Moral Economies for Water: Leveraging Social Infrastructure to Strengthen Household Water Security

Household water insecurity is intensifying worldwide as climate change, political instability, and aging infrastructure strain existing our water systems. While engineering and governance solutions are vital, people also depend on something less visible but equally critical: social infrastructure. From sharing water with neighbors and relatives during shortages or contamination, to pooling resources to build off-the-grid alternative supply systems, recent scholarship demonstrates the myriad ways that communities mobilize informal strategies and networks to cope with inadequate and unreliable water.

This talk introduces the Moral Economies Framework, developed to explain how such social infrastructures emerge, operate, and sometimes break down. Drawing on a cross-cultural study of moral economies for water across seven global sites, I demonstrate the social, ecological, and political conditions under which moral economies strengthen household water security—and when they instead can deepen vulnerability. By tracing both the promise and pitfalls of these hidden social systems, I consider how moral economies can complement formal utilities in advancing the Human Right to Water and achieving Sustainable Development Goal 6 in an era of political, economic, and climatic uncertainty.

Biography

Melissa Beresford is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at San José State University. She is an ecological and economic anthropologist whose research investigates how people adapt to water insecurity. Her current NSF CAREER–funded project develops the Moral Economies Framework to understand when informal social infrastructures strengthen household water security—and when they fail. Her work bridges anthropology, sustainability science, and policy, offering insights into how communities build informal systems for adaptation and resilience and how these systems can complement formal pathways to help achieve Sustainable Development Goal 6 and advance the Human Right to Water. She also a research methodologist and conducts research to advance social science research methods and research methods training. She is the Vice Chair of the global Water Insecurity Community of Practice (WISE-CP, formerly HWISE-RCN), a Co-Director of the NSF Cultural Anthropology Methods Program (CAMP), and Associate Editor of the journal Field Methods.