LAUSR

In this brief response, we wish to engage with some of the comments made by Leandro del Moral, Julia Martínez and Nuria Hernández-Mora in a spirit of nurturing further critical dialogue and progressive political strategies. While we do not necessarily disagree fundamentally with some of the objections they raised in their paper, we nonetheless think it is important to situate the argument in a wider context. First, and as illustrated in Liquid Power (Swyngedouw, 2015), our work attempts to articulate Spanish hydro-social dynamics with wider socio-political transformations to try to tease out processes of socio-environmental change on the one hand and to foreground the role and place of the non-human, in this case water, in fostering progressive political and social visions and strategies on the other. Second, it is an undisputed fact that the 2004 AGUA programme nurtured the upgrading of and construction of new desalination facilities along the Mediterranean coast with a planned volume equivalent to the planned Ebro transfer that was suspended by the socialist Zapatero government. We insist that the possibility of such a desalination plan crucially depended on the formation of a set of implicit and occasionally explicit alliances, what Lopez-Gunn (2009) calls a “network of interests”, between a range of often very different actors and interests, around this sociotechnical edifice. In fact, we pursued a reasoning similar to the one deployed to account for the strategic consensus that was forged earlier in the twentieth century around largescale terrestrial hydro-infrastructure. Our mission is really to demonstrate how the emergence and partial implementation of new socio-technical systems (like desalination) are predicated upon the rise of new social relations, new scientific insights and discourses, and new social and political movements that gel around particular sociotechnical systems under a hegemonizing neoliberal regime. The realization of such a new vision, however incomplete and limited, requires the fusion of all manner of power relations and social positions. It is what Gramsci would call the construction of hegemony, something that entails the partial alignment of discursive, cultural, political and economic forces (Ekers, Hart, Kipfer, & Loftus, 2012). This is what we mean by “consensus”. Of course, such consensus is never total or complete, and we do insist on how such consensus is always partial, precarious, and subject to contestation and possible disintegration. In fact, this is precisely how we understand modernity, namely as a process of continuously