Expert attempts: Water, collectives, prices and the law in Costa Rica and Brazil

This ethnography restages the political deskwork occurring behind common images of the world water crisis in order to mimic the temporality of the political and technical worlds that bureaucrats, economists, lawyers, community representatives, and NGO managers live in. I follow a circuit of experts in Brazil and Costa Rica who are central to recent transformations of water as political object. I trace their efforts to link water governance with a notion of the common good that is constituted by ideals of making collective decisions, acquiring new knowledge, respecting human rights, and keeping prices outside of markets. My ethnographic focus stays close to detailed day-today practices through which these projects are enacted while situating them within globalized projects of water management.;The dissertation re-traces instances of vigilant practice that are set within "Big Power," such as the public economic regulatory agency in Costa Rica, and also at the tips of the "microphysics of power," such as a community meeting in a small rural town where public officials have to involve the public in decisions about water in Brazil. These projects are intended as experiments with courses of action that destabilize the assumed all-encompassing power of liberalism and the market as abstract forces. My colleagues in Costa Rica and Brazil go beyond these abstractions -- to tweak them -- without committing to 'radical' political interventions. I explore the ethics of these commitments and the logics of the techno-legal instruments through which they are enacted in order to imagine possibilities for democratic re-invention that lie in the in-between spaces of everyday political practices.;I argue that anthropological engagements with the "inner" logics of these instruments push critique towards innovative places while impeding the excessive reliance on context as a marker of difference that characterizes much contemporary anthropological work. The dissertation performs a type of critique that does not rest comfortably on ethical presuppositions about categories such as the "State, Technology and the Law" as placeholders. Instead it is an exercise on inhabiting the temporality within which decisions are made and the types of critique that are possible in the slow duration of political processes.