is a way of thinking about dispersed practices of governing, including attempts to render space governable. China's South–North Water Transfer (SNWT) project, the world's largest interbasin water transfer project, is a programme of government that attempts to render the distribution of water across space more governable and administrable. This article analyses English and Chinese academic, media and government documents through a governmentality lens. It aims to examine the SNWT project's machinery, mentality and spatiality, including its narrative, its constitution of objects and subjects in space, its multiple techniques of government, and its physical and administrative as..