Exploring the Role of Time in Water Governance: Contradictory Temporalities in the Planning for Urban Water Scarcity

Urban planning embrace discourses of foresight in the global transition towards a sustainable future. The proposed paper counters this narrative by foregrounding the ponderous nature of bureaucratic planning systems in the governance of urban water scarcity, illuminating situations where the pace of climate change overtakes planning’s sustainability visions. It aims to break new conceptual grounds by weaving together political sociological approaches to water management (Mollinga et al., 2008) with urban studies literature on temporalities (Besedovsky et al., 2019). Empirically, it examines the planned Lusatian Lake District in Germany, which is set to become Europe’s largest artificial lake district through the flooding of abandoned coalfields. The region’s future is imagined as one of lush lakes, where tourism is hoped to fill the economic gap created by the planned coal exit, with adjacent towns developing marinas and harbour districts. But lakes stay dry, and marinas abandoned, as the original plans from the early 2000s failed to project the overlapping consequences of mining and global warming-induced water scarcity now starkly characteristic of the region.

Water scarcity is thus introducing a whole conundrum of temporal dynamics into the planning of the Lusatian Lake District, stirring up questions about how, when and where the future should be built. Analysing documents and interviews with key actors, the paper asks: Which temporal dynamics characterise this process? What are the power relations embedded in the making of these temporalities? My line of argument unfolds across three mutually contradictory temporal dynamics that shape how water scarcity impacts planning: First, ‘sticky bureaucracies’ holding on to outdated plans, characterised by extremely slow regulation and approval processes. Second, growth-driven forecasts, which entail projections of the future that skew decision-making towards economic rationales (e.g. in planning for tourism) at environmental costs. Third, the attempts by environmental activists to ‘re-orchestrate’ these powerful temporal dynamics.