Abstract
Thirst is not just another book on water, but presents Filippo Menga's comprehensive analysis and critical insights into the socio-political construction of, and dominant responses to, the so-called ‘global water crisis’. The book contributes and applies an analytical framework that has elaborated the concepts of care, sacrifice and redemption to examine contemporary philanthrocapitalism and its contradictions, with detailed case studies of leading water charities and bottled water companies.
Being thirst(y)
Thirst starts with ‘Taps’, a 2018 Super Bowl commercial produced by a global charity Water.org, in partnership with a famous beer brewer. Featured a Hollywood superstar, ‘Taps’ delivered concerns on the uneven-and-still-limited access to tap water affecting millions of populations across the world, yet it invited the audience to buy a beer glass so the brewer can help solve the water problem. The book opens questions on the voicing – or, branding – out of the ‘global water crisis’ in a highly influential commercial, and the roles of and interactions between water charity, celebrity, and a big corporation in co-producing ‘Taps’. In the author's words, Thirst is ‘to raise questions about the neoliberalised, pseudo-religious, technocratic solutionism deployed to “fix” the water crisis – a solutionism that re-entrenches the very inequalities, exploitation, and developmentalism it promises to overcome’.
Chapter 2 probes into the making of the water crisis towards a global issue and how a variety of actors attempted to shape the dominant understanding of and ways to manage such a crisis. Chapters 3 traces the emergence of global water charities and reveals the political economy of care that has emerged from North–South relations and World Bank led privatisation of water yet reproducing exploitative relations of inequalities and environmental problems. Subsequently, Chapter 4 examines how celebrities together with water charities mobilise individual people to participate in global water governance through the commodification of compassion. Such campaigns, however, often result in consolidating the power even wealth of particular social elites, uncovering the politics of giving that also commodifying water. Moving to big companies, Chapter 5 illustrates how water is sometimes justified as an economic good rather than a human right. Certain companies profit massively from bottled water business, while facing pressing issues such as plastic pollution. Thus, they seek social redemption – instead of being responsible or ethical – but usually result in reinforcing capitalist reproduction. Titled ‘(t)here is no Such a Thing as a Global Water Crisis’, the concluding chapter reflects on the neolibralisation of the water crisis that has created hegemonic narratives (Trottier, 2008) and socio-cultural normalisation of a particular form of human relationship to water. The author urges for a reconsideration from care and feeling guilty to broader human–environment relationship that allows the search for alternative ways, to cultivate a response-ability through deterritorialising ourselves, reconnecting ourselves and our societies to water.
Water crisis as assemblage
Thirst has probed into the ontology of the water crisis. While the book does not explicitly draw on assemblage theory, the sense of assembling starts with the ‘water network’ and ‘complex set of relations’ underpinning the framing of the global water crisis (and the predominant ways to address it) that interconnects, over time, a wide range of players (e.g. water charities, celebrities and individuals who donated for water-saving activities) and events (e.g. water congress and water-saving campaign). Indeed the author has followed assemblage thinking and in an article revealed the ways in which global water charities deterritorialise and commodify water, thus reterritorialising water into commercial and financial loops, often behind public debates and engagements (Menga et al., 2023).
Thirst has revealed the becoming-being of the water crisis beyond a given idea, opening space to illustrate the ways in which a variety of member-actors, with shared visions, join (or leave) the water crisis as assemblage. In other words, an assemblage called the water crisis exists in social reality and operates to serve the interests of its member actors. These member-actors co-function towards some common goals, especially the globalisation of the water crisis as defined, and generalised application of their preferred technocratic solutions to address water problems in local places. The water crisis as assemblage thus territorialises (which is different from the [de]territorialisation of water; but of the water crisis as assemblage), stabilising its actor-membership and boundaries. Next, I revisit the contradictions of the water crisis as assemblage.
The water crisis as assemblage has emerged from a techno-political process, featuring intensified water scarcity concerns in the late 20th century and continuous escalation of water security issues against growing demand and increasing pollution. Joint efforts by influential hydrologists, governments, corporations, and a wide range of international organisations have globalised such a crisis from normalising and legitimatising its meaning and content to how we may fix it. The key actors organise and present at such events as the World Water Forum that their common goals and visions are shared via well-tailored speeches and narratives, delivering a ‘decontextualised sense of urgency (but) without providing specific or concrete measures for doing so’. The water crisis's primary contradiction is obvious: although ‘crisis’ and urgency both signal a temporality, the ‘global water crisis’ as widely known is ‘fairly ordinary and manageable’. It reflects a particular but dominant view of water (broadly speaking, the environment), deeply embedded in the capitalist logic of demand/consumption, and binary thinking of having water or not. Fundamentally, it is the spectacularisation of human-water relations, a process and product of the selective capitalist system that hold together of the water crisis as assemblage through the relations of exteriority between its member-actors.
The water crisis assemblage operates to exercise material and expressive power beyond representation, producing effects through the co-functioning of its heterogenous member-actors. They produce and proliferate water-centred policies, and channel funding for social movements and initiatives. One outcome is new forms of entities dealing with the water crisis. Global water charities emerged from philanthropic initiatives to improve water accessibility, representing divergent actor interests. They collaborate with celebrities to forge charitable campaigns as their responses to the water crisis, online and on the ground. Many people are enrolled in the water crisis and become connected with others living afar through the goodwill of giving but signalling a modern fetish, simplified the complex relations between donations and the water crisis. Such philanthrocapitalist processes reproduce the meaning and practice of care and sacrifice, so is the political economy, which reflects a contradiction of rescaling from globalised/collective narratives to localised needs and individual actions across place.
Nonetheless influential actors are also reproduced in the water crisis. Water charities Water.org and WaterAid differentiated from the origins that the former initially promoted individual initiative, the latter was founded and driven by industrial interests. Over time, they have both been neoliberalising water governance following capitalist logics and politically powerful given strong connections with (inter)governmental agencies, policy makers, private investors and donor organisations. Notably, these water charities, water companies, and specific places are themselves assemblages too thus their relationship to the water crisis features an ‘assemblage of assemblages’ in DeLanda's (2016) words. Specific actors as smaller assemblages are enrolled and operate towards common goals of its member-actors, and together contribute to the maintenance and operation of a larger assemblage called the water crisis, beyond taking the latter simply as ‘context’ (McFarlane, 2011).
Assemblages usually have counter-assemblages that hold different even contrasting goals and visions. Leading water companies are active member-actors of the water crisis assemblage that through sustainability initiatives they conduct social redemption, without necessarily ‘sacrificing’ controversial profitmaking business. Thirst has examined the conflicts between Nestlé Waters and local communities due to the former's bottled water business. It raises the third contradiction, between water as a commons and bottled water as a private business, resulting from the interactions between the water crisis as assemblage and place-assemblages. One example is the assemblage of Osceola, a township in Michigan. To meet market demand elsewhere of bottled water, in 2016, Nestlé Waters requested to increase the volume of water pumping in Osceola. However, local residents protested and rejected this request, partly as they observed a decline of water flow in nearby river, yet then Nestlé Waters sued the township, and triggered different legal views on the relationship between a public service and the bottled water, and whether water is a resource, or capitalist commodity. Consequently, local conditions and people of Osceola have challenged Nestlé's twisted claim that bottled water ‘was an “essential public service” that met a broader demand’. Osceola thus has acted as a counter-assemblage against the water crisis in the broad sense, while the operation of the water crisis has also been reshaping such local places as Osceola.
Concluding remarks
Thirst has exceptionally rich content and insightful viewpoints. Following assemblage thinking, at least three key contradictions of the water crisis are elaborated: between urgency and ordinary, between global/collective needs and local/individual actions, and between different ways of placing and understanding water-in-society – at least not just following capitalist logics. Overall, Filippo Menga has written an accessible book and thus his urge for a reconsideration of human–environment relationship can make better sense to wider audience.
Thirst guides us with great potential of further research. In relation to assemblage theory, two directions cannot be missed. The first is on the non-humans. Both Osceola's water flow issue and the bottled water business's overwhelming use of plastic clearly have flagged the unsustainable sustainability dynamics of current water-saving schemes in terms of the material cost and its sociotechnical controversies, so are materiality issues of the water crisis as assemblage. The second is on the role of nation-states, particularly how state actors such as governments and state-owned enterprises contribute to addressing the water crisis in their preferred ways. For example, not only there is an assemblage called the China Water Machine managing water in the country, but this assemblage operates to remake places at home and beyond defined territories (Han and Webber, 2020; Webber and Han, 2017). The massive South–North Water Transfer Project, for example, was justified as a solution to water scarcity and water insecurity in north China but through flows of people, water, money, and ideas reproduce hydrosocial and hydropolitical relations at multiple scales (Rogers and Wang, 2020). A very timely concern here goes to the Himalayas that in 2025, China announced to build the world's largest dam on the Yarlung Zangbu River, partly as ‘key to adapting to climate change’ (Jia, 2025). In response, India has strategically accelerated the preparation for building a counter dam in the downstream, called the Upper Siang Multipurpose Project – although the Indian authority expects to use it to mitigate potential water crises resulting from the operation of China's new dam, the Upper Siang Project has already triggered local protests and fears (Singh and Das, 2025). Ultimately, the water crisis, or crises relating to water, has continuously been reproducing human behaviour, and been reframed and acted on following multiple logics that will not likely lead to an improved sustainable future.
