Where Water Should – And Should Not – Be
Climate change is not only about spectacular disasters. It is also about subtle shifts in the ordinary.
In conversations about climate change, water often appears as a hazard – a destructive force that overwhelms cities or washes away homes. Headlines focus on where water should not be: floodwaters in Pakistan, hurricanes in the Americas, inundated streets in Bangkok.
But what about the places where water should be – and is not? Or where water should sometimes be, but arrives too soon or too late?
Dr Jennifer Langill’s recent research offers a compelling lens to rethink these questions. Drawing on feminist political ecology, she explores how environmental change reshapes everyday expectations of water in two very different contexts: a Hmong village in northern Thailand and floodplain communities in Amazonian Peru.
Feminist political ecology challenges the idea of water as a neutral resource managed for human ends. Instead, it foregrounds power, politics and social difference – particularly gender – in shaping human–water relations.
Langill extends this approach by analysing the “three e’s”: the everyday, embodied and emotional dimensions of these relations. Her argument is that beyond the material presence or absence of water, environmental change transforms intimate expectations of water – expectations rooted in culture, history and lived experience.
In northern Thailand, Hmong farmers see their highland village as a place where water should be. Yet water scarcity has become the most pressing constraint on agrarian livelihoods. Interviewees recall childhood rivers so full they were impassable during the rainy season. Today, orange orchards wither due to insufficient water. Farmers attribute this scarcity to state-led conservation programmes that reforested former swidden fields with thirsty pine and eucalyptus trees.
What was framed as watershed protection now feels like a political act that undermines minority livelihoods. For Cheu, a farmer in his fifties, water insecurity is not just an environmental problem – it is an intergenerational trauma of state control.
Amazonian Peru tells a different story. Here, riverine communities live in tune with the annual flood pulse: months of inundation followed by months of recession. This is a place where water should sometimes be – but irregular floods are disrupting this rhythm.
Early floods can destroy crops before harvest, plunging families into debt. Late or inconsistent floods shorten fishing seasons and threaten food security. For Señora Maria, a widow managing a multigenerational household, extreme floods bring exhaustion and loss. For Lucho and Camila, young parents relying on maize cultivation, flood unpredictability traps them in cycles of borrowing and repayment.
These narratives reveal that water is never just a physical substance. It is woven into livelihoods, identities and emotions. When water fails to appear where – or when – it should, the consequences ripple through social life: from strained kinship ties in Thailand to mounting financial stress in Peru.
Langill’s work reminds us that climate change is not only about spectacular disasters. It is also about subtle shifts in the ordinary – the everyday negotiations of when and where water will flow.
Understanding these expectations matters for policy and practice. It means recognising that hydrological extremes are not the only story. The quieter disruptions – the missing rains, the mistimed floods – are equally transformative.
As global environmental change accelerates, feminist political ecology offers a vital framework to capture these lived realities. It asks us to see water not as an “uncooperative commodity”, but as part of an intimate, contested relationship – one that is being renegotiated in kitchens, orchards and riverbanks across the world.
Read more:
Langill, J. C. (2025). A Feminist Political Ecology of Where Water “Should” and “Should Not” Be: Insights from Northern Thailand and Amazonian Peru. The Professional Geographer, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/00330124.2025.2581652
Dr Jennifer Langill is a Lecturer in International Development and a feminist human geographer, working at the intersect of critical development studies and nature-society relations.