Measuring to manage: reconfiguring people-water relations through water measurement standards and technologies in New Zealand

Abstract

This paper presents a water management case study from New Zealand’s South Island region of Canterbury. It examines how the introduction of standards and technologies to measure, monitor and manage the use of groundwater for agriculture has made visible new identities for farmers, not just water use. It finds that recently introduced measurement regulations have allowed farmers to confidently constitute themselves as rule followers and environmental protectors. Using a co-production analytical framework, this article illustrates how measurement standards have reconfigured the relations between people and water. Farmers subject to the new measurement practices and technologies have enrolled these technologies to contest dominant narratives and identities, such as rule breakers and resource squanderers, and deploy counter configurations in contests over resource allocation. In other words, this paper finds that standards can create new forms of political agency for the measured, not just the measurers.