Climate–water crises: critically engaging relational, spatial, and temporal dimensions

Declarations of water crises have been ubiquitous in water policy and practice for decades. In the face of unprecedented human-caused climate change, the circulation of water crisis discourses has increased in frequency. How crises are defined and made meaningful, however, is often assumed to be commonly agreed upon. Reviewing scholarship at the intersections of water and climate, we show that crisis discourses are inherently political because they depend both on the authority and legitimacy to delineate exceptions from norms, and on the powers to mobilize resources to respond to constructions of crisis. Engaging with crisis as an explicitly normative concept helps situate analyses within the social, historical, political, and geographic particularities of water–climate systems. We identify three interrelated analytical frames that assist with this task: relationality, spatiality, and temporality. Our review hopes to better position researchers, policy makers, and activists to critically engage with crisis narratives. Doing so can effectively advance more critical, creative, and imaginative crisis responses.