I am attending the launch of the Water Technology Advisory Europe (WTA EU) via a video conference call. On my screen, I see five ‘water ambassadors’ – Danish water professionals located in Spain, Portugal, Poland, Germany, and Italy – and an audience of actors working at Danish water technology companies. The water ambassadors have just finished explaining how they aim to support the commercial ambitions of the Danish government in their respective countries over the coming two years, and the meeting is coming to an end. As a final note, the hosts organise a networking session during which I manage to have a private conversation with Liam, the Danish water ambassador at the Royal Danish Embassy in Rome.
‘Our meetings with international water professionals work just like the news on TV’, he tells me: ‘We begin by sharing information about Danish water solutions and then gradually introduce the commercials’. I notice a subtle shift in Liam's tone. It seemed to emphasise the salience of transitioning from the sharing of information to facilitating commercials in his work. I ask him to elaborate. The information that he refers to, consists of the legal, technical, and environmental conditions for managing water in Denmark, and how specific Danish water utilities address water management challenges in practice. This sharing of information between Danish and local water professionals takes place either in Denmark, at water technology companies or water utilities during visits of international delegations of water professionals or during what Liam refers to as ‘fact-finding trips’, where the water ambassadors visit European water utilities to investigate local water solutions and challenges. ‘During these meetings’, Liam explains, ‘you see how the participants’ shoulders slowly start to drop and their faces relax as they realise that we are not yet another salesperson. We do not come with a product to sell. We come as colleagues offering new ideas, concepts, and collaborations’. This is the moment where, according to Liam, the ‘commercials’ enter the picture: ‘Finally, we have Danish water companies join the conversation, but we don't want them to talk about their products alone. We want them to speak into a larger Danish narrative. We encourage them to explain how they have helped specific Danish water utilities achieve their results, so that they can become part of a shared story. Like this, we build a trustworthy and collective narrative about Danish excellence within water management – and this story sells’. Liam refers to this as a ‘soft sell approach’. ‘The sharing of good and bad experiences between colleagues’, he goes on, ‘makes both parties lower their guards so that we can generate genuine interest for how Danish solutions can help improve other water sectors. . . . But believe me, we might reach out as a colleague and not as a salesperson, but at the end of the day this is all about hardcore selling – in disguise’.
I was intrigued. What does this ‘disguise’ entail? How does the ‘hardcore selling’ wrapped up in soft national narratives that Liam refers to peculiarly intertwine with transnational relation building and the development of smarter water management solutions in Denmark? As new water technologies increasingly pose potential solutions to commercial and climatic challenges within water management in the eyes of Danish water professionals, this article turns to the kinds of relations that are stored in – and storied through – digital water technologies. Its primary attention resides not on digital water technologies per se, nor solely on the digitalisation of water management understood as the processes through which water becomes quantified and converted into binary digital data. It dwells also, and primarily, on how these material forms and processes engender reconfigurations of what the introduction to this special issue calls ‘digital sociality’ (Bratrud and Waltorp, this issue). In other words, this article slightly decentres its focus from digital water technologies to foreground the emergence of the novel relations, collaborations, strategies, and practices that are set in motion by the digitalisation of water management in Denmark.
Specifically, I explore how digitalisation helps sustain a Danish narrative of environmental stewardship and Danish exceptionalism within water management. I argue that this narrative is centred around the creation of new speculations, innovations, and ways of conceiving water management in Denmark not only as a public service, but also as an asset to sustain the financial future of the Danish welfare state. I show how digital water solutions become scalable and commodified through storytelling, paving the way for new transnational exchanges and relations across water professionals. These reconfigured forms of sociality are enabled by digitalisation and reflect shifting and blurring boundaries between water management as a public service and/or private endeavour, and between practices of diplomacy and commodification in Denmark. Exploring these processes as forms of ‘Water Diplomacy’ – the art of crafting and managing water narratives and relations transnationally for export purposes – allows me to engage ethnographically with how Danish waterscapes are impacted by the digitalisation of water management in practice.
I begin by presenting my methodology and contribution. Hereafter, I offer a critical ethnographic analysis of the social life and politics of Danish water management. I do so by framing it through the entwined narratives of crisis and exceptionalism, and the promises of green transition, digitalisation, and scalability that currently flourish in the Danish water sector. Then, I discuss how specific narratives are strategically crafted by Danish authorities in concert with private and public actors, and how they take material form for commercial purposes. Finally, I provide an ethnographic account of how the logics of scale and scalability that are embedded in these narratives emerge and gain currency through the everyday work of the Danish water ambassadors.
Approaching Water Diplomacy as a Scalar Device
This article draws on twelve months of intermittent ethnographic fieldwork between January 2022 and September 2023. It is the result of detailed ethnographic fieldnotes from participant observation among water professionals in Denmark and Italy, during diplomatic trips, at conferences, and in their daily work at water utility companies, along with countless semi-structured interviews and casual conversations. These actors include water utility employees, water and IT engineers, technology and service providers, and the water ambassadors, whose identity is pseudonymised through the composite figure of Liam, the Danish water ambassador in Italy.
In a sense, this is a multi-sited analysis (Marcus 1995), as it looks at the connections between Danish and Italian waterscapes through the lens of storytelling. Notably, the Danish water sector is not a particularly geographically bounded ethnographic field (Candea 2007). It expands beyond the national borders of Denmark in multiple ways through watery, professional, commercial, and diplomatic relations. For this article, I have focused on the Danish water sector's relation to Italy. Italy suffers from ageing infrastructure and heavy water loss, by up to 40 per cent, from its public piping system. Furthermore, it is estimated that Italy will be one of the European countries to invest most heavily in renovating its water infrastructure in the coming years, making it a new potential emerging ‘market’ for Danish water technologies (The Danish Government 2021: 19). My fieldwork has brought me back and forth between Denmark and Italy as I followed Liam's efforts in making new connections between Danish and Italian water professionals. Through these iterations, I compose what I perceive as a single ethnographic site – the Danish water sector – populated by transnational narratives, articulations, strategies, and diplomatic and commercial relations that are made possible by digitalisation and aimed at scaling the market for Danish water technologies. I refer to this scaling practice as ‘Water Diplomacy’.
The concept of Water Diplomacy has been increasingly present in academic and policy circles since the early 2010s. It builds on an understanding of water as a vital and diminishing resource (Grech-Madin et al. 2018: 101) that is increasingly disputed and politicised. This perception of water was formally institutionalised in the 1990s when international water policies became an integrated part of the discourse around sustainable development (Bisht and Ahmed 2021: 446). While arguably lacking a clear definition, Water Diplomacy is broadly seen as a subfield of diplomacy, understood as the art of building up and managing interpersonal relations among international actors to ‘communicate and collaborate with as well as influence’ foreign governments and stakeholders (Keskinen et al. 2021: 2). It deals with political disputes and concerns around transnational watersheds at the intersection of water-related know-how and political cooperation mechanisms (2021: 5). With only a few exceptions (see Bisht and Ahmed 2021), scholarly research on Water Diplomacy stems mostly from natural and political sciences, focusing either on its potential policy and environmental implications or on the discourses around it.
With this article, I offer a contribution and expansion of the concept of Water Diplomacy. Firstly, I explore Water Diplomacy through the changing political, social, and material arrangements that undergird its emergence in Denmark. By doing so, I am inspired by a legacy of anthropological scholarship that acknowledges how practices of knowing and managing water – as well as the infrastructure that sustains them – are both deep, complex, and extend far into the diverse realms of the social (Anand 2017; Andersen 2018; Hastrup and Hastrup 2015; Orlove and Caton 2010; Strang 2004).
Secondly, I approach Water Diplomacy ethnographically as the water ambassadors’ work to make Danish water narratives transnationally scalable. Within anthropology, scale has traditionally been connected to multi-sited ethnographic studies of large-scale enterprises and global(ised) phenomena. As laid out by George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer (1986), a challenge for multi-sited ethnography is to find a way to embed richly described local cultural worlds in larger impersonal systems of political economy (Marcus and Fischer 1986: 77). Here, an ethnographic focus on scale points to the advantages of iterating between different levels of analysis – often categorised as micro-meso-macro (Fortun 2009) – by using empirical work at the local level to understand (and challenge?) phenomena such as capitalism and globalisation in ways that represent and voice the complexity and diversity of their local nuances (2009: 99). Accordingly, I investigate the diplomatic work of the Danish water ambassador as an inlet to study how the ongoing neoliberal trends of the present-day Danish welfare state are reflected and nurtured in emergent Danish water management practices.
Anthropologist Anna L. Tsing (2005, 2012, 2015) has written extensively and critically about the work of naturalising ideas of market expansion and capitalist pursuits of (up)scalability. She defines scalability as ‘the ability to make projects expand without changing their framing assumptions’ (Tsing 2015: 38) – without rethinking their basic elements. Encouraging anthropology to look at ‘the [nonscalable] work it takes to create scalability – and the messes it makes’ (2015: 38), Tsing argues that scaling is anything but neutral. Scales are ‘claimed and contested in cultural and political projects’ (Tsing 2005: 58). Therefore, an ethnographic sensibility to scaling becomes a way to study and understand power differences and distribution in global capitalist societies. Building on these approaches to scaling, STS scholar David Ribes (2014) has devised what he refers to as an ‘ethnography of scaling’. Ribes suggests that a ‘sustained application of an ethnographic sensibility that takes scaling as its object of investigation’ (2014: 159) can be achieved by focusing on the practical activities, techniques, and tools adopted by actors for knowing and managing large-scale enterprises. He refers to these as ‘scalar devices’ (Ribes 2014: 158).
Having positioned myself thus, I continue by situating this study geographically and historically in the Danish water sector, before engaging ethnographically with two materialisations of Water Diplomacy – or ‘scalar devices’ – namely the Danish Export Strategy for Water (The Danish Government 2021) and the work of the Danish water ambassadors.
The Danish Water Sector
The Danish water sector consists of about 300 private companies, public water and wastewater utilities, consultants, interest organisations, cluster organisations, universities, innovation centres, and approximately 2,600 waterworks and 700 wastewater treatment plants. With drinking water losses averaging well below the global and European average, and energy neutrality being a major focus for more than twenty years, Denmark is often referred to as a global frontrunner within water technology development. According to a broad range of Danish water professionals, this position has its roots in a range of initiatives that were taken by Danish water utilities to comply with the environmental and economic regulations that were introduced in Denmark during the 1980s and 1990s. An often-mentioned example is the Water Tax Act (1993) (lov om afgift af ledningsført vand) with which Denmark became the first country in the world to impose a tax on water utilities for water loss in the public drinking water network. The Water Tax Act offers an example of how policies and regulations have encouraged Danish water utilities to engage in public–private partnerships with local water technology companies to reduce Denmark's water loss to the current average of 7 per cent. The technologies that were developed through these partnerships also helped Danish water companies enter the international market with technologies that help prevent precious water from being wasted from leaky pipes around the globe.
Another reform worth emphasising is the Danish Water Sector Reform Act (vandsektorloven) (2009). Often addressed as an example of Danish New Public Management (Staunstrup et al. 2023: 14), it came out of the at the time ruling government's policy on privatisation and optimisation of public institutions, including water utilities that, until then, had been public institutions managed by the municipality. With the new Act, most Danish water utilities became quasi-private, nonprofit, stock-based companies owned by the municipality, but with a board of directors that grants them the autonomy to take independent strategic and commercial decisions. Today, Danish water and wastewater utilities are natural monopolies, which means that local households and private enterprises cannot choose their supplier freely. Therefore, to ensure high water standards and to prevent water prices from growing artificially high, the Act imposes yearly financial regulations on the utilities to create commercial conditions like those in competitive markets. These regulations are based on a so-called break-even principle, which compels Danish water utility companies to an annual net-zero income while also sustaining a 2 per cent revenue reduction from their customers’ water tariffs. This is seen as an incentive to stimulate the development of innovative solutions to optimise existing operations in terms of water and energy efficiency and, by extension, to reduce operating costs. Furthermore, Danish water utility companies are permitted, in addition to their water and wastewater activities, to sell services, residues, and energy with a certain profit, provided that these activities are closely linked to water management (DANVA 2022: 10). In practice, the Water Sector Reform Act compels Danish water utilities to invest heavily in ‘innovative development, demonstration, and export of Danish water technologies’ (Water Sector Reform Act 2009: §1, my translation) to meet its requirements and continue carrying out their primary activity, namely providing quality drinking water and wastewater management in Denmark.
These reforms can be perceived as reflecting an influx of neoliberal ideas about market governance and efficiency that has gradually trickled down the Danish welfare state since the 1990s (Pedersen 2011). Seen from this perspective, Danish water utility companies effectively blur traditional boundaries between water management as a public and private enterprise in Denmark. I will return to this point later. For now, let me simply emphasise how Danish water policies have historically paved the way for ongoing processes of privatisation and optimisation of water management in Denmark through intricate collaborations with private companies, public authorities and institutions in and beyond Denmark as a premise for their economic sustainability.
In what follows, I return to my first encounter with Liam, the Danish water ambassador, to discuss the rhetoric and material nature of Danish water politics. I attend to three strategic documents that were recently published by the Danish government concerning water export, digitalisation, and ‘global climate change’ (The Danish Government 2020, 2021, 2022), and the material implications they have on Danish water management. Through these examples, I show how the digitalisation of water management shapes particular Danish water narratives for the purpose of export. Finally, I discuss how these narratives are fabricated, sustained, and – as I argue – strategically scaled in practice by Liam through transnational encounters, moments of negotiation, interpretation, and exchange between Danish and Italian water professionals.
Selling Stories Softly: The Water Ambassadors
The conversation that opens this article originates from the launch of the Water Technology Advisory Europe (WTA EU) at the beginning of 2022. This is where I first met Liam, the Danish water ambassador in Italy. At the time, I was conducting ethnographic fieldwork for my doctoral thesis about the emergence of the ideas and practices of digitalising and exporting water management solutions that currently saturate Danish waterscapes. The WTA EU caught my attention because it seemed not only to gather key actors of the Danish water sector around new water management practices but also to direct their agency towards what was addressed at the launch as ‘new markets for Danish water solutions’ in a subtle, yet quite resolute manner. The WTA EU is a Danish outreach programme designed to promote the sharing of Danish know-how and experiences with advanced water technologies with European water professionals and authorities through the figure of the ‘water ambassador’. However, the water ambassador does not serve a purely informative or diplomatic purpose. It has a commercial function too. The WTA EU was established to contribute to the Danish government's ambition of doubling Denmark's revenue from exporting water technologies by 2030 while addressing global water-related challenges with Danish technological solutions. This goal was made public in the 2021 Export Strategy for Water (The Danish Government 2021) by the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in collaboration with the Danish Ministry of Industry, Business and Financial Affairs, and the Ministry of Environment of Denmark. The strategy outlines pathways to national economic development through the innovation, scaling, and export of Danish water technologies. One of these pathways points at storytelling as a key intervention in the effort of ‘branding Danish solutions, products, and models’ internationally (The Danish Government 2021: 28). Instead of sending actual salespersons or diplomats, the strategy predicts that the Danish water sector will benefit (and profit) more by having Danish water professionals – the water ambassadors – contribute to craft, sustain, and spread what it addresses as the ‘Danish narrative’ (The Danish Government 2021: 24, 28). This narrative is meant to unify Danish export activities within one overarching narrative that stages Danish water management solutions internationally, while speaking into local water challenges and global trends and concerns alike.
At the launch of the WTA EU, which forms part of the strategy, I was puzzled by how the initiative, it seemed to me, pulled together notions of transnational relation building, diplomacy, export, and local public services in novel ways, projecting the Danish water sector into a sort of politico-commercial international arena. The five water ambassadors that were gathered at the launch emphasised how they would contribute to enhancing the promotion of Danish water technologies in Europe by taking on a ‘local approach and matching Danish competence where it fits’. In practice, they argued, this would entail a targeted effort towards fostering new partnerships and mutual learning between European and Danish water professionals for the ultimate purpose of export. They called this a ‘soft sell’ approach. Not exactly sale nor purely diplomacy, the work of the water ambassadors consists in nurturing relations between European water utilities and Danish water technology companies with the silent ambition of, with time, carving out a market for Danish water technologies where none currently exist. This, as Liam explained, happens not by selling technologies, but by selling the Danish narrative and adapting it to other contexts, such as the Italian. Within this framework, the ambassadors’ branding of state-of-the-art Danish water solutions in terms of environmental sustainability and digitalisation plays a key strategic and rhetorical role.
Storying Export, Sustainability, and Digitalisation as Water Management
Pressed by climate change, pollution, expanding urbanisation, and ageing infrastructure, waterways and water supply systems across the globe are widely regarded to be in a state of unprecedented crisis (Cosgrove and Rijsberman 2000; Hastrup and Hastrup 2015). Although regrettably, this seems to provide the basis and incentive not only to explore ways of imagining water management otherwise: in a more equitable, efficient, and sustainable manner (Paerregaard and Andersen 2019; Strang 2021). As it permeates global waterscapes, crisis is also a crucial element of the Danish narrative as a call for action to preserve and protect the finite and valuable global water resources through digital solutions and technical ingenuity. The Export Strategy for Water opens by elucidating how the lack of clean drinking water, untreated wastewater, and the increasing threat of droughts and floods are some of the biggest challenges for global livelihoods and economies. This causes, it claims, a growing demand for ‘smart’ and sustainable water solutions (The Danish Government 2021).
In Denmark, particularly since the economic and environmental regulations of the 1980s and 1990s, digital technologies and infrastructure, such as complex monitoring and surveillance systems, have played a central role in optimising and automating many aspects of the control of water flows, pressure, and distribution. However, the notion of digital or smart water technologies has only recently entered the Danish water sector. ‘Smart’ is an idiom that is used among my interlocutors to describe the uptake and progressive integration of (ideas of) automated and predictive technologies within traditional water supply systems. These digital water technologies are based on large quantities of digital datasets from smart metering systems, satellite imaging, remote sensing technology, and AI.
Aligned with the vision of the international water milieu (Garrido-Baserba et al. 2020; IWA 2019), digital technologies and solutions are widely perceived among Danish water professionals to carry the promise of optimising global water flows and to enable informed decision-making under increasingly unruly climatic conditions based on real-time and interoperable water data (Mikkelsen et al. 2019). These solutions include but are hardly limited to the prototyping of a ‘water data space’ to share and co-produce water management data and information across diverse stakeholders and data sources (Water Valley Denmark 2024), the adoption of generative AI as a guidance tool for water infrastructure reinvestment and maintenance, and of satellite imaging to observe and predict local ground subsidence rates that threaten to disrupt underground water pipe networks (Sorensen et al. 2016). These systems are designed to ‘fix’ current challenges in water management such as leaking waters (and profits), droughts, and ageing infrastructure, while responding to climate change and staging novel avenues for Danish global export endeavours.1
The Export Strategy for Water elaborates how the Danish water sector has both an ambition and obligation to contribute to solving global climate challenges by scaling digital water solutions globally. This claim to action is sustained by asserting that Denmark holds an ideal position ‘to provide intelligent and sustainable solutions’ to the world through its ‘leading technology manufacturers, utilities, and advisers within water technology solutions’ (The Danish Government 2021: 4). These narratives go hand in hand with what the former ruling government addressed as Denmark's historically high ambitions within the green transition agenda, which encompass taking global leadership on climate action (The Danish Government 2020). The Export Strategy outlines several pathways to ‘gather, prioritise, and strengthen the expansion of Danish water solutions’ by taking ‘advantage of the possibilities in foreign markets’ (The Danish Government 2021: 4, 8). One of these avenues appears to take shape around processes of digitalisation as catalysts for export and development: ‘If Danish water companies and Denmark's efforts for better water management and a better aquatic environment are to continue to be at the forefront, Denmark must become better at utilising the new opportunities that the digital change in technology and society provides’ (The Danish Government 2021: 35). Being ‘one of the world's most digitalised countries’, so claims the then ruling Danish government (2022: 3) in a recently published National Strategy for Digitalization, Denmark holds ‘a strong position to seize the digital opportunities’ (The Danish Government 2022: 3) that might solve the current global climatic and water crises. Stressing how climate change, just like water, ‘knows no municipal or national boundaries’, the government's digital strategy is directed towards all parts of society, encouraging a concerted effort of collaborations ‘across the public sector, private sector players and research communities to create value in our digital, green efforts’ (The Danish Government 2022: 40).
Altogether, these strategies reflect a neoliberal trend of the Danish welfare state to increasingly mobilise public and private actors to compete for global market opportunities (Pedersen 2011). Within the water sector, this is accomplished by creating new speculations and conditions for the betterment and scalability of Danish water technologies, the export of which is aimed to help finance the costs of Danish welfare. Thus far, we have seen how the Export Strategy for Water portrays Danish water companies as leading players in a global market and on a quest to help other countries become more efficient and sustainable. By depicting the condition of the Danish water sector as internationally desirable, narratives of Danish exceptionalism within water management are imagined to function, through careful orchestration and diplomatic work, as a blueprint for the betterment of global water flows. As such, the strategy reveals how the Danish storying of water intersects with national politics of global climate change mitigation, market expansion, and international relations through digitalisation – and digitalisation, it seems, promises scalability (Seaver 2021). Indeed, digitalisation allows for ideas of exporting Danish water solutions across different geographical contexts to permeate Danish water narratives through the potential interconnectivity and adaptability of digital technologies for water management. In this sense, the function of the Danish water ambassador springs out of ideas of digitalisation and export within water management. Let me thus proceed by illustrating how the scaling of Danish water narratives takes place in practice through an ethnographic account of the diplomatic work of Liam, the Danish water ambassador in Italy.
Water Diplomacy in Practice
When I started working for the Danish Embassy in Rome, I began to follow the ambassador – you know, the actual Danish ambassador in Italy – in his visits around the country. During these visits, he would also invite local water professionals. That is how I gained access to water utilities with which Danish companies struggle to meet – by using the respect that Italians show for the authority represented by the ambassador. Another thing that helps, though, is the fact that I represent Denmark. Most Italians know Denmark as a country where things just work in a way that they may envy or strive for. It is easy to be a Dane and visit these utilities because in their eyes I represent something good. This helps me build up commercial relations.
At the utility company, we were greeted by a handful of local engineers who had set up a slideshow about their water management practices. The atmosphere is formal, and the engineers quickly start presenting the technicalities of the utility where they work which, I learn, is particularly advanced compared to Italian standards. Serving approximately 2.5 million inhabitants, the local utility company consists of a conglomeration of several plants with their own specific story and way of managing the local supply system, which were recently brought together under the same administration. This has brought several challenges for the utility company. Some stem from the geographical context due to the difficult access to some of the drinking water pipes located in mountainous areas in case of bursts or leakages. Other challenges relate to the nature of the serviced urban areas, which are closely inhabited and require the wastewater treatment plants to reduce odours and hydrogen sulphide (H2S) emissions. Finally, some challenges concern ecological matters. As the engineers explain, the treated wastewater from some plants is de facto the main source of water for some local rivers, meaning that processes of centralising wastewater treatment would cause them to dry up.
As he listens to the local engineers’ presentation, Liam draws parallels to exemplary solutions to similar challenges in a Danish context, such as how the Aarhus ReWater project (Aarhus Vand 2023) which adopts advanced Danish H2S sensors, and how the LEAKman collaboration (NIRAS 2021) has helped dramatically reduce water losses in Denmark to the current average of 7 per cent. Aarhus ReWater is a project through which the Danish water utility company Aarhus Vand aims at building what they claim to be the world's most resource-efficient wastewater treatment plant by 2028. According to Aarhus Vand, the new plant will help decouple the increasing amounts of treated water and waste of the growing city from its environmental footprint. The underlying philosophy entails perceiving wastewater as a resource that can be recovered and reused. The plant shall also serve as an international knowledge hub for developing new solutions so that Aarhus Vand may continue to ‘develop and capitalize’ on new ideas (Aarhus Vand 2023). These visions have gained Aarhus ReWater an international reputation as one of the ‘virtuous examples’ of Danish water management, attracting visiting delegations from all over the world as it aims to develop, utilise, and showcase some of the finest and most innovative Danish water technologies. The ‘LEAKman’ project combines, instead, an ecology of water technologies produced by different Danish companies spanning from intelligent pump control, smart pressure management and leakage detectors. Altogether, these technologies are argued to deliver a ‘unique Danish solution to stop global water loss’ (NIRAS 2021). The project is developed by nine Danish partners, including technology providers, consultants, water utilities and a technical university. It combines Danish ‘knowledge and technologies’ to provide ‘a state-of-the-art solution for leakage control’, which is ‘customisable to any utility’ (NIRAS 2021). Listening to these examples, the Italian engineers look at each other and, with a grin, observe that these solutions sound almost like science fiction to them. Looking perplexed at Liam, they ask: ‘Why is it exactly that the Danish Embassy wants to visit us?’ ‘It is a priority for the Danish government’, he answers, ‘to use Danish expertise within water management to develop a strong relationship with Italy in the water sector. We want to hear about your challenges and local solutions to learn from you, and perhaps to offer our experience in exchange. Therefore, we invite you to come to Denmark to see how we do things up there’.
About two months later, I met with Liam again. This time at Aarhus Vand. With him are two delegations of Italian and German water professionals (including the Italian engineers from Reggio Emilia). The day starts with a round of presentations and expectations for the day, where most participants highlight their ‘curiosity to discover something about digitalization’, and expectations ‘to learn about water loss reduction from Denmark’. Following, a representative from the Danish Ministry of the Environment gives a presentation about their policy work for the Danish water sector. Then the local hosts at Aarhus Vand present their future ambitions, strategies, and concrete projects regarding structured and digital water loss monitoring. Specifically, they show how Aarhus Vand identifies leaks through a data-driven leakage detection system and explicate how those systems combine technologies and software from different Danish companies to achieve the best possible results. The day finishes with an excursion to a wastewater treatment plant managed by Aarhus Vand and a demonstration facility for water leakage detection, which is part of the Danish LEAKman collaboration.
As these visits briefly elucidate, in practice, the transnational storying of the Danish narrative is primarily carried out by the work of the water ambassadors, whose short-term task consists of creating new ‘water alliances’ with local authorities and water professionals in specifically targeted countries to share and propagate knowledge about Danish water governance and solutions. In a long-term perspective, these initiatives are expected to support the commercial access of Danish water technology companies to new ‘markets’. The relation-building work of the water ambassadors is pivotal for the success of these alliances.
Within this framework, Danish state-of-the-art projects and solutions such as Aarhus ReWater and LEAKman serve as cornerstones of a narrative about local solutions to global water-related challenges made in Denmark, which is carefully made actionable and propagated transnationally by the Danish water ambassadors to enhance the international appeal of Danish technologies. Whilst they do not directly advocate for Danish water technology, these projects serve the purpose of legitimising the Danish narrative in the eyes of potential international delegations. Seen in this light, water utility companies, such as Aarhus Vand, become more than public service providers. As living laboratories for the testing and development of cutting-edge Danish technologies, they act, also, as avenues to showcase novel Danish water technologies to the world and pave the way for new export endeavours. Through Water Diplomacy, Danish water utilities blur boundaries between water management as a public welfare service and as an avenue to advance the economy of private water technology companies and finance the Danish welfare state.
Diplomacy in Disguise: Scaling Narratives as Export
One can easily imagine why Danish state-of-the-art projects such as LEAKman and Aarhus ReWater are equally referred to by Italian utility operators as a desirable future and science fiction, cementing Denmark as a stronghold for ideal water management solutions in Italian imaginaries. As Liam phrases it, visiting Denmark makes an impression on Italian delegations: ‘What works is not only to visit major Danish water technology companies and state-of-the-art projects. Experiencing how everything seems to work seamlessly in Denmark substantiates a Danish narrative of high standards for the visiting delegations’. Nevertheless, while the Danish narrative tends to generate a coherent and organic picture of the ‘smartness’ and efficiency of the Danish water sector, what makes the visits of foreign delegations an effective part of the ‘soft sell’ strategy employed by the water ambassadors, is that Danish water and wastewater utility plants function, in fact, very much like the Italian. This allows the water ambassador to ‘disguise hardcore selling’ as ‘soft’ relation building and knowledge sharing among peers. The work of the water ambassador consists, in other words, in meticulously translating and effectively tacking back and forth – or scaling – between a story of exceptionalism and one that is not only relatable and desirable for the international visiting delegations but also within reasonable reach. However, the scalability of the Danish narrative depends on the contextual storytelling of the water ambassadors, which is inherently situated and thus nonscalable (Tsing 2012).
By studying, for example, how wild Matsutake mushrooms are foraged in the Pacific Northwest and then turned into commodities through various iterations of assessment and sorting practices, Tsing exemplifies how commodity chain capitalism produces scalable commodities through nonscalable practices (Tsing 2012). Theorising on the notion of ‘nonscalability’, Tsing (2012) emphasises how scaling projects rely on ‘articulations with nonscalable forms even as they deny or erase them’ (2012: 506). Accordingly, I argue that Water Diplomacy, understood as the local storying of the Danish narrative performed by the Danish water ambassador, is a nonscalable practice that makes the scalability of Danish water technologies possible. Notably, what is being scaled in the first place and adapted to new contexts are not digital water technologies but the narratives that sustain them. Thus, albeit being an inherently contextual, relative, and social form of relating, or ‘care’ (Seaver 2021), the nonscalable work of the Danish water ambassadors invisibly allows for the scaling and commodification of digital water technologies and, through them, of the propagation of ways of perceiving water management as a commercial and digital practice.
During my fieldwork at the water utility near Reggio Emilia, I became aware of the various adjacent, albeit often also divergent and situated stories of technologies, ecologies, politics, and controversies that are embedded in managing water. Those stories tell something not only of past but also of current and future desires and contingencies of local and international actors in the context of uncertain futures. Looking at the digitalisation of water management and control through different forms of storying, and at the art of crafting, managing, and scaling stories for commercial purposes as practices of Water Diplomacy, this article has shown how the uptake of digital technologies in the Danish water sector becomes part of a Danish narrative that enacts digital water management as a blueprint for the betterment of global water flows and as a model to sustain the financial future of the Danish welfare state.
I have argued that the transnational relations, imaginaries, articulations, and exchanges that are embedded in formal documents such as the Danish Export Strategy for Water are set in motion by the ideas of global connectivity, commensurability, and optimisation that reside in digital technologies. In turn, these ideas are made scalable and profitable by the water ambassadors through nonscalable practices of situated storytelling. Reflecting an increasingly neoliberal, competitive, and market-oriented trend within the Danish welfare state (Pedersen 2011), Danish water management stretches beyond local and public services, engaging public water utilities as avenues for global commercial ambitions through the diplomatic work of the water ambassador. In this sense, I suggest that Water Diplomacy represents a useful ethnographic vantage point into the social and everyday implications of digitalising water management. Water Diplomacy blurs conventional boundaries between public (institutions, rights) and private (companies, assets) in the Danish water sector, expanding both what it means to do diplomacy and export. As ideas of digitalisation intersect with promises of commercial scalability, the betterment of water management, and environmental sustainability, concepts like Water Diplomacy suggest the necessity for further explorations of alternative vocabularies that complicate binaries such as private and public, diplomacy and export, and commons and commodities, which do not seem to sufficiently describe the complexity of their (digital) sociality.
Acknowledgements
The research behind this article forms part of the interdisciplinary research project ‘SWIft’ (Smart Water Infrastructures) at Aalborg University, which is supported by the Poul Due Jensen Foundation (Grundfos Foundation). I owe special thanks to my many interlocutors in the Danish and Italian water sectors over the past few years, and particularly to Liam, who has patiently and thoroughly helped me understand the complexities of Water Diplomacy. Also, I am deeply thankful for the inspiration, and always thoughtful feedback and responses to the first drafts of this article, that I received from my colleagues at the TANTlab of Aalborg University. Andreas L. Brandt, Astrid O. Andersen, Pernille Paulsen, and Andreas Thyrsted Laursen, thank you for teaching me the meaning of academic generosity.
Notes
However, as digital water technologies become increasingly integrated with traditional water management practices, they also enmesh with situated knowledges and sociotechnical stratifications that mess with what ‘smart’ means in practice – and for whom (Jessen et al. 2023).
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