Troubled Waters in Alice Springs, Central Australia

A main strategy of campaigns for 'smart' sustainable use of natural resources is to engage and educate local communities. Based on field research in the desert town of Alice Springs in central Australia, the article analyses how local residents variably resist, contest and support the kinds of values and forms of knowledge underpinning such campaigns. Taking the local implementation of a national Water Smart campaign as an example, the article draws on recent anthropology of place-making, belonging and meanings of water as part of cultural landscapes in order to illuminate how local dynamics of class-based values and associated historical patterns of education, occupation and Indigenous-settler relations are put into play as locals question increasingly dominant ontological and institutional assumptions about water in global discourses of environmental economics and natural resource management.